She threw at least one party that would have made Bacchus envious, photographed Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe (both friends), co-produced the Oscar-winning “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” and distributed films by the directors Luchino Visconti, Luis Buñuel and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. If a person can personify a global film festival, Marina Cicogna was for decades the face of the Venice Film Festival.
Born in 1934, two years after her maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi (who was one of Benito Mussolini’s finance ministers), helped found the festival, Cicogna (pronounced chi-CONE-ya) helped transform it into a global event. She also championed Italian cinema as a producer and distributor, and she pushed the boundaries of what women could achieve in a male-dominated industry.
For those who knew Cicogna, who died in November at 89, she was not only a striking and glamorous figure but a generous and endlessly curious filmmaker. In addition to her grandfather’s enormous legacy — not to mention the family’s tremendous wealth — her mother, Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, owned Euro International Films, which laid the groundwork for Cicogna’s immersion into Italian cinema.
“When Marina appeared as a distributor and producer in the second part of the ’60s, she was a new and important presence,” said Gian Piero Brunetta, a historian of Italian cinema who wrote “The Venice International Film Festival, 1932-2022.” “Marina was in the perfect moment to interpret the change happening in Italian cinema. Movies at this time were able to open a dialogue with the intelligence of the audience and address present problems. Marina was a protagonist in all of this.”
That individualism was evident to those around her, from the world’s biggest stars to writers, directors and those who benefited from her commitment to the festival and the burgeoning Italian film industry after its post-World War II neorealism stage. (A festival spokeswoman confirmed that there were no official plans to honor Cicogna at this year’s festival, which runs Wednesday through Sept. 7.)
“Marina was one of those people who, when they enter a room, everyone goes silent,” Andrea Bettinetti, a documentary film director, said in a recent phone interview. “I never heard anything from her that wasn’t interesting, deep or fascinating. Nothing was banal.”
Bettinetti directed the 2021 documentary “Marina Cicogna: La Vita e Tutto il Resto” (“Life and Everything Else”), though Cicogna was initially skeptical about a movie about her life. It took Bettinetti several months of persuasion, he recalled. “Once she finally said yes, from that moment on she was absolutely open and available,” Bettinetti said. “She gave me so many names, so many tales and memories about her life. Marina was very sharp in her judgments. She was very deep.”
The movie, which is available in Italian and in a French-subtitled version, was a glimpse into a life that was tailor-made for storytelling, he said, probably because Cicogna herself was a filmmaker and dabbled in photography, including with some success in Hollywood (where she went at the invitation of the studio executive Jack Warner’s daughter, a classmate, after dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College after one year).
“Marina took a lot of photos as a child, and I think that allowed her to reach inside a person,” Bettinetti said. “She would always reveal something about the person she was talking about. She was like a director. She took you to a place where you can see someone better.”
Sara D’Ascenzo, who writes for Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily newspaper, helped Cicogna write the autobiography “Ancora Spero. Una Storia di Vita e di Cinema” (“I Still Hope: A Story of Life and Cinema”) in 2023, shortly before Cicogna died. She recalled Cicogna as the epitome of what Italian women achieved in the last century.
“The festival started in 1932 and she was born in 1934, so she was really born into the festival and spent every summer of her life there except two years when she was very sick,” D’Ascenzo said during a recent phone conversation. “Around age 25, the festival became her stage. But the difference between Marina and other party girls, despite her charm and style, was her love of film.”
What D’Ascenzo found so fascinating was Cicogna’s ascent as not only a festival coordinator but also a major international producer. She famously distributed films directed by Visconti and Pasolini, and perhaps most famously, she produced Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” (1967) about a bored housewife who becomes a prostitute. The movie helped make Catherine Deneuve a global star.
That same year, Cicogna had three of her films screened at the Venice Film Festival and was at the height of her power and popularity.
“When I met Marina, it was the ’60s and she was openly gay, a producer of Fellini and very aristocratic,” the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg recently said by phone from Sicily, where she was visiting. “You couldn’t find anyone more glamorous. She was the queen of the Italian cinema. She was very funny and slightly bitchy.”
Von Furstenberg recalled attending one of Cicogna’s famous parties when she was 20 with her future husband Egon von Furstenberg, who was then her boyfriend, during the 1967 festival.
“It is the most glamorous party I’ve ever been to,” she recalled. “Everyone was there: Aristotle and Christina Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim.”
It was that kind of crowd that Cicogna spent her life with, but not just as a party fixture like so many people born into wealth.
“She knew three languages and she knew how to dress,” D’Ascenzo said. “She was a modern female figure and had no fear of men. She represented women as very free, which has been very important for new generations.”
For others, her influence was as much about the city of Venice as it was the film festival. Though she had homes in Rome and elsewhere, Cicogna is most defined by Venice, which defines her legacy for many of those who knew her.
“She was one of the new international ladies of Venice, like Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda and Peggy Guggenheim, and she had the movie business in her blood,” Toto Bergamo Rossi, the director of Venice Heritage, a group committed to the preservation of the city and its buildings and artifacts, said in a recent phone call. “Venice is such a small village and it seemed like she was never in town or just here to say ‘hi.’ I always admired how she was completely herself.”
It was all part of a life fully lived, D’Ascenzo said, and that passion never went away, even as Cicogna lived with cancer in her final years.
“She always reminded us that if you read books, see films and travel, you are a bigger person,” she said. “And when she was sick at home near the end of her life, she would ask me what I thought about a particular new film. She was curious and interested until the last day of her life.”