Tonino Guerra: A Poet’s Cinema

Beginning his career as a poet in a German prison camp where he’d been interned with other Italian antifascists, upon arriving in Rome after the war, Tonino Guerra would befriend fledgling filmmakers Giuseppe de Santis and Elio Petri, relationship that would start him on the way to a screenwriting career that included collaborations with some of the leading lights of Italian cinema (Petri, Michelangelo Antonioni, Paolo, and Vittorio Taviani) as well as towering auteurs from abroad (Theo Angelopoulos, Andrei Tarkovsky). A key figure in the post-Neorealist transformation of his native country’s cinema with a gift for lyrical dialogue and lucid thinking, to traverse Guerra’s filmography is to take a tour through the Golden Age of European arthouse cinema in the company of a man who his friend, the Ukranian photographer and writer Yuri Rost, described as possessed of “a combination of incredible qualities, a European intellectual and a peasant from Romagna.”