Lina Wertmüller: story of a woman who wrote history without realizing it

Lina Wertmüller was never interested in following the bourgeois canons of a life he had not chosen for her. It is for this reason that he often repeated that women, in his day, did not have the same ambitions as him and that, often, they preferred to take refuge in a protected corner without taking risks that could very well be in vain, shunned because of the men who with the women were in bad and bad weather. To Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmuller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich – with such a long surname it was inevitable that the titles of his films did not fit in one line -, however, a flame burned that many did not have: the ambition to build a career, to challenge men on their own playing field and even to cheat them by taking home the highest score. In a historical moment in which the industry gave women a role either as an editor, or as a costume designer, or as an assistant to the producer, Wertmüller has broken through and ended up behind the camera telling the habits and customs of an Italy that was changing and evolving, with the social classes that advanced, retreated and needed to mark the territory in order to feel protected, armored, unassailable.

Wertmüller in the numerous interviews he gave has always said that his directorial attitude and his ability to pave the way depended by the character and the attitude of not being stepped onthe. Lina on the set did not send them to say: he screamed and bit (Luciano De Crescenzo bit his finger because he gestured too much), ordered and shredded (rhe tore Monica Vitti’s dress to shreds because in the theater she refused to act in overalls like everyone else), he resorted to the imperative, but he was also able to soften everyone with the same smile that his followers have come to appreciate. With more than thirty films under his belt and the title of first woman in the world to receive an Oscar nomination in 1977 for Pasqualino Settebellezze, of Lina Wertmüller all noticed immediately, and everyone competed to work with her even if Lina, for her part, has always had her favorites: like Giancarlo Giannini, which he has chosen as the protagonist of such wonderful films as Overwhelmed by an unusual fate in the blue sea of ​​August e Metallurgical Mimì wounded in honor because they understood each other immediately, and also because Giannini, in all these years, has never abandoned her.

Compared to so many male colleagues treated with reverence, Lina has always preferred to carve out a more secluded role, and it is also for this reason that the Italian press at some point stopped taking an interest in her only to get in line to celebrate her at the news of the Career Oscar she was awarded in 2019. The rest of the world, however, has never forgotten it, as the documentary demonstrates Behind the white glasses by Valerio Ruiz (you can find it on the ItsART platform), a precious testimony in which greats like Martin Scorsese and Harvey Keitel speak of her as an artist capable of going where many were afraid to dare, desecrating concepts and situations that many other directors approached with too much modesty and too much prudence. The last lesson that Wertmüller gave to everyone was in Los Angeles on the occasion of the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, when he said worldwide that the award was «a very masculine thing “ and that it would take a female Oscar, “maybe called Anna”. It is also because of his ability to never take himself too seriously that we will miss him terribly, with the hope that the new generations will be able to enjoy his films on the same platforms that they sift through to watch series they will forget the next month.