
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
Directing
Biography
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (26 February 1921 – 15 December 2005) was an Italian playwright, screenwriter, director and author. He was born in Naples in an aristocratic family and moved to Rome immediately after the end of World War II and spent his professional life there. Patroni Griffi is considered one of the most prominent contributors to Italian theater and film in post-war Italy. Roberto Rossellini made a film from his play Anima nera. His first listed film writing credit was on the 1952 musical Canzoni di mezzo secolo. Patroni Griffi would later direct Charlotte Rampling, Elizabeth Taylor, Marcello Mastroianni, Laura Antonelli, Florinda Bolkan, Terence Stamp, Fabio Testi. Patroni Griffi was also involved with numerous television productions of lyric opera, including Verdi's La Traviata. His many theatrical productions include works by Pirandello, Eduardo De Filippo, Jean Cocteau and Tennessee Williams. As a writer, he published a first collection of stories in 1955, Ragazzo di Trastevere. Later, he contributed significantly to the body of Italian gay literature with Scende giù per Toledo and La morte della bellezza, both set in Naples.
Known For

A beautiful wife of good social standing falls into a flaming passion with a young man. Sooner than expected, she will be unable to terminate the liaison. It will follows that her husband is not wanted. And you can be sure she's not considering divorce as a solution.
Woman

A mentally disturbed woman arrives in Rome to find a city fragmented by autocratic law, leftist violence, and her own increasingly unhinged mission to find the most dangerous liaison of all.
Identikit

A woman becomes obsessed with a man she can't have, and carries the torch for more than 15 years.
The Trap

Lorenzo, who's 16 and born to a wealthy family in Parma, tries to make things right toward a showgirl, Aida, whom his older brother has mistreated. In extending kindness and standing up for her, he comes of age. But, is there anything he can do that will alter Aida's situation or her prospects?
Girl with a Suitcase

Five short stories loosely dealing with the roles of women in society. A superstar actress travels to a mountain resort, only to evoke jealousy from women and lust from men. A woman offers to take an injured man to the hospital. A widowed father and his son seek for a new wife/mother. A man seeks revenge for a woman's honor. A bored housewife tries to explain to her husband that he's not as romantic as he used to be.
The Witches

In the decadent Roaring Twenties, a beautiful woman engages in affairs with two men, playing them against each other.
The Divine Nymph

Adriana, a working-class girl living in Rome during the fascist period, has her difficult relationship with her mother, with men and with love.
The Roman

Annabella marries Soranzo. She happens to also be pregnant by Giovanni — who also happens to be her brother. Destiny, and jealousies threaten to expose her past, and Soranzo plots revenge.
'Tis Pity She's a Whore

A fairy tale of the misadventures of a beautiful but temperamental Neapolitan peasant, Isabella, when she meets the ill- tempered Spanish Prince Rodrigo Ferrante y Davalos. The King of Spain has ordered Rodrigo to choose a wife among seven Italian Princesses, but he is smitten by the lowly peasant.
More Than a Miracle

Mario is in Hannover to work as a miner but after losing his job he decides to go back to Italy. When Totonno steals his passport to avoid the police and later on he offers him a new job as "magliaro" (cloth seller), Mario changes his mind and decides to follow Totonno to Hamburg. In Hamburg, Totonno and his friends have to sell Mayer's cloth, but they meet with the hostility of a Polish gang and Mario falls in love with Paula Mayer.
The Swindlers

A liberal-thinking author watches his wife as she attempts to seduce his best friend at a dinner party. She ends up taking on another man as well, and the writer has an affair with the another dinner guest. Soon the three men and two women are entangled in a confusing series of partner-swapping sex sprees where everyone's morals are challenged in the wake of the sexual revolution.
Love Circle

No description available.
Cavalcade of Song
The film recounts the struggle of the factory workers of five Italian factories, Cagli, Coca Cola, Filodont, Luciani and Metalfer. A montage of interviews in which the workers denounce the hardships and difficulties of living without wages and put forward their proposals for getting out of the crisis and for change. The workers of the occupied factories decide to put up a tent in Piazza di Spagna to propagandise their struggle, but permission is denied by the Commissariat of Public Security. There are clashes with the police, who charge and use batons every time the workers try to set up the tent. Despite being injured and bruised, the workers do not give up until they get what they ask for: 'A tent in the square of Rome to remind the citizens - especially the wealthier classes - that there are workers in Rome without pay during the Christmas holidays'. In the end, the workers get what they ask for and the tent is finally raised amid applause and general satisfaction.
La tenda in piazza

A man with a past gets married and it seems that he will be able to start a new life, but an unexpected inheritance gets in the way and deteriorates the relationship with his wife.
Dark Soul

Two surreal/satirical comedy episodes.
I cuori infranti

Through a series of scenes inspired by famous songs, various episodes of Italian life in the last fifty years are recalled.
Half a Century of Song

This live version of Puccini s superbly dramatic opera was recorded in Rome in the exact locations and at the precise times of day as Puccini had written into his score. The action opens in Rome's beautiful 16th-century church of Sant Andrea della Valle, where Cavaradossi (Plácido Domingo) is innocently painting, moves to the Farnese Palace where Tosca (Catherine Malfitano) dramatically stabs the lustful Scarpia (Ruggero Raimondi), and finally to the battlements of the Castle Sant Angelo at dawn the following day where Cavaradossi is cruelly killed, and Tosca takes her own life.
Tosca

A well known actor comes to off-season Capri to unwind and meets a young man. The attraction is immediate and mutual but before their relationship can get off the ground, an alluring woman with a spontaneous sexuality and care free attitude joins the triangle and the boy is slowly pushed out of the picture.
The Sea

La traviata in Paris is a film-opera of Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata filmed live on television and worldwide, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, conceived and produced by Andrea Andermann in 2000. A Traviata that takes place live, with a television reporter who, amid the events of the day that took place in France on June 3, 2000, connects live to the scene of the action but at the time exactly a century earlier, in the Paris of June 3, 1900 (the setting of the opera is thus postdated from the original, which was conceived for the 1850s).
La traviata in Paris

No description available.