Tonino Guerra

Italian concentration camp survivor, poet, writer and screenwriter (1920–2012)

Tonino Guerra

Guerra in Pennabilli in 2011

Born|

Antonio Guerra

(1920-03-16)16 March 1920

Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy

Died| 21 March 2012(2012-03-21) (aged 92)

Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy

Nationality| Italian
Occupation(s)| Writer, Poet, Screenwriter

Antonio "Tonino" Guerra[1] (16 March 1920 – 21 March 2012) was an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors in the world such as AndreI Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos, and Federico Fellini.[2]

## Life and work[edit]

Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna.[3]

According to his obituary in The Guardian, Guerra first started writing poetry when interned in a prison camp in Germany, after being rounded up at the age of 22 with other antifascists from Santarcangelo.

> To pass the time he told his companions stories: when he came home in 1945 he found a publisher for a book of them, I Scarabocc (Cockroaches, but also "scribblings").[3]

At 30 he moved to Rome and worked as a schoolteacher.[3] During this time he met Elio Petri, the future director of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), who worked as assistant to Giuseppe De Santis. Guerra was able to get his first screenwriting credit after he and Petri went to the Abruzzi mountains to find out about wolf-hunting; "Though they discovered that wolf hunters no longer existed, De Santis went ahead anyway with the film, Uomini e Lupi (Men and Wolves, 1957)".[3]

Although a follower of Cesare Zavattini,[4] who essentially defined the style and morals of Italian neorealism, Guerra deviated from his mentor: while Zavattini brought the directors with whom he collaborated over to his own social and moral speculation, Guerra went to the filmmakers and helped them advance their own concept.[citation needed] He worked with such filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, in L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, Blowup, Zabriskie Point and Identification of a Woman; Federico Fellini, in Amarcord; Theo Angelopoulos, in Landscape in the Mist, Eternity and a Day and Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow; Andrei Tarkovsky, in Nostalghia and Voyage in Time; and Francesco Rosi, in The Mattei Affair, Lucky Luciano, Illustrious Corpses and Christ Stopped at Eboli.

In 1990 Guerra in collaboration with Giovanni Urbinati to create the exhibition “La Cattedrale dove va a dormire il mare/The Cathedral where the sea goes to sleep” [5] at the deconsecrated church in Budrio near Bologna.

In 1995 he was awarded with an Honorable Diploma at the 19th Moscow International Film Festival.[6]

## Selected filmography[edit]

### Writer[edit]

* Piece of the Sky (1959)
* L'avventura (1960)
* La notte (1961)
* The Assassin (1961)
* Numbered Days (1962)
* L'Eclisse (1962)
* The Red Desert (1964)
* Marriage Italian Style (1964)
* Casanova 70 (1965)
* Blow-Up (1966)
* Catch As Catch Can (1967)
* Ghosts – Italian Style (1968)
* In Search of Gregory (1969)
* A Quiet Place in the Country (1969)
* The Voyeur (1970)
* Zabriskie Point (1970)
* The Mattei Affair (1972)
* Lucky Luciano (1973)
* Amarcord (1973)
* Illustrious Corpses (1976)
* Caro Michele (1976)
* Butterfly on the Shoulder (1978)
* Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979)
* The Night of the Shooting Stars (1981)
* Identification of a Woman (1982)
* Voyage in Time (1983)
* Nostalghia (1983)
* And the Ship Sails On (1983)
* Henry IV (1984)
* Voyage to Cythera (1984)
* Ginger and Fred (1985)
* The Beekeeper (1986)
* Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987)
* Landscape in the Mist (1988)
* Burro (1989)
* Dimenticare Palermo (1989)
* The Sun Also Shines at Night (1990)
* The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991)
* Beyond the Clouds (1995)
* Ulysses' Gaze (1995)
* Eternity and a Day (1998)
* Tierra del fuego (2000)
* Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004)
* Bab'Aziz (2005)

### Actor[edit]

* Er Più – storia d'amore e di coltello (1971)
* Naissance d'un Golem (1991) - (uncredited)
* Le Chien, le Général et les Oiseaux (2003) - Il generale (voice)

## References[edit]

1. ^ Lim, Dennis (23 March 2012). "Tonino Guerra, Italian Screenwriter and Poet, Dies at 92". The New York Times.
2. ^ Lane, John Francis (21 March 2012). "Tonino Guerra obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 4 November 2023.
3. ^ a b c d John Francis Lane (21 March 2012). "Tonino Guerra obituary | Culture". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
4. ^ "Tonino Guerra". prod-www.tcm.com. Retrieved 4 November 2023.
5. ^ Fonte: La Cattedrale dove va a dormire il mare/The Cathedral where the sea goes to sleep.
6. ^ "19th Moscow International Film Festival (1995)". MIFF. Archived from the original on 22 March 2013. Retrieved 16 March 2013.

## External links[edit]

* Tonino Guerra at IMDb
* Tonino Guerra quote at Parajanov.com
* Dutch interview with Guerra in Filmkrant
* Tonino Guerra: The Poet of Italian Cinema

* v
* t
* e

Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay

1949–2000|

* Alfred L. Werker, Eugene Ling & Virginia Shaler (1949)
* Terence Rattigan (1951)
* Piero Tellini (1952)
* Pier Paolo Pasolini, Massimo Franciosa & Pasquale Festa Campanile (1958)
* Dumitru Carabat, Henri Colpi & Yves Jamiaque (1963)
* Ray Rigby / Pierre Schoendoerffer (1965)
* Alain Jessua / Elio Petri (1967)
* Steven Spielberg, Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins (1974)
* Furio Scarpelli, Agenore Incrocci & Ettore Scola (1980)
* István Szabó (1981)
* Jerzy Skolimowski (1982)
* Thanassis Valtinos, Theo Angelopoulos & Tonino Guerra (1984)
* Michel Blanc (1994)
* Jacques Audiard & France Alain Le Henry (1996)
* James Schamus (1997)
* Hal Hartley (1998)
* Yuri Arabov (1999)
* James Flamberg & John C. Richards (2000)

2001–present|

* Danis Tanović (2001)
* Paul Laverty (2002)
* Denys Arcand (2003)
* Agnès Jaoui & Jean-Pierre Bacri (2004)
* Guillermo Arriaga (2005)
* Pedro Almodóvar (2006)
* Fatih Akin (2007)
* Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne (2008)
* Mei Feng (2009)
* Lee Chang-dong (2010)
* Joseph Cedar (2011)
* Cristian Mungiu & Tatiana Niculescu Bran (2012)
* Jia Zhangke (2013)
* Andrey Zvyagintsev & Oleg Negin (2014)
* Michel Franco (2015)
* Asghar Farhadi (2016)
* Yorgos Lanthimos & Efthymis Filippou / Lynne Ramsay (2017)
* Jafar Panahi & Nader Saeivar / Alice Rohrwacher (2018)
* Céline Sciamma (2019)
* Ryusuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe (2021)
* Tarik Saleh (2022)
* Yuji Sakamoto (2023)

* v
* t
* e

European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award

* Ingmar Bergman (1988)
* Marcello Mastroianni (1988)
* Federico Fellini (1989)
* Andrzej Wajda (1990)
* Alexandre Trauner (1991)
* Billy Wilder (1992)
* Michelangelo Antonioni (1993)
* Robert Bresson (1994)
* Marcel Carné (1995)
* Alec Guinness (1996)
* Jeanne Moreau (1997)
* Ennio Morricone (1999)
* Richard Harris (2000)
* Monty Python (2001)
* Tonino Guerra (2002)
* Claude Chabrol (2003)
* Carlos Saura (2004)
* Sean Connery (2005)
* Roman Polanski (2006)
* Jean-Luc Godard (2007)
* Judi Dench (2008)
* Ken Loach (2009)
* Bruno Ganz (2010)
* Stephen Frears (2011)
* Bernardo Bertolucci (2012)
* Catherine Deneuve (2013)
* Agnès Varda (2014)
* Charlotte Rampling (2015)
* Jean-Claude Carrière (2016)
* Alexander Sokurov (2017)
* Carmen Maura (2018)
* Werner Herzog (2019)
* Márta Mészáros (2021)
* Margarethe von Trotta (2022)
* Vanessa Redgrave (2023)

Award of Merit (Special Achievement Award)|

* Richard Attenborough (1988)
* Jeremy Irons (1998)

Honorary Award|

* Manoel de Oliveira (2007)
* Michel Piccoli (2011)
* Michael Caine (2015)
* Andrzej Wajda (2016)
* Costa-Gavras (2018)

Authority control databases

International|

* FAST
* ISNI
* VIAF

National|

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Academics|

* CiNii

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People|

* Deutsche Biographie

Other|

* IdRef

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