Giuseppe Rotunno

Born in the Italian capital on February 23, 1923, Giuseppe Rotunno began working in 1940 at the Cinecittà studios, in the still photography department, where he captured snapshots used to promote films and developed them. ” I started working in the cinema by chance, because I needed a job, but since I was a child I had been fascinated by the photographs that were displayed in the windows of a shop called “Foto Arte Carnevali”, near my house”, he recalled in an interview. ” Enlarged images, retouched portraits, etc., caught my attention every time I passed  by. Cinema first entered my life as a job opportunity. My father died and, as is the case with most Italian families, I had to start earning a living.”

In 1942 he was drafted into the army, due to the outbreak of World War II. While serving in the film unit, he was captured after the Nazi occupation of Greece, for which he was held captive for two years in Germany, where he became incarcerated in two different concentration camps in Westphalia.

After his release, he worked as an assistant cinematographer on Roberto Rossellini ‘s The Man on the Cross . He made his debut as the absolute manager of this area in  Bread, Love and… , a comedy directed by Dino Risi , in 1955, with Vittorio De Sica  and  Sophia Loren  in the main roles. Right after he became a regular collaborator of Luchino Visconti , whom he considered his mentor, in Rocco and his brothers From him, The Leopard and White Nights , which he considered one of the most important films of his career. “The photography on that title was very important to my evolution as a cinematographer,” he recalled. “Visconti was always halfway between the real and the unreal, reality and fantasy, and the expressive dimension of cinema and that of the theater. In his outstanding career, he alternated great plays with great films, endowing the theater with expressive potential of the cinema, and vice versa”.

With another great master of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini , he worked on eight titles: Satyricon , Roma , Amarcord , Casanova ,  Orchestra Rehearsal , the “Toby Dammit” segment of Extraordinary Stories , The City of Women and And the Ship Goes .

In the United States, he took over titles such as The Naked Maja , starring Ava Gardner . In 1966 he became the first foreign member inducted into the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). For The Show Begins (All that Jazz) , Giuseppe Rotunno received an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography in 1979.

In the 90s he was still very active in Hollywood cinema, with titles like Lobo y Sabrina (y sus amores) . Giuseppe Rotunno  retired after the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: mi ricordo, sí, io mi ricordo , from 1997. He never shot on video or switched to digital cinema. “I agree with Steven Spielberg , who says that as long as there is a printing and developing laboratory in the world, he will shoot his feature films on film. Modern negatives are more resistant to wear and tear, and when the necessary precautions are taken, they guarantee that a film It will be preserved for at least 100 years.”

He is survived by his wife, Graziolina Campori Rotunno, his daughters Tiziana, Paola and Carmen, and seven grandchildren.