The Organizer (1963)

Interesting facts

• Awards: 2 · Nominations: 1. Including: Nastro d'Argento for Best Supporting Actor; Astor d'Oro for best film

The Organizer is a 1963 Italian-French-Yugoslavian-produced drama film written by Mario Monicelli and Age & Scarpelli, and directed by Mario Monicelli. Set in Turin at the end of the 19th century, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as a labor activist who becomes involved with a group of textile factory workers who go on strike.

Background

Italy’s first capital after the Risorgimento ended in the 1870s, Turin was in the midst of rapid industrialization during the period of The Organizer, although the film unfolds some years before the growth of the industry. Populating his densely inhabited film with actual workers, Monicelli was attempting, three years before The Battle of Algiers (1966), to create a sort of neorealist period piece; using a strategy that would subsequently be seen…

Inspired, according to its director, by the revolutionary ghosts of Paris’s no longer extant Bastille and set in the slums of late-nineteenth-century Turin, the film accepts what the influential Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci saw as “the challenge of modernity,” namely, “to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” To that end, The Organizer is variously (and, for some, disconcertingly) jaunty, sentimental, comic, and ba…

known for its period detail and Giuseppe Rotunno’s faux-daguerreotype cinematography, the film is not so much a call to action as to recollection—both a historical monument and a depiction of a specific moment. Throughout, Rotunno’s black-and-white cinematography makes use of flat lighting and gray skies to emphasize soot and smoke.

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