The Country Doctor, Lorenza Mazzetti’s first film, thought lost for over 60 years, was discovered in 2019 and is remastered from the only known surviving element. It was rediscovered in the Amos Vogel Archive at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during research for Brighid Lowe’s documentary Together with Lorenza Mazzetti. Based on a short story by Franz Kafka, The Country Doctor is a melancholically surreal film that follows an unexpected, urgent visit to a sickly patient whose wounds occur more on the inside than the outside and cannot be cured. A circular, ghostly melody instils a sense of a loneliness with both patient and doctor locked in their own personal, existential prisons.
DIRECTOR: Lorenza Mazzetti
NATION: United States
YEAR: 1953
RUNTIME: 10′
K, based on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, fragmented and collage-like, is stunningly avant-garde, evoking the experimental language of early cinema and German Expressionism. An impressionistic, angular portrait of a city as experienced by an outsider, London appears strange, unfamiliar and unforgiving. The camera searches hungrily for different glimpses of the city, from the highest rooftops to the streets.
DIRECTOR: Lorenza Mazzetti
NATION: Regno Unito
YEAR: 1953
RUNTIME: 28’
Made with the support of the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund and set against the backdrop of the still bomb-damaged East End of London, Together follows the existence of two deaf-mute dock workers, played by Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews. Menaced by the children who play in the ruins, alienated from their fellow city-dwellers, and unable to communicate with their landlord’s family, they are a co-dependent duo, living a repetitive routine: work, market, pub, home…, until one day, when one of them ventures out alone for the first time and sees at a funfair a mysterious dancer played by Vali Myers. Her presence changes the relationship between the two men, and the bond between them is terminally severed at the film’s end.
DIRECTOR: Lorenza Mazzetti
NATION: Regno Unito
YEAR: 1956
RUNTIME: 48′
CAST: Eduardo Paolozzi, Michael Andrews, Vali Myers, Denis Richardson, Cecilia Ma
Original version with subtitles