Top cinema critic Gian Luigi Rondi dead (2)

(ANSA) - Rome, September 22 - Top Italian cinema critic Gian Luigi Rondi died at his home in Rome overnight, ANSA sources said on Thursday. The critic known for his omnipresent white silk scarf and conservative leanings was known, feared and respected in equal measure both in Italy and abroad.
    Born in December 1921 of a Carabinieri policeman father in the northern town of Tirano, Rondi grew up in Genoa and Rome and fell in love with film early on - much like younger brother Brunello, who grew up to become a screenwriter and to befriend director Federico Fellini.
    He had spells as director and president of the Venice Film Festival, was chief of the Rome Film Festival Foundation from 2008 to 2012 and served as president of the David di Donatello awards, Italy's equivalent of the Oscars.
    After earning a law degree at Rome's La Sapienza University in 1945, Rondi was exempted from military service due to a heart condition, joined the partisan Resistance in Nazi-occupied Rome, and saw his first articles in print on 'Voce Operaia' (Workers' Voice), a newspaper published by the Catholic Communist Movement. In 1946 he began writing a column in conservative daily Il Tempo - which he would continue for the next 50 years - and later expanded into radio, television, and abroad on French paper Le Figaro, among others.
    In the post-war period Rondi espoused conservative Catholic views, earning the nickname of "The Black Doge" from L'Espresso newsweekly and often clashing with Italy's leftist intellectuals.
    "You are not loved, Gianluigi," director Michelangelo Antonioni - miffed that Rondi nixed his "obscure cinema" in favor of the "explicit clarity" of director Pietro Germi - wrote him in 1965.
    "You may be feared, perhaps respected, but not loved".
    "You're so hypocritical that when hypocrisy will have killed you, you'll be in hell and believe yourself to be in heaven," director, poet and philosopher Pier Paolo Pasolini famously wrote Rondi after the critic slammed Ken Russell's The Devils in 1971.
    Rondi became known for his rigid moralism, something he regretted later in life.
    "I've been a moralist and not just moral, and for this I am sorry," confessed the perennially arch and elegant critic, who would have turned 95 in December. His favorite film was Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) and his favorite director was Fellini, for inventing an entirely new way of practicing the seventh art.