The stars look down

The posters of the films by Anton Giulio Majano, king of TV drama

The exhibition recalls, through posters, playbills and lobby cards, the film career of Anton Giulio Majano (Chieti, 1909 – Marino, 1994), famous primarily as the creator of landmark TV drama, but here presented in his role as film director.

The name Majano holds great significance for those who experienced, as spectators, the great age of Italian television of the 1960s and 1970s. Majano was the author of some of the great masterpieces of that period: he moved Italians with The Citadel, and he involved them in the adventures of David Copperfield and the dramatic events of The Stars Look Down.

Majano, who dealt very skilfully with historical turning points, reinventing the Middle Ages of The Black Arrow, the sense of Mitteleuropean decadence in Two Prisoners, and the British seventeenth century of The Master of Ballantrae, was himself a figure at the crossroads of times, a man capable of creating powerful connections between past and present, between neorealist cinema and television, between the great tradition of melodrama and the premises of docufiction. He knew how to orchestrate complex plots – to be unravelled by the audience over hours and hours of viewing -, digging into the psychology of the characters, and revealing their most intimate motivations through his meticulous and intimate direction. Anton Giulio Majano also described reality through fiction, at times even bringing down the boundaries between chronicle and narration, as in Medea’s Children, which at the time caused a furore and made the front pages of Italian newspapers.

The exhibition, however, concentrates on Anton Giulio Majano as film director.

Posters and playbills of the following films will be on display:

Vento d’Africa (African wind) (1949), L’eterna catena (The eternal chain) (1951), La domenica della buona gente (Good folk’s Sunday) (1953), Una donna prega (A woman prays) (1953), Cento serenate (One hundred serenades) (1954), La rivale  (The rival) (1955), Terrore sulla città (Terror on the city) (1956), Il padrone delle ferriere (The owner of the ironworks) (1958),  Lui, lei e il nonno (He, she and grandfather) (1959),  Seddok (L’erede di Satana) (Seddok, Satan’s Heir) (1960), I fratelli corsi (The Corsican brothers) (1961).

The posters on display trace Majano’s entire film career, from Vento d’Africa to Fratelli corsi. Large-format posters and lobby card sets present an overview of the films directed by Majano, evoking their most famous scenes.

The exhibition also includes many contemporary periodicals, from journals of the 1930s and 1940s (Excelsior, Cinema, La Lettura), in which Majano started out as writer and cinema critic, to TV magazines with interviews with the film director.

The posters and magazines come from a private collection.

The exhibition is curated by Mario Gerosa, cinema and television scholar and author of “Anton Giulio Majano. Il regista dei due mondi” (Anton Giulio Majano. The director of the two worlds) (Falsopiano, Alessandria, 2016).