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Scholars who study the work of Augusto Genina agree on the difficulty of labelling him an auteur with a recognisable coherent style. His career spans more than forty years: from the silent era to the Italian cinema of the mid1950s, while from 1929 to 1936 he worked in France and Germany where he experienced the changeover to sound. His sound phy is by opportunism. In Italy in the second half of the 1930s, he became one of the leading film directors of the Fascist era, twice winning the Venice Film Festival's Coppa Mussolini: in 1936 with Lo squadrone bianco / The White Squadron and in 1940 with L'assedio dell'Alcazar / The Siege of the Alcazar, both being war propaganda films, for which film criticism will never completely forgive him. After World War II, he flirted with neorealism, directing among others Cielo sulla palude / Heaven over the Marshes (1949) and L'edera / Devotion (1950, from the novel by Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda), as well as Tre storie proibite / Three Forbidden Stories (1953), a subject based on fact and already filmed the previous year by Giuseppe De Santis, about the collapse of a staircase that caused the deaths of several young women applying for a typing job.
Genina's silent period is marked by an extraordinary flexibility, combined with equal inventive adaptability. His directorial debut (1913) occurred during difficult years for Italian silent cinema because of the loss of foreign trade and the invasion of American films, as well as the approach of the First World War, the advent of Fascism, and the consequent "fascistisation" of national film...