(19 March 1923 - 7 February 2021)
The veteran Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno enjoyed a global fifty-year career. He worked with many of the most prominent directors including Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Stanley Kramer, Martin Ritt, John Huston, Mike Nichols, Lina Wertmüller, Bob Fosse, Robert Aldrich, Alan J. Pakula, Fred Zinnemann, Terry Gilliam, Sydney Pollack and Dario Argento, to name but a few. He started out as a stills photographer at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. After being incarcerated by the Germans during World War II, he became assistant cameraman on several films before attaining his first position as a cinematographer on Dino Risi’s Scandal in Sorrento (1955) starring Vittorio De Sica and Sophia Loren. After that he never stopped working - on films such as On the Beach, Rocco and His Brothers, Boccaccio’70, The Leopard, The Bible... In the Beginning, Sunflower, Carnal Knowledge, Man of La Mancha and nine films for Fellini. He did Altman’s Popeye, Zinnemann’s Five Days One Summer and Mike Nichols’ Wolf, plus umpteen others. He was an extraordinary artist and his contribution was, arguably, often the best aspect of any film he worked on, be it in colour or monochrome. Just think of his black-and-white work on Rocco and His Brothers, or the rich colours of the ballroom scene in The Leopard, the complexity of All That Jazz (for which he was Oscar-nominated and won a Bafta), and his continuing work for Fellini on Satyricon, Roma, Amarcord, Casanova, Orchestral Rehearsal, And the Ship Sails On, etc and you really will get the picture. Giuseppe Rotunno, who has died aged 97, was the first non-American to join the American Society of Cinematographers, and was the winner of many awards in his own country. He was married to Graziolina Campori and they have three daughters, Tiziana, Paola and Carmen.
MICHAEL DARVELL
