Sixty years a celebrity auteur: Franco Zeffirelli

Abstract

The 89-year-old film-maker and designer Franco Zeffirelli is recognised for his spectacular mise en scène and professional mastery in the spheres of international cinema and opera, yet is critically despised by ‘serious’ film critics in Italy and abroad. This essay explores Zeffirelli's habitus (in Bourdieu's terms) within the field of Italian and international cinema and concludes that he differentiates himself from conventional accounts of auteur authority by his appeal to a middlebrow audience. The paper then investigates how Zeffirelli has maintained contact with this constituency over his long career. On the international front, these include the career choices he has made, the opportunities offered by new audiences thirsty for cultural capital and the technological development of new media products, such as his use of performance codes on DVD extras and reissues of his films and opera productions. On the local, rather than global, front, he maintains his Italian identity and appeal to a middlebrow constituency through a drip feed of controversial interventions in the same way as Katie Price. He is vocal in his support of Silvio Berlusconi, expresses other controversial opinions in the press and social media, and intervenes regularly in support of the Fiorentina football team. The paper concludes by identifying the precariousness of the processes by which Zeffirelli constructs himself as an auteur in old age, and the mechanisms by which his constituency remakes the authorial sign and recognises him as a celebrity auteur.

Keywords:

• aging
• celebrity auteur
• film
• opera
• Italian
• Franco Zeffirelli

Notes

1. There is one edited book on his films, but several on his design work. The most recent book in the latter category, retailing at $150 is a lavish volume, weighing 10 pounds and with 800 illustrations, described as ‘a definitive book on the life and work of this great master of spectacle’ (Anon, 2010). The word ‘master’ is significant, indicating as it does Zeffirelli's alignment at the top of the cultural hierarchies in which he has operated. The Los Angeles Times review makes a link between the lavish and spectacular form of the book, and ‘the Italian showman Franco Zeffirelli’ (Bradner, 2010).

2. Visconti had worked with Jean Renoir in France, and had directed Ossessione (1943), a film considered to be a precursor of neorealism.

3. Alan O'Leary's useful discussion of Italian political cinema's appeal to a constituency can be applied to that of the celebrity, in that it represents ‘the attempt to articulate the concerns of an audience perceived to share the cultural [ … ] points of reference of the writer or filmmakers’ (2011, p. 80).

4. Girl-on-girl catfights in The spy who loved flowers encouraged German distributors to market it as Die Höllenkatze des Kong Fu, again demonstrating the commercial imperative behind film production and reception.

5. Francesco Rosi's Carmen (1984) is an example of the audience appeal of opera films. In France it played, without protests, at an enhanced ticket price of 40 FF, as opposed to the usual first-run price of 33 FF (Anon, 1984. p. 5).

6. Directors Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti ‘were not very important movie-makers at all. Death in Venice is a terrible film’. Zeffirelli interviewed by Jasper Rees (2010).