Country: UK
Year: 1956
Duration: 50'


"Together is not social comment on the problems of bad housing and amenities in the East End of London. On the contrary it is about the complexities, subtleties, beauty and harshness of the East End world. In a style closer to Italian neorealism than British documentary Lorenza Mazzetti presents positively and simply the streets, the homes, the workplaces, the entertainment of the East End, through the story of the lives of two deafmutes.
The camera follows the two men, played by painter Michael Andrews and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, as they walk the streets alter work, chased by mocking children, playing on bombsites still not cleared, at their workplace, as dockers unloading cargo from barges on the river At their lodgings, they share a tiny room and take their meals with the landlady and her family; these shots, especially in their room and at teatime, show their intimate and sensitive friendship of caring and support. There is no dialogue, the soundtrack being the music specially composed by Daniel Paris for the film, and the street noises, snatches of conversation silenced as the camera becomes the point-ofview of the two men. The tragic ending of the film a teasing child tips the hat of one of the men as he sits alone on a bridge, he falls and drowns, unable to shout and his friend unable lo hear is perhaps undercut rather than emphasised by the barge slowly moving upstream under the same bridge as the film ends.
In subject and approach, Together is very much a film of Free Cinema, but its style is surprisingly different. Using longer takes and long shots rather than closeups and fast editing. The film relies very little on montage, producing its visual effect instead by careful framing and composition within shots, together with high and low angle shots and reverse shots, less for narrative meaning than to emphasise detail and the important of the ordinary." (Catalogue British Film Institute Productions 19511976, London, BFI, 1977, p. 31)

Biography

film director

Lorenza Mazzetti

Lorenza Mazzetti moved to London right after WWII and studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts. Between 1952 and 1953, she stole some school equipment and film and secretly made her first short, K, which introduced her to London’s movie world. In a certain sense, the movie anticipated the Free Cinema manifesto, which Mazzetti herself signed in 1956 with Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz. Thanks to the support of Denis Forman, the director of the British Film Institute, and with the help of people such as Anderson himself, she shot the medium-length Together (1956), with which she participated at the first Free Cinema screenings and at the Cannes Film Festival, where she received a Mention au film de recherche. After returning to Italy, she next dedicated herself to writing and published the autobiographical novel The Sky Falls, with which she won the 1962 Viareggio Prize, and which was followed by Rage (1963) and Uccidi il padre e la madre (1969). At the same time, she also dedicated herself to journalism, collaborating with the journal “Vie Nuove;” to theater, founding and directing the Puppet Theatre in Rome; and to painting. In 2014, she published Diario londinese.

FILMOGRAFIA

K (cm, 1954), Together (mm, 1956).

Cast

& Credits

Director: Lorenza Mazzetti.
Plot: Denis Horne.
Director of photography: Hamid Hadari.
Fotografia addizionale: Geoffrey Simpson, Walter Lassally, John Fletcher.
John Fletcher.
Surpervisione al montaggio: Lindsay Anderson.
Music: Daniel Paris.
Cast: Michael Andrews, Eduardo Paolozzi, Valy, Denis Richardson, Cecilia May.
Production company: British Film Institute, Harlequin Films.
Menu