The following is a transcription of Vittorio Cottafavi, grandson of the filmmaker Vittorio Cottafavi, introducing the U.S. theatrical premiere of Il taglio del bosco for ‘Narrow Margin Magazine Presents: Luc Moullet and Vittorio Cottafavi’ at Anthology Film Archives, August 12, 2025. The archival images found within this article were provided to us from the personal collection of Vittorio Cottafavi.
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What a pleasure to be here. I said this earlier tonight, and it couldn’t be more true: there is no place in the world I would rather be. My grandfather was incredibly important to me and a huge part of my childhood. And at the same time, I was too young to really appreciate his movies while he was still with us. So, the ability to still connect with him in this way and get to know him by watching his movies later, and get a little more insight into the parts of him that I wasn’t mature enough to ask about or engage with, is such a gift. So first things first, huge thank you to the Narrow Margin team for putting this together. It is a distinct pleasure, and I’m so proud — and my father, who is still with us, is as well — that my grandfather is still relevant, is still appreciated, is still affecting people in the world. If I’m still affecting people in the world thirty years after I pass I’ll obviously be incredibly proud. Thank you to the Narrow Margin team and the Anthology team for the work that you do to restore, to commemorate, to remind people of artists like my grandfather who are not brand names, but who made incredible art, and, with some scrubbing up like with the second movie we’ll see tonight, shine even brighter than they did originally. I think the first movie, Il taglio del bosco, is going to look a lot like it did when it premiered on RAI in the early 60s. I’ve gotten a preview that it’s a little grainy and probably as if you were sitting in your living room in Italy in ’63 when it came out and you’re watching it on your little tube TV. It probably looked kind of like this. Obviously one hundredth the size. Thank you, thank you, and thank you.
I got to know my grandfather really well. I was really lucky and unlucky in the sense that my parents split when I was young. My mom and I settled in Long Island and my dad went back to Italy. The upside was that every summer I would go for a month to six weeks to go stay with my dad. And my dad couldn’t take six weeks off from work, so I often went and spent the entire day for a week or two with my grandparents, and my grandfather was largely retired at that point. So, again, I grew up in Long Island. I’m in what they call a bedroom community, right? A lot of commuters. It’s largely Wall Street types and lawyers and so forth, not a lot of creatives. I go to Italy, I’m suddenly dropped off at my grandparents’ apartment and there’s my grandfather. He comes out as he did pretty much every day that I ever saw him — resplendent. He would come out, he was so beautifully dressed, always perfectly dressed for whatever the weather was, whatever the events were for the day. Then he would proceed to engage with me in this way that was so present and open and imaginative. That’s one of the things that really has stuck with me about him and something that, to the extent I can, I try to emulate with my children and with children that I engage with. He was immediately at my level, in terms of imagination and engaging. He was in a way almost a caricature of the carefree artist. He never carried a wallet. I remember wandering in Rome with him, and he had a tab, you know, at the cafe and the restaurant and the other cafe and so forth. He found the minutiae of day-to-day life to be something he didn’t want to deal with. So my poor grandmother would have to go around twice a month and pay in each of the places, to sort of clean up after him in a sense. I was too young to fully appreciate this, but at the same time, the memory that is the most distinct in my mind about my time with him — I get emotional thinking about it — we were on one of these walks. He had a big basset hound called Fabiola. And Fabiola was very important in his life, in their life. We were seated in a park on a bench, and there was a bench probably thirty feet away from us and on that bench was a young couple, and the woman was crying, really crying, wailing almost. It was one of the few times where my grandfather wasn’t super present with me. He was distracted, and he was so drawn to this woman and what was happening. It seemed like a breakup but it wasn’t clear. Had she gotten horrible family news? But we weren’t staring. I was so young, he wasn’t saying all of this, but I have this idea of what it could be in his mind, sort of spinning. He cut the walk short and we went back to his apartment; and he was lost in thought for an hour or two afterwards. It was really the only time where I felt him drawn to something else, and away from me. With hindsight, I saw this really stark contrast with his big, almost larger-than-life persona. He was incredibly gregarious and funny and cultured and his gestures were almost performative. And yet, his work and what he was drawn to creatively, as you’ll see in both movies tonight, was really about pain and loss and suffering. It was this kind of yin and yang relationship, yin and yang in him, that is so stark and with hindsight, remarkable to me. That the persona that he had as he navigated the world was so different from his creative output.
In 1963 he was doing the RAI movies, but he also had some theatrical releases. They were what was called peplum, sword-and-sandal epics, like ‘Hercules does this’ and ‘Goliath does this other thing’. They were really commercially successful and they wanted him to do another one. So he did another one and they wanted him to do another one and they wanted him to do another. But he found it — and I’m sort of regurgitating what my dad has told me here — soul crushing. It was fun the first time, it was kind of fun the second time, but by the third time it was killing him. Instead, what he was doing for RAI with one twentieth the budget was where he wanted to be creatively. That along with the beauty of the tree felling scenes makes this movie [Il taglio del bosco] my dad’s favorite. It’s this pivotal moment in his career where he’s [almost] finished with the peplums, sort of exhaling creatively and finally finding his creative bliss, which was reading. He read voraciously. He was reading books and saying ‘I want to do a movie on this one’. He would find two or three people to help do the adaptation for the screen and then within a few months make a movie. That’s what happened with Il taglio del bosco. It was a book from the late fifties. Cassola is the author’s name and it’s a beautiful novella. It’s less than 100 pages, about wood cutters in the Tuscan hills, and I hope you enjoy my grandfather's interpretation.
Vittorio Cottafavi at Anthology Film Archives, August 12th 2025.