Restoring Il taglio del bosco, produced by Rai for Raffaele La Capria’s programme Racconti dell’Italia di oggi, not only allows us to fully appreciate the work itself and to showcase the skill and qualities of the technicians employed by Italy’s nascent public television service, but is also an opportunity to reflect on the convergence of very different paths and personalities that shaped the second half of the last century. The film is based on Carlo Cassola’s story of the same name, published in 1950 and written over the two preceding years: “conceived as a purely existential story – the story of wood-cutting”, as the author would later explain, but overshadowed by a grave loss that transforms the act of felling wood into the “simple backdrop for a specific feeling, the protagonist’s grief over the death of his wife. The existence of his companions – an existence made of nothing, of everyday gestures, of everyday talk – is for Guglielmo the mirror of his former condition, the mirror of his lost happiness.” The story of Guglielmo, a man with two children who lost his wife a few months earlier, played by Gian Maria Volonté in one of his first leading roles, carries strong autobiographical weight for Cassola, both as writer and partisan. For Cottafavi too, Il taglio del bosco was deeply connected to an aspect of his life not always given its due: his passion for the mountains. As his son Francesco recounts, Vittorio Cottafavi had been climbing mountains since he was young, scaling them and finding through that practice new perspectives to bring to his work as a director. The film was shot in Tirli, in the province of Grosseto, with local inhabitants and woodcutters. As Adriano Aprà wrote in “Filmcritica” in September 1963, “Cottafavi worked boldly in two directions: on the one hand, bringing Gian Maria Volonté down to the level of the non-professionals; on the other, eliminating in the latter their uncertainties and lack of technique, while preserving intact their presence and expressive truth.”

Fulvio Baglivi