Tonino Guerra

Antonio "Tonino" Guerra (16 March 1920 – 21 March 2012) was an Italian concentration camp survivor, poet, writer and screenwriter who has collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors of the world.

Life and work

Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna.

According to his obituary in The Guardian, Guerra first started writing poetry when interned in a prison camp in Germany, after being rounded up at the age of 22 with other antifascists from Santarcangelo.

To pass the time he told his companions stories: when he came home in 1945 he found a publisher for a book of them, I Scarabocc(Cockroaches, but also "scribblings").

At age 30 he moved to Rome and worked as a schoolteacher. During this time he met Elio Petri, the future director of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), who was working as assistant to Giuseppe De Santis. Guerra was able to get his first credit as a screenwriter after he and Petri went to the Abruzzi mountains to find out about wolf-hunting an "though they discovered that wolf hunters no longer existed, De Santis went ahead anyway with the film,Uomini e Lupi (Men and Wolves, 1957)".

Descendant of Cesare Zavattini, the screenwriter who essentially defined the style and morals of Italian neorealism, Guerra deviates from his great mentor: while Zavattini brought the directors with whom he collaborated over to his own social and moral speculation, Guerra goes to the filmmakers and helps them advance their own concept.

Tonino Guerra has worked with filmmakers who have different aesthetic, social, political and cinematic identities. These include Michelangelo Antonioni withL'avventura, La notte, L'eclisse, The Red Desert, Blowup, Zabriskie Point and Identification of a Woman, Federico Fellini with Amarcord, Theo Angelopouloswith Landscapes in the Mist, Eternity and a Day and The Weeping Meadow, Andrei Tarkovsky with Nostalghia and Francesco Rosi with the militant politics ofThe Mattei Affair, Lucky Luciano and Exquisite Corpses.

Selected filmography

• Piece of the Sky (1959)
• L'avventura (1960)
• La notte (1961)
• The Assassin (1961)
• L'eclisse (1962)
• The Red Desert (1964)
• Blow-Up (1966)
• Catch As Catch Can (1967)
• Ghosts - Italian Style (1968)
• In Search of Gregory (1969)
• A Quiet Place in the Country (1969)
• The Voyeur (1970)
• Zabriskie Point (1970)
• The Mattei Affair (1972)
• Lucky Luciano (1973)
• Amarcord (1973)
• Illustrious Corpses (1976)
• Caro Michele (1976)
• The Night of the Shooting Stars (1981)
• Identification of a Woman (1982)
• Voyage in Time (1983)
• Nostalghia (1983)
• And the Ship Sails On (1983)
• Henry IV (1984)
• Voyage to Cythera (1984)
• Ginger and Fred (1985)
• The Beekeeper (1986)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987)
• Landscape in the Mist (1988)
• Burro (1989)
• Dimenticare Palermo (1989)
• The Sun Also Shines at Night (1990)
• The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991)
• Eternity and a Day (1998)
• Ulysses' Gaze (1995)
• Tierra del fuego (2000)