American director Stanley Kramer agreed; after viewing White Nights, he hired Rotunno to shoot his star-studded end-of-the-world epic On the Beach (1959). The following year, Rotunno reteamed with Visconti on the classic Rocco and His Brothers. In recognition of the cameraman's artistry on the film, Italy's journalists honored him with the Silver Ribbon, one of the country's most prestigious awards (Rotunno eventually earned a remarkable total of eight, in addition to the many other garlands he received in his homeland).
Rotunno recalls shooting the climactic nighttime street fight between Rocco and his brother, Simone: "I had to cover a big section of the street, but my light was almost 100 meters away from the subject. Sometimes I needed to double the light to reach one of the actors [who was deeper in the frame], and to have enough light for the exposure; of course, the light had to seem as if it was coming from the same point. That involved many difficulties, but we did it."
Visconti started a unique cinematography tradition on Rocco and His Brothers, which he observed on every subsequent film he made with Rotunno: each scene was shot using three cameras, not for coverage but for continuity. "Each camera captured its own piece of the story," Rotunno explains. "When the actors filmed a short segment and we changed the shot, re-lit, and started again, we sometimes lost the vibration of the performance. By shooting with more cameras, Visconti could film a big piece of the story all in the same moment. The scene would start before one camera, and then we'd move in another camera; the scene would continue to play until the actors left the second camera and we picked them up with the third camera. For the director it was much better, but it was terribly difficult for me, because there was no room for the lights. Practically everything was in the shot except the corner where we placed the cameras."
Visconti's desire to use three cameras in the cramped laundry location where Rocco worked was particularly challenging, but Rotunno had the opposite problem while shooting the lush palazzo of landowner Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster) in The Leopard (1963). The climactic hour-long banquet scene, in which the Prince faces his decreasing power and influence in 19th-century Sicily, is considered one of cinema history's great setpieces, and was shot under strenuous circumstances.
The sequence was filmed with three cameras in widescreen Super Technirama, within a real palazzo illuminated by thousands of candles. "To create the atmosphere, we studied all the painters of the 19th century and earlier," Rotunno notes. "Although it wasn't very realistic, Visconti felt that the quality, density and direction of the candlelight represented the richness of the place. Of course, because we were shooting in Technirama in 1962, the lens was not so fast, and we needed a great deal of light. The candles were basically props; my light was over the chandelier. I made a wooden crown on the chain between the chandelier and the ceiling, and I reproduced the candlelight exactly. I put some light in the foreground for close-ups, but with three cameras, it was almost impossible to light [anywhere but from above] — we had mirrors everywhere, and there was practically no corner of the set that was out of the shot. All of our lights were on dimmers, and we used as little light as possible, because it was really, really warm; it was summertime, and we had all of these people enclosed in various rooms with candles. As we moved from one camera to the next, I got many drops of wax on my neck, and so did Visconti. I had trained the whole crew for days to put out the candles when the scene stopped. There were a thousand candles, so everybody had his section, including me. I felt like a priest in a church!"
Rotunno's final feature with Visconti was The Stranger (1967), which immediately preceded the start of his most famous collaboration, with Federico Fellini. As with his previous associations with De Sica and Visconti, Rotunno knew Fellini for a long time before they ever worked together. In fact, Rotunno recalls first meeting with Fellini in 1959 to discuss shooting 81/2 — a job he didn't take because he was preparing to follow up his work on Mario Monicelli's The Great War with another project, The Organizer. By the time Rotunno realized that the project was postponed, Fellini was already shooting 81/2. (Rotunno eventually filmed The Organizer in 1963.)
Fellini later approached the cameraman to work on a film about a musician, The Mastorna Journey, but then became ill. "I stayed with Fellini for a year, doing all the things you do for a friend who is very sick," says Rotunno. "The film was postponed, but Fellini told me I couldn't leave him."
Fellini and Rotunno finally began their collaboration on the highly regarded Toby Dammit segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), an omnibus film based on tales by Edgar Allan Poe. Rotunno's brilliant reddish lighting lent an eerie, dreamlike quality to the film's opening sequence, in which the titular character, a dissolute thespian played by Terence Stamp, arrives in Rome at sunset; the lighting effect simulated the character's druggy point of view, with the "sunset" lingering long after the sun had actually set.
The filmmaking duo next teamed on the opulent Satyricon, based on the book by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, which only survives in fragments. Satyricon effectively captured this fragmentation, and went on to earn a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and an Oscar nomination for Fellini's direction. The largely stagebound film was shot over eight months, and Rotunno delighted in capturing Fellini's bizarre tableaus while exercising extreme control over his cinematography. "It was like an astronaut's dream," he muses. "Inside a rocketship, you feel still things, but everything is moving fast around you. Satyricon was really a subterranean dream — everything was shot like a memory, and it wasn't intended to be realistic."
The same can be said of Rotunno's brief stint on Fellini's next project, The Clowns, for which he filmed only the flashback memory sequences before joining Mike Nichols on Carnal Knowledge. He would continue his collaboration with Nichols many years later on both Regarding Henry (1991) and Wolf (1994).
Rotunno and Fellini reteamed on Roma, an impressionistic portrait of the Eternal City which netted a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film. Roma broke with the usual baroque look of Fellini's films; in terms of visual style, it was more like a throwback to Rotunno's documentary reportage. "It's a memory film, but it is really realistic in the memory," the cinematographer says. "I was born in Rome, and I knew the city well, so it was much easier to reproduce it in a realistic way. When we shot the traffic jam [on the autostrade], we put a big Chapman Crane on a camera car and drove around. The whole crew tried for several days to catch the ambience, but we never got it. The reality in this case worked against the memory, so we had to re-create it in the studio. Later, when we filmed the sequence in which the motorcycle drives around Rome like crazy, we were so noisy that somebody shot at us with a gun!"
[ continued on page 4 ] © 1999 ASC