ZURLINI, VALERIO

(1926-1982)

Art critic, screenwriter, director. After graduating in law from the University of Rome, Zurlini began his film career in the late 1940s with a series of short documentaries on urban life. His first feature,Le ragazze di San Frediano(The Girls of San Frediano, 1955), based on a novel by Vasco Pratolini, was the first of several fine adaptations of literary works that would mark his relatively short but distinguished career and which would includeCronaca familiare(Family Diary, 1962), with which he shared the Golden Lion at theVenice Festival, andLe soldatesse(The Camp Followers, 1965), the adaptation of a wartime novel byUgo Pirro. After a profound but melancholic exploration of the doomed nature of love in bothEstate violenta(Violent Summer, 1959) andLa ragazza con la valigia(The Girl with a Suitcase, 1960), he madeSeduto alla sua destra(Black Jesus, 1968), a fierce indictment of white colonialism in Africa but also a more general parable of man's inhumanity to man. He returned to explore further the precarious nature of love and interpersonal relationships in what was perhaps his most personal film,La prima notte di quiete(Indian Summer, 1972). Zurlini is probably best remembered, however, for his final film, a delicately wrought and intellectually complex adaptation of Dino Buzzati's novelIl deserto dei Tartari(The Desert of the Tartars, 1976).