Roberto Mancinelli, Italian Movie Poster Artist for "Paisà" and "Action in Arabia"

Some painters are remembered for a single fortunate encounter, and Mancinelli's carries real weight: his signature sits in the corner of the first-edition poster for Paisà, one of the founding films of modern cinema. That alone would justify this page; the rest of his surviving work reveals a complete craftsman of the Forties.

One Name, Four Signatures

Public sources hold nothing at all on Mancinelli's life: no dates, no training, not a line of biography. What remains are the signatures, "R. Mancinelli" in neat block capitals, and the collection catalogues that credit the works to his name. His documented activity runs through the Forties and reaches at least the middle of the following decade, which makes him a contemporary of Sergio Gargiulo, another artist in this series, and like him a man of the generation in between, raised in the shadow of founders such as Anselmo Ballester and working through the trade's hardest years.

Selling Neorealism

The case of Paisà deserves a chapter of its own, because it raises a question we have forgotten how to ask: how did you sell, in 1946, a film with no stars, shot in the streets with actors pulled from the crowd, built in episodes and against every rule of showmanship? Mancinelli's answer was the answer of his trade: give audiences back the codes they knew, the idealised faces, the mosaic of scenes, the register of painted melodrama. The poster promises emotion where the film promised truth, and it is precisely in that gap that its value as a document lies: it captures the moment when the new cinema still had to dress in the old cinema's clothes to get through the theatre door.

The Exotic Post-War

The rest of the page belongs to liberated Italy's great hunger for elsewhere. With the American studios back in the market came Oriental espionage and tropical adventure, and Mancinelli served them with exactly the right palette, orange sunsets, burning skies, cavalry charges and beasts lying in wait, in crowded compositions that had to promise the whole world at a glance. And when Italian cinema returned to costume and comedy, his hand was still there, in the actor's portrait of the early Fifties.

I Married Adventure (documentary, 1940)

The poster for I Married Adventure (documentary, 1940). Elephants, crocodiles and a leopard bearing down on two documentary makers armed with a camera and a rifle: the tropical adventure drawn from Osa Johnson's celebrated book, which reached Italian screens in a post-war edition as A sud dell'equatore.

Action in Arabia (Léonide Moguy, 1944)

The poster for Action in Arabia (Léonide Moguy, 1944). George Sanders and a cavalry charge under an orange sky, with a veiled woman presiding over the scene from above: RKO's exotic espionage, released in Italy when the American studios returned after the war.

Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)

The poster for Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946). The soldier with the white cross on his helmet watches over the film's episodes, from the reeds of the Po delta to the lovers' embrace: the masterpiece of neorealism translated into the language of painted melodrama and distributed, as the margin records, by Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

Cardinal Lambertini (Giorgio Pastina, 1954)

The "locandina" (the small Italian format) for Cardinal Lambertini (Giorgio Pastina, 1954). Gino Cervi's portrait in cardinal's red above a bayonet charge and the face of Nadia Gray: the Bologna-set historical comedy in the small vertical format.

Whatever the register, every image remained a creation of its specific Author, and the community of artists that Maurizio Baroni has called Pittori di Cinema owes its very continuity to craftsmen without biographies like him. Mancinelli left no trace of himself, but the Paisà poster alone is a precious legacy.

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