Liliana Cavani
Cavani, third from the right, at the 2009 Venice film festival, as member of the jury
Born	disputed Carpi, Modena, Italy

Liliana Cavani is an Italian director and screenwriter, best known for her 1974 feature film, Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter), which launched actress Charlotte Rampling to international stardom.

In 1979, she was a member of the jury at the 29th Berlin International Film Festival.^[1] Her 1985 film The Berlin Affair was entered into the 36th Berlin International Film Festival.^[2]

Cavani was born to a working-class family in Carpi, near Modena in the province of Emilia-Romagna.^[3] Her birth date is not known. According to the Áine O'Healy (in the Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, 2007, p. 427), Cavani was born on 12 January 1937, although Liehm states 1935 (Passion and Defiance, 1984, p. 198). Other commentators have claimed 1933 and 1936, with 1933 prevailing on Internet biographies such as IMDb.^[4] Cavani's father, an architect from Mantua, belonged to a conservative bourgeois family of landowners. "My father was an architect interested in urban development. He took me to museums. He had worked in urban planning in Baghdad in 1956, when Iraq was still under British control. My mother was very strong, very capable, and very sweet," Cavani explained in an interview. Her mother was passionate about films and took her to the movies every Sunday from an early age. On her mother side Cavani came from a working class family of militant antifascist. Her maternal grandfather, a syndicalist introduced her to the works of Engels, Marx and Bakunin.^[5] "I had both Fascist and anti-Fascist relatives", she once stated. ^{[citation needed]}

She graduated in literature and philology at Bologna University in 1960, writing a dissertation on the fifteen century poet and nobleman Marsilio Pio.^[3] Cavani had intended to become an archeologist, a profession she soon abandoned in order to pursue her passion for the moving image.^[5] She attended Rome's renowned "Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia", (Experimental Cinematography Center) inaugurated by Benito Mussolini prior to World War II. She studied documentary filmmaking and obtained her diploma with the short films Incontro notturno (1961), about the friendship between two men, a white man and a Senegalese African, and L'evento (1962) about a group of tourists who killed for fun, which won an award as the best short of that course. ^{[citation needed]}

While attending film school, Cavani won a competition at RAI, Italy's national television network, and took a job there as a director of historical documentaries in 1961. Her professional career thus began making documentaries for RAI between 1961 and 1965. This included Storia del III Reich, (History of the Third Reich) (1962-63), which chronicles the rise of the Nazi regime. ^[6] It was the first historical investigation of German totalitarianism to appear on television. Other documentaries are: Leta di stalin ("The Stalin Years"), an investigation into the massive abuse of power perpetuated by the soviet leader; La donna nella Resistenza (1965); Phillipe Pétain, proceso a Vichy, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice film festival in 1965 in the documentary section. In this period she also made il girono della pace, a four-hour documentary on immigration south-to-north within Italy.

Cavani made her first full-length feature film in 1966 with Francis of Assisi (Francesco d'Assisi). Made for television and aired in two parts, it was deeply influenced by the style of Rossellini and atmosphere typical of the films of Pasolini; made in a period of political unrest, it was to become a kind of manifesto of dissenting Catholicism. Starring Lou Castel, it portrays Francis of Assisi as a slightly depress protestor and a avid, albeit mad, supporter of armed brother hood. The ideal defender of the 1968 student movement. The film was a great success, but also triggered many negative reactions. It was called " heretical, blasphemous and offensive for the faith of the Italian people".^[7] The film won an award at the Valladolid Film Festival, which encouraged Cavani to write and direct more features. ^{[citation needed]}

Her next film, Galileo (1968), focuses on the seventeenth-century conflict between science and religion. ^[8] Galileo Galilei's belief that the truth should be proved by experimental methods, makes him clash with the dogmas of the church and he falls into the hands of the Inquisition. The film, originally made for television, was banned by the Italian censor, that considered it anticlerical and was never aired, but it found a distributor and was released on theaters. ^{[citation needed]}

I Cannibali (The Cannibals) (1969) , Cavani's first film to rely on an independent production company uses the myth of Antigone to present the contemporary political state of Italy.^[9]. Inspired by Sophocles' Antigone, the film, set in the industrial city of Milan, recounts the struggle of a girl against the authorities that prevents burying the bodies of rebels killed by the police, to serve as a warning to its citizens. The brave girl, the only rebel in a city crushed by dictatorship, is aided only by a young man who speaks an unknown language. The example of this two youngsters is soon followed by others. This work was not very well received by the public, so Cavani returned to television with the series of documentaries I bambini e noi (1970).

Cavani's subsequent film L'Ospite (The Guest)(1971), furthered her interest in social and psychological themes. The plot centers on the relationship between a writer and a woman, a former mental asylum patient struggling to fit in back in society. The film, starring Lucia Bose, was made on a shoestring budget. It was shown at the Venice film festival out of competition.

The director undertook a venture into Oriental mystical experiences with Milarepa (1973). A story inspired in a classic text of Tibetan literature, Milarepa moves back and for in time between the story of the title character, a mystic of the eleventh century and a young westerner whose travails are not very different, both are torn between the search for knowledge and quest for power. The film was praised by Pier Paolo Pasolini who called it a "truly beautiful film"^[10].

Liliana Cavani was not well known beyond Itlay until she made Il portiere di notte The Night Porter (1974), a film that was a great success arising big controversy in art house film's circles. It remains the film for which Cavani is best remembered.

The plot, set in Vienna in 1954, follows a former concentration camp victim, raped and tortured by an SS camp guard, who fifteen years later revives the pattern of abuse after encountering the man by chance in a hotel, where he is working under an assumed name as a night porter. A deeply controversial film that attempted to examine sadomasochism, Nazism and Holocaust guilt, it starred Charlotte Rampling,then-unknown, and British actor Dirk Bogarde.

The film received a lot of attention and divided cultures. American critic Roger Ebert called it "despicable," and both major New York critics, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, dismissed it as "junk". However, in Europe, the film was uniformly hailed as a groundbreaking attempt to probe the unsettling sexual and psychological ambiguities generated by war and the exploitation of power following by it.

• Francesco d'Assisi (1966)
• Galileo (1968)
• I Cannibali (1969)
• L’ospite (1971)
• Milarepa (1973)
• Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974)
• Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil) (1977)
• La pelle (1981)
• Oltre la porta (1982)
• Interno Berlinese (The Berlin Affair) (1985)
• Francesco (1989)
• Dove siete? Io sono qui (1993)
• Ripley's Game (2002)
• De Gasperi, l'uomo della speranza (2005)
• Einstein (2008)
• Un corpo in vendita (2012)

• Marrone, Gaetana. The Gaze and the Labyrinth: the Cinema of Liliana Cavani. Princenton Paperbacks, 2000. ISBN 0-691-00873-6

• Filmografia di Liliana Cavani
• Liliana Cavani at IMDb 

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