Happy Birth Anniversary, Ennio Flaiano, screenwriter extraordinaire |

The name of Italian writer and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano is connected in my memory with carefree summer days spent at the cinema.

A theatre, film and literature festival is indeed organised every year in his hometown, Pescara, between June and July.

When I was a teenager the ticket for the entire festival used to be really cheap and that meant that, for roughly three weeks, you could watch three films a day choosing them from a wide programme that included old and new movies.

The festival usually closed with an awarding ceremony with many international actors, directors and writers.

The fun side of the event was that you ended up meeting people of different ages who liked going to the movies and were even able to speak to the “stars” invited (and sometimes ended up in accidentally kidnapping them, but that’s another story…). The downside of the festival was that, for roughly three weeks, you would forget about having a social life outside the cinema building, go to bed late at night as some films ended up at 1 a.m. and reduce your basic bodily functions to make sure they matched with the film breaks.

Catastrophe ensued the year the festival was moved to an independent cinema with three different screens, as that meant the programme broadened and you had to cleverly organise a strategy to watch as many films as possible. At the end of that edition many of us were reduced to wrecks, friends and families had forgotten we existed and our skin assumed the squalid pallor of Max Schreck's in Nosferatu, but, deep down, we felt like heroes, after all we had enriched our film knowledge and had paid our tribute to Flaiano. We were therefore finally allowed to go back to idle the rest of the summer away like the "vitelloni" in Fellini's eponymous film.

Sadly, though, Flaiano is not so well known outside of his own country, even though he collaborated with quite a few famous directors.

Born in Pescara on 5th March 1910, as a young man he moved to Rome where he started working as a journalist. In 1935 he was sent to fight in Ethiopia, an experience that led him to reject fascism and inspired his novel Tempo di uccidere (Time To Kill, 1947; adapted to the screen by Giuliano Montaldo in 1989).

Back in Rome he resumed working as a journalist, writing cinema and theatre reviews and articles about art and architecture.

Flaiano's flair for words helped him breaking into the cinema scene in the 40s and soon he started working with Romolo Marcellini, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Flaiano worked with Federico Fellini on different screenplays such as Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik, 1951, with Alberto Sordi, from a Michelangelo Antonioni's subject), I vitelloni (1953), La Strada (The Road, 1954), Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), and 8 1/2 (1962).

One of my favourite films Flaiano collaborated to remains I vitelloni: though the seaside town where the film takes place was supposed to be Fellini's own Rimini, Flaiano's memories of his hometown resurface here and there and a connection is also clear in the title (a "vitellone" is somebody who wastes his life away in the local slang).

I watched the film when I was very young and felt I could identify with the frustrations, dreams and hopes of the main characters, the five friends Moraldo, Alberto, Fausto, Leopoldo and Riccardo, so I always ended up crying at the end of the film.

Time To Kill
remained Flaiano's first and last novel, but he left behind many
screenplays, articles, plays, essays and collections of aphorisms.

Flaiano's
style easily adapted to film, theatre, literature and journalism and
that's what always amazed me. But there is also another aspect that
always interested me and that's his bitterly disillusioned yet ironic
and satirical gaze at life that he conceived as "an endless series of
mistakes", and at modern society.

In his aphorisms he moved a critique against superficiality, ignorance, Italy, the film industry, and even fashion. There is actually a rather comical dialogue he wrote in October 1972, a month before he died, for Italian newspaper Il Corriere della sera that is entitled “Getting Dressed” and shows an entire family falling into an identity crisis as they get ready to go out.

In an attempt to look younger, the parents try to borrow clothes from their kids, who in turn refuse to wear their new clothes as they are outrageously "new" and insist in wearing battered and torn down denims and jackets. As roles reverse and the mother complaints about how difficult it has become to pick the right clothes, the daughter rebukes her, superficially reminding her that, if they want to start changing the society they are living in, they must do so from their own clothes.

Forty years after the family of that dialogue, our society, is still exchanging clothes, trying to alter their exterior look, but essentially remaining the same, preserving the ignorance, prejudices and weaknesses Flaiano so wonderfully managed to spot in his writings and screenplays.

"Ennio Flaiano, scrittore minore satirico dell'Italia del benessere" (Ennio Flaiano, satirical writer in a wealthy Italy), an exhibition featuring Flaiano's letters, notebooks and sketches is on at the Mediamuseum, Pescara, Italy, until 30th April 2010.