This page, too, begins with a single certainty, a legible signature in the corner of five posters, and an almost total silence around the name attached to it. Public sources hand down no dates for Donelli, no training, not a single anecdote: what remains are the works, and they alone trace the outline of a decade of activity, running from the mid-Fifties to the early Sixties, poised between Neapolitan comedy, English horror cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague.

An Unusually Wide Range

If one thread ties the five works on this page together, it is how far apart they stand from one another. Within the same decade Donelli painted the working-class Naples of the De Filippo brothers, an Ealing Studios thriller, an Italian-Spanish seafaring drama, a Hollywood small-town comedy and, finally, one of the high points of European cinematic modernity, the film with which Jean-Luc Godard turned Anna Karina into an icon. Few Italian poster artists could move this naturally between such different worlds: the mark of a solid craftsman, able to adjust his line to the register of each film rather than force a single recognisable style onto every subject.

The Portrait as Narrative

What the five posters share is, if anything, a method: Donelli builds the image around a single face, or a pair of faces, brought right up to the front and loaded with the full emotional weight of the film, leaving the surrounding context, where there is any, to a small vignette or minor scene in the background. It is an art of psychological, rather than narrative, compression: the terror visible in an actress's eyes, another's distant stare, is enough to tell the film's story better than any action scene could. Even in the most sophisticated case on this page, the softly blurred, almost watercolour portrait for Godard's film, the choice is the same: a single face, isolated from its context, standing in for an entire new cinema.

Cortile (Antonio Petrucci, 1955)

The poster for Cortile (Antonio Petrucci, 1955). Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo among the hanging laundry and the voices of a Neapolitan back alley, with young George Poujouly perched on a ledge above: the ensemble comedy set around a working-class courtyard, rendered as a sequence of exchanged glances.

La mina (Giuseppe Bennati, 1958)

The poster for La mina (Giuseppe Bennati, 1958). Elsa Martinelli and Antonio Cifariello clinging to a floating mine in the open sea, their faces tense against a grey sky: the Italian-Spanish co-production distilled into a single image of fear, in widescreen format.

The Night My Number Came Up (Leslie Norman, 1955)

The poster for The Night My Number Came Up (Leslie Norman, 1955). Sheila Sim's face contorted with terror behind an aircraft propeller transformed into a clock: released in Italy as La scogliera della morte, the Ealing Studios thriller condensed into the nightmare of a premonition coming true.

My Life to Live (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)

The "locandina" (the small Italian format) for My Life to Live (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962). Anna Karina’s softly blurred face, almost rendered in watercolor, with a scene of Paris by night behind her: the film that earned Godard the Special Jury Prize at Venice, distilled into a single image in the small vertical format, forgoing any visual effects and relying solely on the power of the portrait.

Playgirl (Joseph Pevney, 1954)

The poster for Playgirl (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962). Anna Karina's blurred face, almost painted in watercolour, with a nocturnal Paris street behind her: released in Italy as Questa è la mia vita, the film that won Godard the Special Jury Prize in Venice, in a poster that gives up every effect for the sheer force of the portrait alone.

A Name Worth Verifying, a Body of Work Worth Keeping

It is often precisely the most versatile poster artists, the ones never tied to a single genre or a single distributor, who prove hardest to document: without a recognisable specialism, there is no monograph to keep their memory alive either. Donelli belongs to that category, and recovering his name, before the works scatter for good without an author attached, remains the task this series has set itself from the start. Like every other artist in this collection, he too made every image a creation of its specific Author, and it deserves to be traced back to that name rather than left anonymous. In the community of artists that Maurizio Baroni has called Pittori di Cinema, Donelli is today little more than a signature: the five works gathered here are a first step toward giving him back the space he is owed.

The works reproduced on this page come from the original prints of the period, recovered, photographed and digitally restored by Movie.it.