La Abadia de Berzano
By Rafael de Espana
January 13, 2025
Original title: Designer of Dreams: Carlo Simi, an
architect ceded to the cinema
Year: 2024
Authors: Andrea B. Nardi, Giuditta Simi
Editorial: One Hundred Publishing (Rome)
Technical data: 260 pages
When a few months ago I presented in this same cinematic space a semblance of the outside, together with Ennio Morricone, the main collaborator of Sergio Leone[1], I reclaimed the need for a publication that would do justice to his work. The response to my request took place last October, at the incombustible Almeria Western Film Festival, when a splendid volume coordinated by the daughter of the honoree, Giuditta Simi, was released with the collaboration of journalist and essayist Andrea Nardi.
The book features a magnificent presentation, with hard tapas and top quality paper that highlights in all its value the rich graphic material from Simi's personal archives and includes, as expected, not only wésterns but also evocations of the American past of the 20th century such as Once in America (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984, Leone) or Bix (1991, Pupi Avati). With a more detailed contextualization of these illustrations in the narrative part it could already be the catalogue of that projected museum that plans to exhibit his work in Covarrubias.
As for the written, let us clarify that it is not intended to be an academic study in the strictest sense, but it offers a lot of anecdotes about Simi's life and work as well as interesting testimonies of those filmmakers who had the pleasure of working with him. The only criticism that can be made is that the transfer to the Spanish of the Italian original could have been more rigorous: it gives the feeling that several hands have intervened without someone unifying and thoroughly reviewing the final text.
Anyway, the narrative discovers unpublished details of both her professional life - her anonymous participation in films as Carmen (Carmen proibita, 1953; G. M. Scotese) or 5 women marked (Five Branded Women, 1960; Martin Ritt), his work as a civil architect - as his personality, that of an architect who made cinema not so much for the financial compensation he could give, but for the love of art..., art direction, never better said.
Proof of this disinterest is that he was never involved in the closed circles of the profession and was always for free, working only for those filmmakers for whom he felt friendship or recognition to his films. The most obvious case, there is no need to insist, is that of Leone, but in his last years he had a close relationship with Pupi Avati, who in 1992 led him to finally get a David di Donatello who until then had resisted him, most likely because of that condition of his outsider that we quoted before[2].
In short: we are faced with a very large contribution to the (pretty diminished) bibliography about film professionals not located in the sections traditionally the subject of research, that is, the realization or interpretation, and with an indisputable appeal to all those interested in the strictly visual part of the films... that is almost never the exclusive fruit of the filmmaker's talent or, much less, of the performers.
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