![]() In the course of his long career, Barillari counts 70 broken cameras, 11 broken bones and 160 trips to the ER.Ī little disconcertingly, none of the amusing images is captioned, and the young divas flit by so rapidly it takes a quick eye to identify them. Often his victims fought back against the invasion of their privacy. He laid ambush outside restaurants at 3 a.m., waiting for the scoop of an illicit couple emerging arm in arm. Barillari was an expert at provoking dramatic reactions from his subjects. Big Hollywood productions like Ben-Hur and The Bible were bringing stars to Rome in droves. Photos capture Nureyev and Bobby Kennedy walking down the street together, John Wayne and Gregory Peck, Jayne Mansfield and Ava Gardner, Alfred Hitchcock and the Beatles. He describes his arrival in Rome as a penniless teenager from a southern town, and how he discovered an aptitude for snapping pictures of tourists at the Trevi Fountain. Most of the later events are of a violent nature - the assassination of politician Aldo Moro at the hands of the Red Brigade, youths dead from overdoses in old cars and on dead-end streets, Ali Agca’s attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, the Mafia bombs that killed magistrates Falcone and Borsellino.īarillari, still today a spry figure with a pencil mustache, is a humorous and old-fashioned raconteur. After a bow at the Rome Film Festival, this fast-moving doc and its astonishing hero should titillate period aficionados.Ĭo-directed by Giancarlo Scarchilli (known for his fine doc on actor Vittorio Gassman, Vittorio Recounts Gassman) and Massimo Spano, who co-wrote and produced, this is one of the most memorable revisitations of Rome in the ’60s since Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The unexpected coda to the photographer’s career, when he switched from stalking visiting celebrities (who had dwindled to a mere trickle) to tackling darker material, will particularly resonate with Italian viewers. He is justly celebrated in The King of Paparazzi - The True Story, a heady collection of footage from Istituto Luce and his own 500,000-photo archive, which goes beyond the Dolce Vita period to chronicle the rise of drugs, Mafia and the Red Brigades in Italy. If today we can instantly picture Liz Taylor and Richard Burton strolling down the Via Veneto or Peter O’Toole swinging a punch at a pesky photographer, it’s thanks to the lasting fascination of the pictures snapped by Rino Barillari and his paparazzi cohorts. Federico Fellini claims onscreen that he invented the word “paparazzo” in the 1960 film La Dolce Vita, his bittersweet portrait of hedonism during Italy’s postwar boom. ![]()
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