Portrait of Gina

Orson Welles shot this film as a pilot for a TV series about “places and people”. It was supposed to be “an interview show completely different from everything presented so far”. The meeting with Gina Lollobrigida is just an excuse for travelling through Italy, talking to colleagues like Rossano Brazzi and Vittorio De Sica about the ups and downs in their professional lives, discussing Italian customs with his wife Paola Mori and interviewing Lollobrigida’s pen friend Anna Gruber. Foreshadowing the style of his late masterpiece F For Fake, the film was rejected by American TV stations and never aired. The only surviving copy was discovered shortly after Welles’ death in the mid 1980s.
Stefan Drössler

It was about the Roman movie world. She [Gina Lollobrigida] was the leading subject, but a lot of other people were in it—De Sica and so on. The film was made as a pilot for ABC of a proposed series, a sort of magazine—a serious one, not variety. And they hated it and that was the end of that. They said it was technically incompetent and couldn’t be shown. Had a lot of new ideas in it—done with Steinberg’s drawings, many still photos, conversations, little stories—and they regarded that as technical incompetence. I spent a lot of time photographing movie posters. That bothered them, too. It was made for that screen [TV], in the newspaper tradition.

A film on Italian cinema, on Lollobrigida. A documentary in a very particular style, with drawings by Steinberg, a lot of still photographs, conversations, little stories. In fact, it’s not all a documentary. It’s an essay, a personal essay. It’s in the tradition of a diary, my reflection on a given subject, Lollobrigida, and not what she is in reality.

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