“This book is dedicated to my beautiful nieces”. Often book dedications express the author's will to dedicate his work and contain the most synthetic treasure chest of his passions. This is certainly the case for the book of Gianna Gissi. An Istrian at the Cinema, Edited by Alessandro Cuk for Alcione PublisherThe monograph tells the life and works of one of the most important costume designers in Italian cinema. And Gianna Gissi's life has an indelible beginning. Born in Pula, February 5, 1943, in a hospital cellar, under the bombings. Then, at four years old, in '47, she is forced to flee from Stignano di Pola, where she lived. “I didn't understand why they had torn me away from my places, from the places where I played, from my cousins, from my grandparents,” says this master of modern cinema today too lady of history. “At first I thought it was a trip to the seaside, because we got on this ship, the Toscana, and my mother put me, like everyone else had a tricolour cockade on the lapel of the coat”. The “tricolour cockade” by Gianna Gissi is “the symbol of identity” that the artist leaves to his granddaughters. And with them, to the young people, to us, who still do not fully know the history from which we come. This is why he wanted to write his monograph. He will have noticed the unconsciousness and the poor participation in the fate of this scourged Italy, the risk it runs “Italianness and Made in Italy” and the necessary pride and fighting spirit.

In Italy there are more than 350 thousand souls from Fiume, Istria, Dalmatia, today multiplied in families, children, grandchildren, who "to be Italian” they have fought since “exiles”. A population within a population forced by force to emigrate from Venezia Giulia and  Dalmatia after the Foibe massacre, which is remembered every year in “Remembrance Day”, on February 10th. There were between 5 and 10 “the infoibati” for "the wrong of being Italian”, together with those who were forced to leave everything to liberate the ceded territories, with Treaty of Paris, Jugoslavia of the communist marshal Josip Broz Tito. “I remember my mother crying, I remember when we left the pier in Pola”, writes Gianna Gissi, returning to that ancient pain, never soothed because it had never yet fully developed. Also because “the Istrian-Dalmatian question” has long been removed. A page that has not yet found the number of books, films, essays, analyses needed.

Gianna Gissi's Career begins in the cinema of the seventies alongside Mario Monicelli (after a television debut alongside one of the most famous directors of TV drama, Edmo Fenoglio) and runs through the entire filmography from the 80s to the present day. A gallery of thousands of costumes. But what more do I say, since she herself says that only on the set of Marquis del Grillo dressed a thousand extras every day. “In the cinema you need a iron health and nerves of steel”, he says quoting the famous costume designer, set designer, painter Dario Cecchi, son of the writer Emilio cecchi, his mentor. And it must be explained that the costume designer he is not only the creator of the dress, but the author of the visible part of the actor, of the work, of the direction.

To understand the value of the filmography of this precious artist, its cultural weight with the list of Awards, its role in Italian culture, finally all the teaching and personal activity, we must return to the exiled child and the images of real life. Starting from the escape from Pula to Rome, to the very hard journey, by train, truck, with stops and days of fear and fatigue. Why Rome? “Because my dad had a cousin, uncle Natale, who had been in Rome since the 1930s. And when my dad left, at night, I remember the film image, a night of full moon and dad's shadow speaking, I hear him say to my mother if I'm alive I'll be in Rome, from Christmas. And so it was."

Here, and thus, it is born Gianna Gissi's Cinema. The episode unfolds a drama even greater than the heart and mind, the flesh and blood of not only one, but of all the exiles of theIstria, of Fiume, of Dalmatia, of Zadar. Perhaps for young people these lands are foreign names, but Istria, Fiume, Dalmatia, Zara were Italy and Italians. An interior story for which cinema is needed, as a projection of the magma of feelings and experiences, to reveal and understand it. Like when Gianna, arriving in Rome, hears a knock, and sees her mother, her sisters who say “daddy, daddy”. But she doesn't, she doesn't recognize him. She says in the book: "Mom showed me the photos every night: this is dad, say a prayer for dad. My father was 1,86 tall and I found myself in front of a man who weighed 60 kilos, so, he was really a kind of ectoplasm".

The exodus, therefore, and the cinema. Not on the exiles and the foibe: “I have always been outraged by the total ignorance that Italians in general had of our history,” he says. But the cinema inside her, which she approached to elaborate memories and images of memory. She says, in fact, that she and her sister would go to see the same film more than once. “It was the era of musicals, of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I went home and redesigned all the clothes. I think with drawing, with which I invented my life, like my exiled brothers”. The artistic monograph, meticulously reconstructed by Alessandro Cuk, Julian-Dalmatian film critic journalist and vice-president of the Cinit (Italian Film Forum), is a long list of titles and also a gallery of sketches made for the famous parts of Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Monica Vitti, Hugh Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni, Gérard Depardieu, Gian Maria Volonté, just to name a few.

The book was presented at the House of Remembrance of the Exodus, the space of Rome Capital inaugurated in 2015 in the Fori Imperiali area, by Professor Donatella Schurzel, scientific researcher of European History at the University La Sapienza in Rome, from an Istrian family, a scholar awarded numerous recognitions and the title of Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, who is very active and at the helm of the institutional subjects of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia. “We are making great strides, with Remembrance day we enter many schools, there is a widespread diffusion of our history. The hope is present this book also in Pula, we are already in dialogue with the deputy mayor". Schürzel not only coordinated the presentation, she also set up the terrace surmounted by a vine with bunches of grapes from which coloured umbrellas peeked out to provide shelter from the sun “the Julian-Dalmatians” precious and rare living witnesses. Everyone has the exodus in their eyes or, like her, has experienced it through fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts. And among the younger ones, it struck me how there was no one who did not keep a small faded photo of relatives or simple compatriots, how each still whispers facts and events. Not atrocious memories, but rather sweet, very sad images, of beautiful proud people who smiles in the photos, many of which ended up who knows where, since The overall count and the relentless endings are shrouded in mystery. While we wait for the presentation to begin I hear people say, “Mom never came back, she wanted to search, in cemeteries or among the documents, she died with this pain.” Maybe a brother? Or even a little son, left there, and of whom nothing is known?

Among the speakers, together with Alessandro Cuk e Marino Micich, director of the Historical Archive Museum of Fiume (Rome), I had the honor of I'll be there too: both because I was a special envoy of the Newspaper by Indro Montanelli, who has never forgotten to dedicate pages to this chapter; and both because my father, Lorenzo Papi, was one of the scene photographers of Italian cinematographic neorealism. And so I could fully get the sense of both levels of the monograph. The memories of exile, the testimonies, the quantity of unpublished material, but also the weight of the costume designer's work, the value of the creations, the importance of the prizes and awards. For example the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for So they laughed di Gianni Amelio and the five Oscar nominations for The postman by Michael Radford and Massimo Troisi, in which Gissi “dressed”, in addition to Troisi and the actors, the protagonist Philippe Noiret as Pablo Neruda. “The film is a beautiful memory, but unfortunately also a sad memory,” admits the Istrian. “To finish the film, Massimo had himself carried lying down at times because he was so weak and he died immediately after the last take.” And she adds: “Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, was a friend of friends. I met him during one of his visits to Rome. Until then I didn't know who he was. Sometimes I went with my father, who took care of those in the refugee camps until the end, probably he saw him there too? It was my sister who revealed his name to me. But we have Neruda in the garden and nobody tells me?, she shouted when she saw him walking in our condominium garden”.

The consecration as a costume designer comes with David di Donatello for Il Marchese del Grillo in 1982, film directed by Mario Monicelli  with  Alberto Sordi, who also won a Silver ribbon, and in 1990 for Doors open directed by Gianni Amelio. “With Amelio, in 1998, I also did So they laughed. It was hard work, a lot of work. We started without a script. I didn't have a script. They gave me some sheets of paper the night before. The film went from the 1950s to the mid-1960s. The only thing I managed to get were two huge trucks full of fabrics, stuff from the period, all blindly. We went on like this for a while, then at a certain point I got stuck. I said I'm going to Rome. Amelio thought I would retire to the Hotel Roma, where I was staying. When he realized I had left the set, he started to pester me. But I was intransigent: Either you give me the script and apologize, or I'm not coming back.. I'm back. Gianni is a guy like that, you have to fight. Alberto Sordi, on the other hand, came to the set at the last minute and I don't remember him complaining."

Cinema was the medicine, the dream, the transposition. Artistic high school, then the Academy. Dario Cecchi as a teacher-friend, who was also the screenwriter's brother Suso Cecchi D'Amico, then a long apprenticeship on the sets, then alongside Mario Monicelli with whom Gissi begins a long collaborationThe broken soul was being recomposed, also thanks to the typical elements of Italianness. The sea, for example. And the sea of ​​Ostia of her youth. Gianna was lucky enough to immediately live in an apartment, but most of the exiles were sorted into Giuliano village on the Laurentina road, made during the 1942 Exhibition by Benito Mussolini as a workers' village. She missed the sea. It is a characteristic fact of the Julian-Dalmatians. If you look at their eyes, especially those with light eyes, you can see the foam of Istria, of Fiume, of Zara, because the sea is that natural and logical bond. "Dad said to me one morning: I'll take you to see the sea. When we arrived in Ostia I was very disappointed. I started to cry. Because it was a completely straight sea, you couldn't see the horizon, you couldn't see anything. If this is my sea I won't come here. I don't want to come here, I told him. But this was what the convent was all about, there was nothing else then.”

Ostia is not the sea of ​​Istria, the Adriatic. But the sea is the sea and that wide expanse, without horizon, rebuilt, oh yes it rebuilt. Not only the Lazio coast. As soon as she can Gianna sets off on a journey, discovers Amalfi Coast, Capri, Positano. It is also a art historian. “I studied this subject to get a qualification. Because you never know, as my dad used to say. And it helped me. Because my work doesn't start like that, from simple emotions. It's a very particular job. My job is similar to that of an actor, I have to empathize to be able to bring out what the director wants". Exile and cinema, then. The Julian-Dalmatian Question and the Italy of the Star System merge in this biography. Gianna becomes together with the scriptwriters and set designers of the time (among other things she marries the set designer Lorenzo Baraldi) the arm of the most famous directors. And it becomes also the costume designer friend, the confidant, of the most famous actors and actresses. The costume designer creates sumptuous and historical clothes, but also profiles personalities with simple clothes. “I remember the conversations with Gian Maria Volontè for Doors open, taken from the book by Leonardo Sciascia, in which the character is a judge. We agreed with Gian Maria that a judge of the thirties could not have more than two gray suits”.

The anecdotes, told by Gissi and collected by Cuk, are a huge list. Each film has its own technical sheet, the plot, then the comments in which the costume designer records details, fragments, facts, cameos of personalities. I wait for the lady to get to talk about Gérard Depardieu, with which it has worked in 1979 in Rosy Storm by Mario Monicelli, of whom she says he called her from Paris in 1980. “Oh yes, it’s true,” she smiles in a black suit, dark glasses, diva and child, leaning on her cane, to whom nothing escapes, bitter, sweet, but also stigmatizing, accompanied by her husband, a set designer, and her son, a producer. “Gerard is calling me from Paris. Gianna? How are you? I’ll put you through to someone. Who is it, I think. It was François Truffaut, who proposed that I work with him in the masterpiece of French cinema The last subway, with Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. I regretfully refused: my son was not well and I did not feel like leaving him. My husband always reproached me for this: You made a mistake, I would have brought it to you on set, he told me. But no, I didn't take that step towards international cinema, I favored my family and my mother".

I listen to her, take courage (sometimes it takes courage to assert an intuition) and tell her: "No, Mrs. Gissi, not only did you not accept for your son, but for another reason, a profound one that I will tell you now and you will understand how true it is. You did not accept to go to France, abroad, to move your professionalism and success outside of Italy because to be Italian, to return to Italy, to work and weld the roots and the Italian identity, she fought. And this is it membership which he wants to leave to his granddaughters to tell in future ages: to be Italian”. History, ours and collective, is often tragic and terrible, but it always has a meaning. I also believe in Divine Providence, so I believe what I answered to a lady who was talking to me about her family and the historical delay: "Yes, of course, a mistake, but I want to think that it was even a drawing, because today more than ever these testimonies take on enormous value, essential and equally desperate. It must be said, to young people, to everyone, how much effort, how much commitment they have paid the Julian-Dalmatians for our Italian talent".

(*) Gianna Gissi. An Istrian at the Cinema, edited by Alessandro Cuk, Alcione Editore 2021 

Donatella Paci
Source: The Opinion of Freedom – 28/06/2024