Among the many directors who have enriched the history of Italian cinema and its standing in the world, there are some whose very name, at least until some time ago, was no longer even remembered in our country; one of these is surely Vittorio Cottafavi.
Active for more than forty years, Cottafavi represents one of the most significant exponents of that cinema, unfortunately now definitively vanished, commonly labelled under the reductive heading of the "genre" film. Begun at the dawn of the 1940s and ended at the close of the 1980s, the director's was a career marked by a path we might call "alternative"; among the many titles he signed, not all, to be sure, can be considered of value, but there is no doubt, however, that most of them marked a decisive and ennobling turn for those cinematic territories regarded until then as marginal. "Master of popular cinema with unsuspected experimental flashes" (Mauro Gervasini, Il conquistatore dell'immagine, in "Filmtv" no. 88, 2006), Cottafavi had been born in Modena in 1914; after attending the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he made his debut first as a screenwriter and then moved behind the camera in 1942. An advocate of a cinema profoundly different from the then triumphant Neorealism, Cottafavi's was, from the very beginning, one of the few and valid responses that the Italian film production of the time successfully gave to the American one.
The relationship with reality, the everyday and often harsh reality that characterised, albeit with poetry, Neorealism, did not find the director in agreement; he loved instead complex scenic constructions and epic sweep in the narration of historical events. Pursuing, then, the vocation of a cinema as spectacular as possible, Cottafavi was thus one of the most accomplished authors in staging, in Italy, thrilling representations, there where epic adventures, historical dramas and fantastic set designs represented the unprecedented cinematic road travelled with originality and assurance.
Extremely cultivated but at the same time reserved and reluctant towards every form of celebrity, Cottafavi divided film criticism from his very beginnings. Thus, while the Italians always showed little reverence for his works and his ideas on the matter, it was the French, on the other hand, who proved attentive connoisseurs and fervent supporters. Free from every form of hypocritical and limiting classification, French criticism was able to grasp the innovative force of his works, a force springing from an expressive conception, where the energy of spectacle was skilfully constructed through a mixture made of cinematic, artistic but above all literary ascendancies.
Thus with Cottafavi Italian cinema goes through a new experience, and not so much for the many themes tackled (suffice it to recall that the Italian cinema of the 1910s and 1920s had brought historical or fable-like products to the screen, and not forgetting that in the 1940s an author such as Alessandro Blasetti signed titles like La cena delle beffe and La corona di ferro), as rather for that capacity to devise a staging where the theatrical antinaturalism of so much analogous cinema gives way to an approach made of broad and entirely anti-traditional scenic breaths.
This is the choice that moves Cottafavi, this very precise will that indeed sees him place himself almost in an isolated position, a public exile that is superimposed on that of the author, a lofty position that paradoxically seems to be reflected as a lowly one.

Rereading his filmography, a passion for cinema that disdains no genre is in fact evident; he was certainly a Master of the adventure film, but although he consecrated some of his greatest successes to the peplum, it is not correct to reduce his contribution to Italian cinema to these two strands. If he considered no subject unworthy of his genius and always ruled out a cerebral idea of cinema, one must not, however, think that he worked to order, denying him instead that consciousness of art which belongs to the great creators. The best of his work stands out, in fact, in the historical fresco, but since he often preferred subjects capable of lending themselves to reconstruction, he was for too many years classified on a par with the many authors of adventurous costume works, forgetting instead that, compared with the others, some of his screenwriters are named Dumas (Il boia di Lilla, Traviata '53) Molière (L'avaro), Ibsen (Casa di bambola), Conrad (La follia di Almayer) and even Shakespeare (Antonio e Cleopatra).
It is within the historical-adventure strand that Cottafavi seems to distinguish himself most from the equivalent cinema of the period; he himself, in a piece written some years ago, theorised on the subject: "the strand [of the historical film] arose from the commercial consideration of presenting characters whose fame, through schooling, studies and legends, was widely diffused among the public: this fact, which was regarded as a draw, nonetheless involved the error of making historical figures the sole protagonists. History is made up, yes, of those who made it, but also of those who endured it, that is, ordinary people [...]. When we approach a historical spectacle, we must insert ourselves among the characters as witnesses of the event. For this I would appeal to the theories of Brechtian theatre, where the spectators become judges of the happening and draw from it considerations of a moral, social, political and, in the last analysis I would say religious, order – Cottafavi further stresses that – this procedure is in fact difficult in cinema because the historical means of narration leads us to an identification with the heroes of the story – and he concludes by recalling how – every time the attempt was made to follow the Brechtian modes, the spectator did not appreciate it, and this is one of its faults" (Vittorio Cottafavi, Eroi e diseredati, in "Inventare il vero", 1989).
From such modes is born the director's most authoritative film, I cento cavalieri. Made in France in 1964, the film fully applies the Cottafavian lesson just cited, giving back a cinematic work of strong impact in content and spectacle. An original attempt capable of transforming a historical film into a shrewd Brechtian parable on war and power, I Cento Cavalieri is to this day the best adventure film, not only by the director, but of all Italian cinema, and its greatest merit is contained precisely in that trait which instead drove the "immature" public of the time to reject it: a narrative choice that, preventing the spectator from any easy identification with the characters, abandons every possibility of orientation or of release, thus unhinging all the rules of the genre and renewing itself at every turn of the plot. Marked by a remarkable rhythm and by acute figurative inventions, the film was a total commercial failure and drove Cottafavi to abandon cinema in order to devote himself exclusively to television. For television too Cottafavi shot many masterpieces such as Maria Zef, Il taglio del bosco, Le Troiane di Euripide, Operazione Vega, I Racconti di Padre Brown, A come Andromeda.
And in a new climate of revision, far from pressing conditionings of every kind, the figure of Cottafavi too is revisited, and the recognition of his passionate soul, of his fervid imagination, of his narrative audacity, comes to light. What had escaped notice slowly resurfaces, and so, with courage, scholars such as Stefano Della Casa, Enrico Ghezzi and even a "committed director" like Gianni Amelio (within the framework of the special programme 15×15, sponsored by the European Community, which asked 15 directors to indicate a film from their own country to be restored, Gianni Amelio chose for Italy Le legioni di Cleopatra by Cottafavi) reawaken past memories, seeking to recover lost time. Certainly, a time that unfortunately cannot be lived by the filmmaker in question, but that nonetheless, in the words and images of those who have loved and love what by now belongs only to a few, reveals a power and a working passion that is, never more than at this moment, a great school for our cinema.

Bibliography consulted
Gianni Rondolino, Vittorio Cottafavi. Cinema e televisione, Cappelli editore, Bologna 1980

Francesco Bolzoni, Mario Foglietti, Le stagioni del cinema: trenta registi si raccontano, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2000