If you can’t resist great cinema, compelling photographs, beautiful people and a taste of Italy this exhibition is for you.

If you can’t resist great cinema, compelling photographs, beautiful people and a taste of Italy this exhibition is for you.

Joyce Glasser reviews Sergio Strizzi: The Perfect Moment – Photographic Exhibition at the Estorick Collection (until 8 September 2024)

There’s more than a taste of Italy, cinema history and nostalgia in every one of the 80 images on display in this exhibition of Sergio Strizzi’s film stills, although to call them “stills” is misleading.

These primarily black and white images are so alive you can practically see the characters moving and hear the melodious Italian of an entire story compressed in a frame. Or, if Michael Caine or Sylvester Stallone are on the set (as in John Huston’s Escape to Victory), or a young Jacqueline Bisset (as in Luigi Comencini’s The Sunday Woman), you might hear familiar English speaking voices.

The gift that made Strizzi arguably the most sought after stills photographer of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s was his uncanny ability to catch what he called the “perfect moment.” Unlike a trailer which tells you too much, that perfect moment arrests your attention, draws you in and leaves you wanting to see more.

And it wasn’t only directors from Vittorio De Sica (The River Girl) and Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) to Liliana Cavani (Ripley’s Game) who insisted on Strizzi’s presence. After seeing the stills from her 1978 film Bloodline, Audrey Hepburn chose Strizzi to be the photographer for a feature article Life Magazine was devoting to the style icon. Hepburn said, ‘his photographs allowed me to discover something about myself that I didn’t know I possessed.’

What the actors and directors alike all recognised was Strizzi’s knack for capturing that amorphous thing called chemistry between two actors. Alain Delon is a handsome young heartthrob in L’elisse (1962) but in Strizzi’s closeup shot with Monica Vitti he exudes that existential angst, decadence and ennui that permeates Antonioni’s trilogy.

Strizzi bonded with Giuseppe Tornatore over their shared love of photography and thanked him with one of the greatest movie stills of the millennium, taken four years before Strizzi’s death in 2004. The glamorous model and actress Monica Bellucci is the titular Malena, seated alone at an outdoor café, the most desired woman in town while her husband is away at war. As she puts a cigarette in her mouth men descend upon her like seagulls on an ice-cream, cigarette lighters appearing everywhere at the end of outstretched arms.

But the still that defined Italian cinema for decades, and perhaps still does, is from Antonioni’s 1961 era defining, La Notte. The still was turned into one of the most famous movie posters of all time, showing an inebriated Jeanne Moreau, with her head thrown back with a white stole over her, trailing behind a contemplative Marcello Mastroianni, as they wander over the grounds of another society party. The still is so expressive that you almost know that he is a disillusioned novelist, and she is his alienated wife, both clinging on to what remains of their marriage with booze and social climbing. When once asked how he manages to catch that split second that defines a film, Strizzi answered, ‘I wait.’

Antonioni must have been delighted with the shot, too. This was the period when he substituted traditional story telling for mood, composition, and atmosphere, all of which permeates Strizzi’s iconic still.

Approaching 70, Strizzi worked on Roberto Benigni’s, Life is Beautiful, taking the still that became the famous theatrical release poster showing Benigni’s bookshop owner just about to kiss his wife (Nicoletta Braschi), the two – who would be separated by the horrors of WWII – separated by a bicycle carrying their son. The film won three Academy Awards and became the highest grossing foreign language film to date.

Born in Rome in 1931, Strizzi went to work young, becoming a photojournalist for Vincenzo Carrarese’s Publifoto agency. When he was only 21, two of Italy’s biggest producers, Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis engaged Strizzi for The 11 Musketeers by Ennio De Concini and Fausto Saraceni. The film, dedicated to the national football team that won the World Cup in 1934 and 1938, launched Strizzi’s career in cinema, and he never looked back.

Within the tight Italian film community Strizzi never had to look for work. Nor did he struggle when it came to landing a couple of James Bond films. After taking the stills for From Russia with Love in 1963, in 1966 Strizzi had just wrapped another British spy movie, Guy Hamilton’s A Funeral in Berlin.

Albert Broccoli and Sean Connery were at a hotel party for the start of production on a new Bond and Strizzi was among the guests. Co-producer Harry Saltzman found some of Strizzi’s stills that he had left in a hotel room and sought out the photographer. ‘I’m starting a film in fifteen days,’ Saltzman told him. ‘Do you want to work on it’? Strizzi added You Only Live Twice to his CV.