"You keep saying that the public wants something else and instead on the street people thank me because I made them discover Dostoevsky's Idiot." It is the dawn of the 60s and a Giorgio Albertazzi in the midst of his maturity speaks of the success of the historic television reduction signed by Giacomo Vaccari. "A speech that could be today.
Evidently we stayed there," Pino Strabioli told ANSA. And it is precisely with those images that Via Sicilia 57-59 begins. Giorgio Albertazzi - Il teatro è vita, a docufilm that Strabioli wrote and directed together with Fabio Masi and that, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the star (Fiesole, 20 August 1923 - Roccastrada, 28 May 2016), will premiere on 28 October at the Rome Film Fest. A tribute that is not only a portrait of the genius and the artist, but a denunciation of the state of the theater in Italy.
"Everything comes from a beautiful document shot by the director Alessandro Giupponi in 2015 inside the Teatro delle Arti, the historic stage founded in 1937 in Via Sicilia 57-59 in Rome, which after a fire remained abandoned for years - says Strabioli - That film has been preserved until today by the producer Alessandra Infascelli, who was also Giupponi's companion".
"The Municipality had just entrusted that space to Giorgio and Alessandro, to give us shows and a theater school," she explains to ANSA. First of all, the two turn over that document. "There is Albertazzi leaning on the stick, without nostalgic tones, but with that lucidity that only the great old can have - says Strabioli - wandering in the destroyed theater evokes the ghosts of his life, who had been there: Anna Proclemer, Anna Magnani, Sergio Tofano, Carmelo Bene". In less than a year, however, Albertazzi leaves and shortly after Giupponi also falls ill and disappears and the project stops.
From those images starts today the story of Strabioli - produced by Polifemo S.r.l. with the Golden Grail Award and Growing Production - running on a double track: the first at the Teatro Quirinetta, closed for over five years, where a group of young actors works to organize a new theatrical season and denounces how "in Italy today there are 500 closed theaters that at the moment will not reopen: a haemorrhage that does not stop", explains Strabioli; the second, with the extraordinary lectio magistralis by Albertazzi at the Teatro delle Arti. Plus the repertoire material from the Teche Rai and the Istituto Luce, which returns memories and anecdotes, from Eleonora Duse to Vittorio Gassman, Anna Proclemer, Carmelo Bene, Vittorio De Sica, Anna Magnani, Sergio Tofano.
But who was Albertazzi, the eternal emperor Hadrian? "He himself said he met a girl on the bus: 'why don't you be an actor?' she had asked him. And since she was pretty, he launched himself - smiles Strabioli - He was a provocateur, a man of great culture, a free man who lived everything, curious until the end. Together with Gassmann, he immediately understood the power of television. He was one of the last 'greats.'" After the Film Festival, the project, says Infascelli, "is to organize three major events at the Teatro di Roma, La pergola in Florence and the Mercadante in Naples. And then, we hope that Rai will broadcast it". But why do theaters in Italy close and not reopen? "Because they don't fit into an 'industrial' landscape," Strabioli reflects. "It is a problem that with Giorgio and Sandro we had faced - adds Infascelli - The economic data weighs: the private sector cannot do it, subsidies for culture decrease. And then the transformations of cities: it is more much more convenient to open a supermarket".
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