L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2016 www.italoamericano.org L'Italo-Americano 9 T he bow before the Last Emperor, a child shining with gold in the darkness, that casts his shadow towards the audience. The black and white that shapes the figures of James Woods and Robert De Niro on the Brooklyn Bridge in Once Upon a time in America. Dancing with the Wolves that paints the cheeks with colors of the Sioux. Sean Connery's seductive look as he points 007's gun in Never Say Never. The faces of power of Conan the destroyer and Rambo III. John Wayne in The Battle of Iwo Jima. A Fistful of Dollars in Clint Eastwood's hands in the west wind. The hug that seems like a mirage in the sand cloud of Tea in the Desert. A look at Renato Casaro's posters and in an instant, hun- dreds of films that have marked the history of cinema all come to mind. In order to conceptualize the sketch, a synthesis of the film idea, only a week was necessary for him. One month to put in on paper and produce masterpieces that have created a collective imagination in celluloid for each of us. When Photoshop did not exist and the film posters were works of art painted by hand by talented artists, his was "the art of painting cinema". Directors like Sergio Leone, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Zeffirelli, Michael Cimino, and Milos Forman chose him. Like many others, they entrusted the task of imprinting in the minds of the viewers a feeling and charm of their work, using only a single image. And he made a cult. At 19 years-old, he was the youngest cinema-painter in Italy and today he holds the record for artistic longevity: no one has worked as much as he has among the painters of cinema. In his archives, there are over a thousand illustrations for the global film industry. Today, Renato Casaro is 81 years old but transmits the same passion he had at 17 when he started his artistic career design- ing posters in exchange for movie tickets. It is no coinci- dence that to L'Italo-Americano he says with the enthusiasm of a boy to be ready to start over again, expecting "a new highlev- el challenge" from a modern day Fellini. How does a film billboard come to be? How do you come up with one idea to transform two hours of film into an iconic image that summarizes an entire film? This is a bit of a secret. It becomes easier to understand with experience and with time, you learn. In this profession, the important thing is to capture the whole film in the few inches of an image. It is essential you find the summary of the story, the main point, to be able not only to share it through an image, but to also intrigue the audience and capture their attention. In a society like ours where we are bombarded by images which pass by so fast and that we are quick to forget, how does one find images that stay in our memory and will remain there? This is certainly something very difficult to do today. In the past it was much easier. With modern technology, digital devices, television, and movie trailers, it is hard to stop this race for time. Everything is moving too fast and there is no time to stop and look around. If we go onto Wikipedia and type in your name, you are said to be one of the "most impor- tant, influential and innovative masters of design for Italian film posters". What is, in your opinion, your innovative capacity? At one point, it consisted of adapting to the times. Today, this has somewhat been taken over by technology. Before, it was important to communicate through still images- the street was our gallery; our museum was along the road. In you works, you use tradi- tional techniques: tempera and airbrushing. An "ancient" way of painting which today has been superseded by computer graphics and which, however, has cut off the artistic skills that were qualities cultivated overtime. Exactly. Today, creativity has flattened. If you lack creativity, you can not communicate and you must communicate with cre- ativity and essentiality of things, but above all, with beauty which today, is bypassed by photogra- phy. Young people today are specialized in digital photogra- phy and are abandoning the art that made it great. What would you say to them? Would you tell them to go back? No, no turning back but I would say that you could com- bine the two. I would not avail myself to technology alone, but I would urge them to make better use of their creativity to produce important things. Also in this aspect America is one step ahead of Italy and Europe as a whole. With computer graphics, you also loose manual skill, tactility of the work, and the physical and emotional contact with paper and with design. Yes, and so it is evident that we must know the film product, you must first be a big fan of cinema. If you work for a com- pany where today you produce the launch of a laundry detergent and tomorrow creating images for a movie, you cannot live the spirit. You cannot do both BARBARA MINAFRA things; to work well for the movies, you must only make movies. You represent the contem- porary history of the Made In Italy illustration, especially in relation to the movies. In New York they named you among the "big 5"- the best in the industry. Do you see this as an accomplishment and a recogni- tion to your long career or is there still the chance to evolve? I have always tried to do as much as I could for as long as I could, always giving it my best. Today I think I stopped, given my age, but also because I believe that it is right to stop at the peak of one's career. Nonetheless, I can still do some- thing more today. If I were pro- posed a challenge, I would accept it, even with modern tech- nology of computer graphics. I am waiting for the occasion. Who are you expecting it from? Well, I don't know... I am awaiting an important task. More of an American director or an Italian one? Is it a long- cherished dream? No, but if Fellini were here today, I would use Fellini as a symbol of this challenge, as the protagonist of the request. It would be an incentive to do it. Fellini, whom I miss in the industry, would be the perfect example. You are from Treviso and Veneto is historically a land of immigration. Have you ever felt as though you were an immigrant? Absolutely not because I have always been in demand. I have never immigrated but I brought my professionalism and my experience abroad and I have always been fine because I always wanted to try new experi- ences. L'Italo-Americano talks of a community made up of immi- grants and it is through their descendants that they have an affectionate bond with their territory of origin. Dino De Laurentis, a great Italian who moved to Los Angeles to produce the film, called me precisely because he wanted to keep Italian profes- sionalism together, promoting Italian excellence made up of cameramen and Italian writers, as a way to keep Italy close to heart. It was precisely in Los Angeles and with John Huston's The Bible (1966), that you reached your first major milestone with your billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. In that occasion, did you feel as though you had made it? Made it, no but important, yes. The Bible produced by De Laurentiis was my first, yes. Being on Sunset with 20 square meters of posters brought from Italy, I would say is something very emotional. One feels more important than accomplished. Illustrator of film imagery, Renato Casaro whose work has been featured on thousands of posters advertising films around the world for over 40 years Renato Casaro: Capturing Films On Paper LIFE PEOPLE MOVIES MUSIC BOOKS

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