1962_Cronaca familiare, directed by Valerio Zurlini, music by Goffredo Petrassi.
Few, important scores for cinema composed by Goffredo Petrassi, all set in farmland and making use of folk repertoire: Bitter Rice of 1949, No Peace Under the Olive Tree of 1950, La pattuglia sperduta of 1954. In 1962, Zurlini called Petrassi to write music for this aching story on the fragility of two brothers’ relationship. Petrassi composed amazing music, austere and melancholic, that you just have to give a listen to.
1964_Deserto rosso, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, music by Giovanni Fusco.
This film ends the historical collaboration between Antonioni and Fusco, which began in 1950 with Story of a Love Affair. Between Hiroshima mon amour and Garter Colt, great Italian film score composer Giovanni Fusco produced four to five scores per year in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a hard-working craftsman, Fusco, who occasionally gave free rein to his creativity and made absolutely outstanding music. His scores are instantly recognizable in that follow so closely the pace of the narration: no ‘romantic’ digressions, but essentiality often entrusted to smaller chamber ensembles and to a mix of sophisticated nocturnal jazz and summertime rumba, surf, twist.
1966_La battaglia di Algeri, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, music by Ennio Morricone.
Here we are with our beloved Ennio Morricone of extraordinary middleness, a strong anchor point of narrative as well as the presence of an idea, an enlightenment that made this man the most intuitive music composer in the history of cinema, the one who could pair a musical idea with the specific mood of a film. The persistent theme song November 1, 1954 is based on a motif by Pontecorvo, who couldn’t read or write music but was musically talented nonetheless. That’s why the score of The Battle of Algiers is credited to both.
