The death of Tullio Pinelli in Rome last Saturday, reminded me of a documentary that I saw about Enno Flaiano. With Tullio Pinelli, Flaiano co-wrote the screenplays for ten films by Federico Fellini: Variety Lights (1950), The White Sheik (1952), I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955), Le notti di Cabiria (1957), La dolce vita (1960), The Temptations of Doctor Antonio episode in Boccaccio '70 (1962), 8 1/2 (1963), and Juliet of the Spirits (1965).
Nino Bizzarri directed the documentary on Flaiano, entitled: L'UOMO SEGRETO (The Secret Man), and says of it and of his subject:
Noi siamo tra coloro che considerano Flaiano uno dei grandi autori italiani del Novecento. Non la figuretta d'ingegno, il fustigatore dei costumi, il giornalista acuto e brillante, che una vulgata insistente continua a tramandare, ma un gigante, uno dei nomi destinati a restare.
Il suo pudore estremo -in un 'epoca in cui vige, nella sfera della cultura, la religione del Pavone -ha fatto sì che la sua vita trascorresse per intero in una sorta di cono d'ombra, che celava ai contemporanei la sua verità, ma il tempo comincia a rendergli giustizia.
L'uomo segreto mostra il suo cuore tragico e il suo essere poeta.
Rischiara il suo lato umano -il rapporto con la madre, la moglie, la figlia malata, e le altre donne -che nessuno ha mai potuto raccontare perché ostinatamente e sistematicamente lui lo nascondeva.
E scava nel rapporto ombroso, eppure viscerale, che lo legava a Pescara, la città dov'era nato e dove un giorno, ancora bambino, era stato messo da solo su un treno, con una piccola valigia, qualche libro, vestiti niente…
In 1947, before turning to screenwriting, Flaiano won the Strega Prize for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (the English version is called: The Short Cut though the direct translation would be: Time to Kill). The novel, set in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion (1935-36), tells the story of an Italian officer who, bothered by a toothache on his way to the base in search of a dentist, takes a short cut through a sinister valley, loses his way, comes upon a native woman bathing in a stream whom he accidentally kills. The barren landscape around the protagonist hints at an interior emptiness and meaninglessness, that the crime is not outside but rather inside of himself. This is one of the few Italian literary works dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa.
Two weeks before his death in an interview with journalist Guilio Villa Santa, Flaiano talked about the anguish and the faith behind his famous humor. Flaiano said: We don’t know who we are, we are just so many passengers without baggage, we are born alone and we die alone. Once a woman writer quoted me in a book of hers, and in the English translation the English writer translated my name as Ennius Flaianus, thinking that this Ennio Flaiano was some Latin author. A few months later we met each other in a restaurant in Rome and were introduced and, naturally, she experienced an awkward moment, for she didn’t think that this ancient writer was still alive. However, we did agree that certain characteristics of my person, a certain style of life, indicated that she was right. I perhaps was not of this age, am not of this age. Perhaps I belong to another world: I feel myself more in harmony when I read Juvenal, Martial, Catullus. It’s probable that I’m an ancient Roman who is still here, forgotten by history, to write about the things that the others wrote about far better than I – namely, let me repeat, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal. (p. 251)
Best Flaiano quote: In Italy, Fascists divide themselves into two categories: fascists and anti-fascists.
