Curated by
Marco Berti and Francesca Pappalardo, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma
Promoted by
Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo
With thanks to
Park Circus (London), Lab80 Film
The Palazzo Esposizioni Roma Cinema is paying tribute, with over a month of screenings, to Billy Wilder, one of the greatest film directors in the history of the cinema. The man who has done more than anyone else to entertain audiences all over the world left Europe when Hitler rose to power, without ever being able to see part of his family again after they were exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. After settling in America, he became one of Hollywood’s most highly acclaimed screenplay writers – writing in a language that wasn’t his native tongue – and, on moving behind the camera, one of the directors whose technical creativity was to become law for future generations of directors; an inventor of gags and quips that are still proverbial today; a peerless master in working with actors whom he propelled to stardom: artistes of the calibre of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Shirley MacLaine, William Holden, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Walter Matthau all offered their finest performances under his direction; and last but not least, the winner of fully six Oscars, without counting those won by his movies in every category.
The most important thing for Wilder was making good films for his audiences and using the fiction of the cinema to reveal the lies that govern the world – a seemingly simple formula, but in the hands of a genius it translated into a narrative so rich it continues to astound us today. Wilder mastered and defined the standard in every genre, creating the funniest comedies ever made, thrillers and noirs as suspenseful today as when they were made, and searing social drama that is still a gut-wrenching punch in the stomach in our modern society. In a time and place as “respectable” and bigoted as the America of his day where censorship ruled the roost, Wilder managed to criticize and to lambast every aspect of a society enslaved by ambition and obsessed with social-climbing, to deplore the media’s sensationalist handling of genuine grief and suffering and its obsession with frustrated eroticism, imparting legitimacy to themes that were taboo while making absolutely no attempt to spare us any of modern man’s strategies for hoodwinking his peers.
Wilder donned the garb of the great classic moralists, but he did so by making us burst our sides laughing, using the myriad resources the cinema offered him to place us in front of a mirror reflecting our flaws and, in forcing us to keep our eyes wide open to laugh, he continues to bitterly remind us that ‘nobody’s perfect’.