[On Monday 10th September 2018, UCL and the Slade School of Fine Art will award an Honorary Fellowship to director and writer Lorenza Mazzetti. The event will take place at the British School at Rome and will also feature the screening of her most famous film, Together (1956)]
Lorenza Mazzetti (b. 1928) was adopted at a very young age by her uncle, Robert Einstein. Several members of the Einstein family were killed by the SS in August 1944 in the dramatic event remembered as Strage del Focardo. Her account of this time later formed the basis of her debut novel, Il Cielo Cade (1961). In the early 1950s Mazzetti arrived in London and started studying at the Slade School of Fine Art. She made her first film K, an adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in 1954. In 1956, with the support of the Slade and of the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, she completed Together with fellow students Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi in the roles of two deaf-mute dockworkers living in London’s East End.
Together was selected for the first Free Cinema event at the NFT in 1956. In line with Free Cinema’s focus on subjectivity and poetic freedom, Mazzetti’s film rejects traditional conventions and combines Neorealist practices, radical documentary cinema and Kitchen Sink drama.
Together was filmed in a London still bearing clear marks of the wars raids. A general sense of decay is reflected in the film by the hostile attitude that the people living in the area have towards the two main characters who are cut-off from the outside world by their disability and must depend on each other for survival. Their interaction with each other and with the world is alternatively amusing and frustrating. They are constantly followed around by hordes of children who mock them or play with them. The presence of the taunting children becomes increasingly sinister as the story unfolds until they become instrumental to the film’s tragic ending.
In Together, as it had been already evident in K, the film’s characters embody a perspective on the world which is profoundly marginal and isolated. In an interview with the BFI, Mazzetti openly acknowledged the possibility of superimposing the two characters with her own experience of exclusion and solitude. Paolozzi and Andrews could then be interpreted as the projection of her feeling of being an outsider, never quite partaking of the world around her.
The crucial sense of isolation in the film is presented not only through the characters, but also by a very intriguing use of diegetic sound. The images are usually accompanied by the constant noises coming from the warehouses in the docklands. At certain times, however, these sounds are silenced, and we find ourselves in the same cocoon-like environment inhabited by the two friends. We are thus invited to share their perspective and isolation. These sudden interruptions in the stream of sounds are a powerful and effective clog within the film’s delicate mechanism: when sound resumes unexpectedly, we cannot avoid experiencing a sense of shocking estrangement.
Although inseparable, the two characters are portrayed in an almost diametrically opposite manner: whilst the character interpreted by Paolozzi appears to be retreating willingly into himself and to appreciate his life in isolation from the outside world, the one interpreted by Michael Andrews demonstrates a clear desire of finding a way to communicate and share the life that surrounds him. This intimate need of participation makes him more open to other people, but also, and crucially, more vulnerable and exposed. The use of rack focus in various sequences transmits in a clear and painful manner the sense of confusion and anxiety he experiences whenever he comes into contact with someone who is not part of his immediate circle of acquaintances.
This ambivalent attitude reflects the sense of disorientation still experienced by Mazzetti towards the end of the 1950s. In her own words: ‘It is possible that the two deaf-mutes in Together were my childhood, but also me and my sister, left all alone, in a world only interested in dancing and having fun. […] I simply could not be happy…’
The dramatic closing sequence appears to reconnect Mazzetti’s feature to the dramatic events of her childhood and permeates the film with a subtle but ever-present threat of violence that will remain a constant leitmotiv in her early works.
As a woman and a foreigner in a British male-dominated world, Mazzetti’s early films opened up many questions about the relationship between British and Italian avant-garde cinema in the 1950s. After the screening of Together at the BFI, she was invited to Cannes to showcase her work. She never returned to England and moved on to work for Italian television and as a writer. Although brief and adventurous her career as ‘the Italian who invented Free Cinema’ really contributed to renovate British cinema.
