Already in the decades immediately following the Lumière brothers’ invention of the cinematograph as a development of photography, the scene of the newborn Australian film industry was dotted with Italian names. Without wanting to dwell here with detailed information that can be found in the writings of Gaetano Rando and Gino Moliterno, we limit ourselves to pointing out the various Humbert and Antonio Pugliese, Ernesto Crosetto, Joe Valli, Charles Zolli and Armando Lionello.
In the post-war period, after almost twenty years of monopoly of Anglo-American productions, between the 1960s and 1970s two films that have now become “cult” appeared which narrate the Italian migrant epic in Australia: They’re a weird mob (1966 ), an Anglo-Australian production directed by Michael Powell based on the homonym novel by J.P O’Grady and the Italian Bello onesto emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (1971) by Luigi Zampa with A. Sordi and C. Cardinale in the lead roles.
To remain however to downunder productions that see Italians as protagonists, in the same period one name stands out above all others for the contribution given to the emerging Australian film industry, that of Giorgio Mangiamele.
The Italian Cultural Institute is pleased to present, in collaboration with Palace Cinemas and the N.F.S.A. (National Film and Sound Archive) an event dedicated to the Italian-Australian director, A Day with Giorgio Mangiamele.
The tribute will take place at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington. After the greeting of the director of the Institute, Paolo Barlera, the screening of Ninety Nine percent (1963) will follow. This will be followed by a panel discussion focusing on the various aspects of Mangiamele’s filmmaking, his contribution to the Australian film industry and the social issues of his films. Contribution to the panel will be given by Gino Moliterno, Geoffrey Gardner and Quentin Turnour.
After the round table and a brief convivial break, the public will be able to attend the screening of Clay (1965).
All of Mangiamele’s production is characterized by a “poetic visual style that combined his already evident humanism with the ability to capture the inner life of his characters. His films represented the isolation, alienation and encounters with racism that could be part of the experience of migration to Australia in the 1950s and 60s“(G. Shirley).
In Ninety Nine percent, the only comedy in his production, Mangiamele tells the tragicomic story of the father of a little boy, a widower who in order to appease the criticisms of the Principal who accuses him of not paying attention to the boy, decides to put an advertisement in the newspaper looking for a woman to marry him and help him support his child.
Clay tells the story of an escaped prisoner who finds shelter in a sort of artistic community where a man lives with his daughter and a young man in love with the woman. The arrival of the intruder unleashes the jealousy of the suitor, with tragic outcome.
After studying Fine Arts in Catania, Film Production at the Scientific Police of Rome and Journalism at the Pro-Deo University of Rome, Giorgio Mangiamele (1926-2001) arrived in Australia as a migrant in 1952 and the following year began to shoot the his first feature film, The Contract (1953). This and his subsequent five films Unwanted (1958), The Brothers (1958), two versions of The Spag (c.1960 and 1962) and Ninety Nine Per Cent (1963) focused on the difficulties faced by migrants in the process of integrating into the new country. From the second version of The Spag onwards, Mangiamele developed his own particular style which critics define as the ability to transpose poetry onto the film material he produced. This style, developed extensively in his only comedy, Ninety Nine Per Cent, reached its most perfect form in Clay (1965), which represented Australia at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival. After Clay, Mangiamele had significant difficulty raising funds for the types of films he wanted to make. His science fiction film Beyond Reason (1970) for example, failed to break into the commercial circuit despite distribution by Columbia Pictures, and his final films were promotional and educational documentaries for the Papua New Guinea Information Bureau. However until his death, Mangiamele never stopped writing and planning further feature films.
Giorgio Mangiamele leaves a lasting legacy not only as a courageous and determined film poet, but also as someone who continued to make fictional films at a time when many in the Australian film industry considered it impossible. The National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra has paid tribute to Mangiamele by restoring five of his films and initiating and collaborating on the production of the Ronin Film DVD boxset (https://www.roninfilms.com.au/)
Speakers:
Geoffrey Gardner
Geoffrey Gardner is a former director of the Melbourne Film Festival and a long time enthusiast for the production and promotion of Australian film. He is the Founder and Chair of the Organising Committee of Cinema Reborn, an annual festival devoted to the presentation of restored cinema classics. Gardner has served as an advisor to both the Sydney and Brisbane Film Festivals and the Asia-Pacific Screen Awards.
Gino Moliterno
Gino Moliterno is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU, Canberra. In a long academic career, his research interests have ranged widely from Dante Alighieri and Giordano Bruno to Contemporary Italian and European cinema. In 2011 he co-authored (with Gaetano Rando) Celluloid Immigrant: Giorgio Mangiamele Italian Australian Filmmaker, and more recently published an updated and augmented edition of his Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021).
Quentin Tournour
Quentin Turnour is the Assistant Manager of Film Preservation at the National Archives of Australia’s Audiovisual Preservation Section in Sydney. Turnour was the founding Programmer of the National Film and Sound Archive’s Canberra Arc cinema, between 2005 and 2014. He has worked as a freelance and consultant screen programmer, archivist and historian for many of Australia’s screen culture institutions and agencies since the late 1980s, including for the Melbourne Cinémathèque Inc between 1991 and 2005.
