Roman Diversions

 

When exactly does intrusive press reporting stop being a gross violation of personal privacy and become something else- a historic document or even art?    And at what point does ephemeral press photography destined for tomorrow’s tabloid front page or next week’s magazine exclusive turn into the product of an artist’s eye and consciousness?   I found myself musing on these questions (without, I must admit, finding an entirely satisfactory response to them) while catching another exhibition just before it closed.

The show in question was at the Estorick Gallery (regular readers will know this is a favourite place).  Entitled “The Years of La Dolce Vita”, it highlighted the photography of Marcello Geppetti and, to a much more limited extent, that of Arturo Zavattini.  Zavattini was Fellini’s chief cameraman on the eponymous film (and many of his other productions) and his photos offer a behind the scenes view of its making.  In many ways it’s a rather unrevealing affair; Zavattini was, after all, part of the “company” and it’s reasonable to assume that all the photos were taken with the full knowledge and consent of those depicted.  Even “off duty” moments of relaxation during the shooting are pretty tame.

Geppetti was a rather different, and more complex, kettle of fish.  He had started out as a conventional news photographer with an ambulance chasing streak whose first moment of fame had come covering a fire in a hotel on the Via Veneto in Rome (ironically later to be the core of the café society immortalised in “La Dolce Vita”) and never stopped covering “hard” news stories throughout his long career.  This side of his work is only tangentially referenced in the Estorick show with a shot of Robert Kennedy visiting Rome just weeks before his assassination.    His fame, however, rests on his role as the most prominent and talented of the pack of photographers dedicated to snapping the comings, goings and excesses of the film stars who passed through Rome in the decade or so from the mid 1950’s to the mid 1960’s when the major Hollywood studios shipped their stars over to the Eternal City to make movies there.  He’s sometimes taken as the model for the Paparazzo character in Fellini’s film (and hence, indirectly, the man who gave a particular style of intrusive photo-journalism its name).   This is a slight exaggeration- the character was a composite of several celebrity chasers active at the time, of whom Geppetti was just the most successful and notorious- but he certainly acted as a technical advisor on the film and put in a cameo appearance. 

The primary reason Geppetti’s subjects were in Rome was economic.  Hollywood studios couldn’t transfer the profits they were making from European markets back to the US due to exchange control restrictions.   Rome had top class production facilities at Cinecitta (a legacy of Fascist era investment in the film industry which had never been fully used before war came) along with talented cameramen and film crews who cost a lot less to hire than their American counterparts.   Italy offered lots of wonderful locations to film in and a touch of the exotic for American audiences.   In this context it made perfect sense to spend the cash blocked in Europe to make films which, with luck, might make profits in the US.   From an Italian perspective, hosting American film makers kept facilities operational which would otherwise have struggled to survive on the basis of purely domestic demand and paid for studio upgrades which the domestic industry could not have afforded.  While Italian film makers may have resented the American presence only the most dogmatically Communist entirely rejected the spin-off benefits it brought; indeed Italian directors were often very happy to take advantage of the presence of authentic Hollywood stars and include them in their casts.   Italian (and indeed other European) performers were only too pleased to take parts in US-made films and Italian audiences lapped up the products of the Dream Factory.  If the gritty Neo-Realism of the immediate post war years had ever had a mass audience in Italy, this had largely evaporated by the mid 1950’s in favour of more escapist fare.       Inevitably the quality of the works produced in Italy under those circumstances was very variable; it was no doubt symbolic that one of the last major productions created in this period, just as changing rules on taxation and currency convertibility began to undercut the economic rationale for this approach to film making, was the monumentally expensive and loss-making “Cleopatra”, which indirectly provided Geppetti with one of his iconic (and most profitable) photos.

For American stars, shooting in Rome had many attractions.   The dollar went a long way in what was still at heart an impoverished semi-rural country, though one changing fast under the impact of post-war industrialisation; one could live even more lavishly than in Beverly Hills at limited cost.   The social life was every bit as lively as back home, with the opportunity to rub shoulders with genuine(ish) aristocrats if that was one’s inclination.   Above all, there was a certain air of freedom and room for transgression.   In Rome the stars were at one remove from the rather suffocating conformism of 1950’s America which affected how even film idols were expected to present themselves to the public.   There was the opportunity to let hair down and take risks.   The downside of this apparent freedom was embodied by Geppetti and his colleagues.  The studios were far less able to manage media coverage of their key assets than they would have been in the US and the apparently insatiable Italian appetite for gossip and pictures of the stars, fed by a whole sector of magazines aimed at a mostly female audience, meant that they could hardly set foot out of doors or have a banal dinner in the local trattoria without the accompaniment of flash bulbs.   It probably wasn’t much comfort that their Italian colleagues faced exactly the same ordeal. 

There’s a tendency now to regard Geppetti as an unjustly neglected artist on a par with the great photo-reporters like Capa or Cartier-Bresson.    I’m not totally convinced by this, at least on the basis of the exhibition (and fully recognising that Capa and Co undoubtedly also took a large number of pretty banal photos alongside the iconic works they’re remembered for).     Geppetti undoubtedly had an eye for people and could take some striking and very thought-provoking images.   Take the example at the top of the page.  A very young and very sexy Brigitte Bardot, out and about in Orvieto north of Rome (I assume on location) turns her back on a wall of press photographers and police to give us a dazzling smile.  It’s a beautiful meditation on fame and media coverage, creating a sense of intimacy between us, the viewers, and the star; there’s a sense that she’s sharing a moment of amusement at all the fuss her presence has created and that she’s allowed us (via Geppetti) privileged access denied to the common herd of snappers in the background.  It is perhaps revealing, however, that she isn’t actually looking into Geppetti’s lens either.  It’s also notable that this photo, which must surely have been created with her collaboration and consent, doesn’t really fit into the stereotype of his work as a photographer of the unexpected and unguarded moment, zig-zagging through the Rome traffic on his motor scooter with a camera specially adapted so that he could shoot on the move if need be (as when he caught Anita Ekberg at the wheel of her Mercedes below) or gatecrashing events to catch the stars at play.

 

The photos in the show which did fit that stereotype were a bit of a mixed bag.   Some are wonderfully strange, like the image of Frank Sinatra and an unidentified heavy coming out of a theatre in full evening dress; pop-eyed, they look as if they’ve seen a ghost or something equally disturbing.  There’s something faintly menacing about the shot, subliminally playing into the sulphurous, Mafia-linked, side to Sinatra’s reputation.   Sophia Loren looks bored to distraction by the company of Carlo Ponti (though he must have improved his conversational skills eventually, given that the couple were to enjoy many years of married life together).  Michelle Morgan causes a  traffic jam by losing her shoe on a Roman pedestrian crossing (surely taking her life in her hands relying on Italian drivers to obey the rules of the road-unless, of course, the shot was carefully staged).   Audrey Hepburn, stylish as always, takes her equally stylish pooch for a walk in a bustling Roman street. 

 

Most, though, are pretty uninteresting.   There are, after all, only so many ways you can take photos of people drinking in a bar or sitting down in restaurants for a meal, even if there might be a bit of slightly predictable comedy to be had at the expense of foreigners struggling to come to terms with spaghetti (Jane Mansfield clearly hadn’t picked up the knack when Geppetti shot her and her husband Mickey Hargitay in a Roman restaurant).  

 

There may well have been contexts which made these photos “work” in journalistic terms but are now accessible only to those well versed in the life and times of the stars concerned- I can see that who was dining with whom might have been very hot news for the gossip sheets of the day, for instance- but they weren’t really spelled out in the exhibition.  Equally there’s only so much interest to be derived from seeing Hollywood stars of the 1950’s and 60’s behaving like “normal” tourists in Rome, eating ice creams or towing bored teenage children round the sights.   It would also have been helpful to have some sense of how the photographs were presented in the magazines which bought them- this was, after all, photography created for a very specific market.   Were all the shots in the show published- and if not, what might that say about shifting views of what makes a “good” photograph?

Perhaps my viewing of the exhibition was influenced by knowing that it was curated by Steven Gundle.  He’s an academic historian with an interest in topics like the use and abuse of glamour and feminine beauty in Italian society since 1800, on which he has published serious academic tomes.  More relevant to this exhibition, however, was a much more “popular” book called “Death and the Dolce Vita”, which examined a murky and never properly elucidated murder case involving a young Roman woman whose body was washed up on a beach near Ostia Lido (Rome’s local seaside resort).  The rather bungled investigation spiralled off in all directions, drawing in members of the arty Roman cafe society who also mingled with the foreign stars, louche Roman aristocrats with big titles and little money, dubious property developers with links to the Fascist past and so on.   There were political overtones (one of the suspects was the wayward son of a prominent figure on the left of the ruling Christian Democrat party), allegations of sex and drug orgies involving the rich and famous and, inevitably, claims of cover-ups and conspiracies.  It’s an interesting book, but (at least in my view) rather weakened by pages and pages of rather gossipy stuff about the cinematic milieu which Geppetti was snapping.   The young woman whose death is the nominal focus of the book was a cinema fan and there were some links between the list of suspects and that world but in truth they’re pretty tenuous and much of the material on Hollywood stars in Rome looked as if it had escaped from another book with even fewer academic pretensions.  

Having read Gundle’s book (on sale in the Estorick bookshop at the time) it was tempting to see the exhibition as being in some sense the “show of the book” even though the rather sketchy interpretative material provided in the galleries and the catalogue never mentioned the case and none of the photos had any obvious links to it.   There were rather oblique references to the “dark side” of the world Geppetti covered but in truth there wasn’t much visible evidence of this in his photos, for fairly obvious reasons.   Even a skilled gatecrasher like Geppetti would presumably not have obtained access to a really heavy duty sex and drug orgy- and if he had, he had too much of a sense of self-preservation to take photos there as (a) it would have been highly dangerous to do so and (b) there would almost certainly have been no market for them in his usual press outlets.   The Italian magazine press might have been more overtly intrusive and willing to print certain stories than its US counterpart but there were clear limits to its coverage.  Marital infidelity and wild parties in nightclubs were one thing, serious criminal behaviour or such taboo activities as gay sex were quite another.   A little transgression added to the glamour of the beautiful people whom Geppetti photographed; he wasn’t in the business of probing much deeper.

As a result there was very little that could overtly be put under the “stars behaving badly” rubric in the show.  The fact that everybody seems to be smoking certainly doesn’t count- though it is a nice reminder of how societal attitudes have shifted over the past half century or so.   I don’t think Raquel Welch dancing on the table on-set under the amused eyes of Marcello Mastoianni counts either, fun shot though it is.   

 

Of course the context point made earlier comes into play here; it isn’t necessarily immediately obvious that they are behaving badly without background information which the news stories these photos would have been slotted into would have provided.   Take one of Geppetti’s most notorious photos below.   In some respects it’s very forward looking- the use of long lenses to spy on people would now be regarded as one of the core concerns over intrusive press coverage but was something of a novelty in the 1960’s.   The victims here- Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, taking a break from shooting “Cleopatra”- would probably have been unhappy at being photographed in a private moment at the best of times; what made this photo so scandalous was that both of them were married to other people at the time and its appearance on magazine front pages in Italy and beyond caused a huge scandal as both marriages came messily apart in public.  One could see this as the foundational image of a whole style of celebrity journalism which is with us yet- and (at least here in the UK) is part of wider arguments over privacy legislation and press regulation.

Beyond that, however, the nearest thing to misbehaviour on camera in the show was a series of photos of various stars getting into noisy disputes with photographers, in some cases to the point of physical assault.  The most bizarre of these involved Anita Ekberg sallying forth from the villa she must have been renting armed with a bow and arrows to confront the press pack.   In fact it’s so bizarre that it’s very tempting indeed to suspect that it was staged.

 

This left me musing on just how many of the supposedly candid shots taken by Geppetti were actually done with the knowledge and consent, however grudging, of the subjects.   Some very obviously are- I’m sure Mickey Hargitay didn’t make a habit of carrying Jane out of restaurants when the cameras weren’t there, for instance.    On the other hand, they can’t all have been but (the long lens Burton and Taylor one apart) it’s very difficult to tell just from looking at them- even the assaults might have been staged (being walloped by a star probably didn’t damage a photographer’s career while punching a snapper on the nose made the star look like an ordinary human being, especially if it was done to “protect” a lady).   In the ultimate analysis Geppetti was an insider, even if he was probably regarded by many of the stars he photographed as a bit of a pest whose attentions you had to tolerate for career reasons.  He was obviously welcome on set.  In other words, you weren’t going to get anything seriously subversive of the movie industry and its stars from him.    The whole modernisation process which Italy was going through- socially, culturally, economically- in the years of La Dolce Vita was hugely controversial and the cinema industry was a lightning conductor.   Damned for its American overtones on the Communist left, blasted as destructive of Italian morals on the Catholic right and sneered at as hopelessly vulgar by intellectual and cultural elites.   Very little of these critiques found their way into Geppetti’s work- or indeed Fellini’s film, which (as the more perceptive contemporary critics noted) mostly reserved its barbs for soft targets and to a considerable extent played to attitudes which it claimed to satirise.    If Geppetti did hold a mirror to a very specific sub-culture at a very specific time, it was a rather less overtly critical one than is sometimes suggested.

As far as the questions posed at the beginning are concerned, I suppose the passage of time does make a difference; it’s hard to be offended over intrusion into the lives of people many of whom are now dead, especially as it’s likely that in many cases they were consenting victims.   There is a legitimate historical interest in Geppetti’s work as the record of a specific, long departed, moment in the history of cinema and even to some extent of Italian society.   I’m less persuaded of the higher claims made for his work in purely artistic terms, even if he took some very fine individual photographs.  It was still worth putting the exhibition on at the Estorick, though….