Together With Lorenza Mazzetti Review: Compelling Testament from Overlooked Director

Lorenza Mazzetti was an Italian artist, writer, and filmmaker whose short film Together significantly impacted the influential mid-1950s Free Cinema movement in the UK. Mazzetti, who passed away in 2020, spent her later years in Italy focusing on writing novels and memoirs, and running a puppet theater in Rome. While her filmography was limited, she stood out as one of the very few female directors working in Britain during the 1950s, making her a significant figure for academics and filmmakers uncovering hidden histories.

Brighid Lowe, an associate professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, has particularly focused on Mazzetti. Mazzetti arrived at the Slade School as an ambitious artist in 1951 and boldly declared her “genius” to the school’s director, painter William Coldstream. Lowe’s film, which she describes as a labor of love that took at least five years to complete, features an interview with a 90-year-old Mazzetti conducted by fellow academic and critic Henry K. Miller. In the interview, Mazzetti, with some prompting, reflects on her time in London and the origins of her art, presenting what now feels like her final testament.

Mazzetti’s life was deeply affected by her traumatic wartime experiences. In 1944, the SS murdered the family of her Jewish uncle Robert Einstein in Tuscany. Einstein, who was in hiding, took his own life a year later. Mazzetti and her twin sister Paola, who lived with the Einsteins, were spared, likely because their last names did not identify them as Jewish. Mazzetti fled this horror to a war-torn London, where she attended art school and used liberated camera equipment and film stock to create a pair of short films inspired by Franz Kafka. Mazzetti then received support from the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund to make Together, which featured artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi as deaf brothers living in London’s East End.

Together, which was included in the first Free Cinema program at the National Film Theatre alongside works by Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson, marked the pinnacle of Mazzetti’s film career. Unlike many of her contemporaries who went on to notable directorial success, Mazzetti returned to Italy. Although she made an Italian feature in 1959 called I Cattivi Vanno in Paradiso in collaboration with Denis Horne, it did not meet with critical success. She then turned her creative energies towards writing about the traumatic events of her childhood.

Mazzetti never explicitly blamed sexism for derailing her film career, but as the only woman among her Free Cinema peers, it’s difficult not to think it played a role. Despite this, Mazzetti remained a vibrant and infectiously enthusiastic individual until the end of her life.

Together With Lorenza Mazzetti is available on BFI Player from 26 August.

Source: BFI