Rent Lorenza Mazzetti: Collection (2023)

Kafka in the East End - Lorenza Mazzetti: Collection review by CH

One should not only be thankful that Max Brod ignored Kafka’s instruction to destroy his work but also that, in turn, three decades on, Lorenza Mazzetti took no notice when that executor forbade her to make a student film of his stories while studying at the Slade in the early Fifties.

Her arrival there was heroic. In Italy she and a twin sister had survived a German slaughter which saw off her family. Come her arrival in London and working in a café, she was determined to study art, making bold to arrive at the College and demand to see its director. Little did she realise that she was speaking with the man himself, artist William Coldstream. He was so taken by this approach, along with her assertion “I am a genius”, that he readily admitted her.

Among her discoveries was the Film Society which not only showed films but had the equipment for making them. And so it was that she set about adapting a Kafka story The Country Doctor. These eleven minutes were to prove controversial, for the authorities discovered that she had used the cameras without permission. Ever benign, however, Coldstream organised a showing of it where the audience would decide whether or not she should be punished for what was shown on the screen. Certainly an unusual take on practical criticism. She won support for what she had done; the upshot of which was that she took on another Kafka work, the story in which a man turns into an insect - a rôle taken by lithe fellow artist salesman Michael Andrews - while resident in a dark and narrow boarding house. Much of the running time is silent, the film naturally does not claim to have any conventional narrative - and she was not to set aside such an approach when it led to her becoming part of the Free Cinema movement and as associate of Lindsay Anderson

Together (1956) is also part of a British Film Institute disc of her work made in England. Again Michael Andrews has a part, in tandem with the burlier artist Eduardo Paolozzi (who encouraged the artist and early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe). They are a pair of deaf mutes who, during the film’s fifty, often silent minutes, stroll around a bombed-out East End, with packs of children following them now and then. (Whatever happened to packs of children?) As with much of the Free Cinema work, there is a documentary nature to all this but it is more than a matter of old buses and cars, vanished shops, riverside work and dredging, labourers in suits. Theirs is a quest which leads in and out of pubs, even finding Andrews seduced in a claustrophobic room. As it happens, the disc also contains a fascinating interview with Lorenza Mazzetti shortly before her death in 2020: she cheerfully recalls that she herself slept with Andrews. So terrible an early life, which she never mentioned at the Slade, led her to relish everything that the decades could subsequently provide.

To watch these films is to become imbued oneself with that spirit - startling though Andrews’s fate is in the film. Exile is also the theme of an extra on the disc, Robert Vas’s 1959 Refuge England, about a man who, escaping Hungary, has been given the address of lodgings in London.

Trouble is he has only the street number and name - Love Lane - and there turn out to be several of these. He traverses them as day turns to night, a different eye upon a beguiling and challenging metropolis. (Both this and Together are also available as part of the Free Cinema box which includes work by Anderson, Schlesinger and others.) The Lorenz Mazzetti disc is limited to a thousand copies, and comes with other commentaries and a forty-page booklet which will lead anybody to her own book London Diary about those years as well as the short recollection The Sky is Falling which, after abandonong it with the opening page, she was encouraged to pick up that piece of paper and keep going, which she did quickly.