Carlo Lizzani, inspired by real effects – Liberation

« I pick up the catch. » Scratched on a leaf before putting an end to his life by defenesting himself, these last words of Carlo Lizzani (1922-2013), a high figure of Italian culture and important filmmaker although unknown in France despite a dense work, little distributed here, strangely resounded as he had just stopped as a nervous seismograph to take the pulses of Italy, to hectic, its electric influx and its contradictions.

Of the generation of pioneers of neorealism to which he will bring his stone, signing the scenarios ofGermany year zero (1948) by Rossellini and participating in the writing of Bitter rice (1949) and Bloody (1950) by Giuseppe de Santis, it was also he who was going to reshape the aesthetics of the Italian urban thriller towards the late 1960s with Bandits in Milan (1968) initiating the vein of « Poliziottesco »with its camera on fire in the action, its documentary approach and its peaks of violence prefiguring the great waves of terror that were going to shake the country during the 1970s.

As a leftist humanist filmmaker, traveling companion of the Italian Communist Party to which he joined in 1943 in the same