Conference by Giuliana Minghelli.
Introduction to the Retrospective dedicated to Valerio Zurlin on the occasion of the XVII Settimana della lingua Italiana nel mondo, that has as main theme "L’italiano al cinema, l’italiano nel cinema".

Valerio Zurlini was nineteen in 1945. Younger than the generation of De Sica, Visconti, Rossellini and even Fellini, Zurlini seems to have arrived on the cultural scene at once too late and too early. He did not start his career under fascism like all the other great post-war auteurs, and instead underwent a long apprenticeship before claiming a place among the new generation of filmmakers. Zurlini came of age as a director in the Fifties, and from that decade he seems to have absorbed the silences, repressions and unresolved tensions. His cinema looks back – through the two adaptations of Vasco Pratolini novels, Le ragazze di San Frediano (The Girls of San Frediano) and Cronaca familiare (Family Diary), the autobiographical "Estate violenta" (Violent Summer) and "Le soldatesse" – to the years of Fascism and its war. And it looks inward.
The contained energy of his vision is similar to the timid, yet stubborn and resilient courage of his male characters: the young lover in "Girl with a Suitcase", and the delicate, sick, but loyal brother in "Family Diary" (played by Jacques Perrin) or the diminutive and gentle Jean-Luc Trintignant in "Violent Summer".
The cinema of Zurlini has a staying power as it speaks poetically of a world of hopes, quite desperation and short-lived joys that have found expression nowhere else in Italian cinema except, perhaps influenced by his work, in the early Bertolucci of "Prima della rivoluzione".
Zurlini’s legacy as an unrecognized master of a cinema of historical critique and psychological excavation is due for rediscovery and reevaluation.
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