Ferdinando scarfiotti biography of martin

Scarfiotti assisted Visconti for more than a decade, designing many of his operas and plays, including Der Rosenkavalier, Falstaff and Simon Boccanegra, plus such dramatic works as Goethe’s Faust, Natalia Ginsburg’s The Advertisement, and The Cherry Orchard, in venues as diverse as La Scala, the Royal Opera House in London, the Vienna Staatsoper, and in Dallas, Amsterdam and, of course, Spoleto.

Although he was a very successful stage designer, Scarfiotti was a movie fan, especially of the Hollywood masters. By his own count he had seen Gone with the Wind fifteen times by and he adored William Cameron Menzies’ use of Technicolor. “If you watch that movie carefully,“ he said, “you can learn from it every aspect of movie-making.” Working for Visconti served as Scarfiotti’s school, and it led finally to a feature film, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, ), which brought him to the attention of other directors.

Scarfiotti was also a close friend of Bernardo Bertolucci. They grew up together and their birthdays were just ten days apart. Their first film together, Il Conformista (The Conformist, ), assured Scarfiotti’s reputation, and solidified his unique relationship with Bertolucci, and with cameraman Vittorio Storaro. The film reawakened popular taste to the joys of Hollywood Art Deco. Their next film, Last Tango in Paris (), was largely shot in a cramped block of flats in Montparnasse.

Scarfiotti designed Avanti () for Billy Wilder and Daisy Miller () for Peter Bogdanovich, both of them in Rome, and then came to Hollywood where he made what was probably his greatest fashion statement. The film was American Gigolo () The image of the Armani-clad Richard Gere staring at a harsh blue-grey Los Angeles bedroom illuminated by the slatted sunlight pouring through venetian blinds was massively influential, and caused Brian de Palma to hire Scarfiotti for Scarface (). Its overblown drug-lord’s mansion, in which Al Pacino’s Tony Montana sinks into a mire of white powder, influenced the television series Miami Vice and Scarfiotti became known as a designer’s designer. Film historian Charles Tashiro wrote:

“Scarfiotti’s main gift, and probably his greatest influence, was his ability to create highly stylized visual environments that were never completely removed from what seemed at least theoretically possible in the everyday world. His legacy lies in finding that point of equilibrium wherein production design ceases being a passive background and becomes an integral part of a film’s meaning without overwhelming it with visual excess, even as it creates a hyper-real sensuality.”

His finest moment, for which he won the Academy Award®, was the opening sequence of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (). The wondrous red and gold spectacle both defined and embellished the glory of the Forbidden City. He received a second nomination in for Barry Levinson’s Toys, and his baroque and crazy sets were reviewed as the best part of the film.

Scarfiotti’s last work was the Warren Beatty-Annette Bening remake of the classic romance Love Affair, filmed as it would have been during Hollywood’s golden years, on stage at Warner Bros., with exterior locations in New York City and Moorea in French Polynesia. His work has influenced an entire generation of directors and designers, and the way that the cinema-going audience now views the real world.

HALL OF FAME -

CREDITS: Production Designer
FAIR GAME ()
LOVE AFFAIR ()
ESTASI ()
TOYS ()
THE SHELTERING SKY ()
THE LAST EMPEROR ()
MY MAN ADAM ()
BRING ON THE NIGHT () documentary
BAROCCO ()
DAISY MILLER ()
THE CONFORMIST ()

CREDITS: Supervising Set Designer
LAST TANGO IN PARIS ()