C.Z. Soprani

Biography

Italian Argentinian culture journalist and film producer Camilo Zaccaria "C.Z." Soprani was a leading movie maker in the city of Rosario, 300 kilometers northwest of the capital Buenos Aires, where the movie industry proper was situated. He not only wrote about, produced, directed and filmed movies, he also published a number of handbooks on moviemaking, covering everything from acting and writing to cinematography. Soprani produced and directed, not always under his own name, four films in the twenties and thirties, three of which were silent. These were Mujer tu eres la belleza ("Woman, You are Beauty", 1928), La leyenda del mojón ("The Legend of the Cairn", 1929), Juan de la Cruz Cuello (1931) and El hombre bestia ("The Beast Man", 1934). Today all but El hombre bestia (and perhaps Mujer tu es belleza) are considered lost, or only fragments remain. The first, Mujer tu eres la belleza, has, until very recently, been preserved only through a number of fragments including shots of nude women. But unlike its contemporary sexploitation movie Afrodita (1928), it doesn't seem to have been met with censorship and outrage from the Catholic press, which indicates a more modest movie than the surviving (perhaps omitted) fragments imply. According to an article on Pagina 12, a researcher has finally uncovered (in 2018) what is suspected to be a complete copy of Mujer tu es la belleza. Soprani's final film, El hombre bestia, is Argentina's first science fiction horror movie. Like most of Soprani's films, it did not receive a commercial release in Buenos Aires, the hub of Argentina's film business. Instead Soprani and the producer of the movie would organise their own screenings in other cities, and made a fair profit on the incredibly small production budgets used for shooting. Soprani would direct, film and edit himself, and most of his cast and crew were happy amateurs. Soprani was almost completely forgotten for decades, since none of his films were known to exist, until an old commercial copy of El hombre bestia turned up in the beginning of the 2000's. The son of the lead actor/producer had kept one of the old commercial copies that Soprani and his father had used to organise screenings with, and had it transferred to a VHS copy so he could show it to friends and family. The film collector who made the transfer ended up ruining the old nitrate print in the process, so now the version of the film in existence is a VHS copy. However, this crude piece of film history, along with a 2003 documentary about it, helped re-ignite the interest in Soprani, who is now considered a pioneering independent filmmaker in Argentina and something of a minor legend of his home town of Rosario.