The Principle
Mauro Marchetti is a cinematographer of remarkable tonal range, and the organizing principle of his work is not a singular visual signature but rather a disciplined responsiveness — the camera always in service of the emotional and dramatic register of the story at hand. What remains consistent across his filmography is an underlying belief that images must feel inhabited, that the world depicted onscreen should carry the residue of real life even when the material pushes toward the fantastical or the stylized. This is perhaps most clearly visible in Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore, 1994), directed by Michele Soavi, where Marchetti's lensing never allows the film's gothic surrealism to float entirely free of bodily, earthly weight — the cemetery grounds look genuinely damp, the dead look genuinely decayed, and yet the film retains a romantic luminosity that grounds its philosophical delirium in something felt rather than merely constructed.
His work on Boris: The Film (2011), the cinematic extension of the beloved Italian television satire, demonstrates another dimension entirely. Here Marchetti embraces a self-aware, deliberately degraded aesthetic — a film about the making of bad Italian television shot with a knowing sloppiness that is, paradoxically, rigorously controlled. The humor of Boris depends on cinematographic choices landing with precision, and Marchetti understood that parody requires total command of the conventions being mocked. This intelligence, the ability to use visual grammar reflexively and critically, sets him apart from cinematographers who simply execute a director's vision without internalizing its deeper conceptual stakes.
Across his career, including the social warmth of Boys on the Outside (Ragazzi fuori, 1990) with Marco Risi and the gentler romantic register of Amore a prima vista, Marchetti has demonstrated a sustained commitment to faces. The Italian tradition of neorealist portraiture — the close attention to the human countenance as a site of social and psychological truth — runs beneath his work even in its most genre-inflected moments. His compositions tend to trust actors to fill the frame, and his lighting consistently seeks to reveal rather than glamorize, to illuminate character rather than simply to beautify.
The deepest principle in Marchetti's work may be this: the image should always know what kind of story it is helping to tell. He does not impose a personal visual style onto material; he finds the visual logic that is native to each project. This is not a lack of identity — it is a sophisticated, mature form of cinematographic intelligence, one that produces work recognizable not by a repeated look but by a consistent quality of attention and craft.
Camera and Movement
Marchetti's camera tends toward the observational rather than the declarative. In his social realist work, such as Boys on the Outside and Mary Forever (1989), both made with Marco Risi and focused on young men navigating poverty, crime, and institutional failure in southern Italy, the camera maintains a respectful distance from its subjects — close enough for intimacy, far enough to allow lives to unfold without the sensation of being manipulated. Movement in these films is organic, motivated by character action rather than by cinematic rhetoric. Handheld work, when it appears, is not aggressive or stylized but functional, used to stay with a character through unstable physical space.
In Cemetery Man, the demands shift considerably, and Marchetti responds with a more theatrical camera vocabulary. Tracking shots gain a dreamlike glide; the camera sometimes holds in static, painterly compositions that allow Soavi's vision of a world half-in-half-out of death to breathe and accumulate meaning. Crane movements introduce a vertical dimension that grounds the film in its cemetery landscape, looking down at graves or rising to reveal the strange, walled-off world that protagonist Francesco Dellamorte inhabits. The widescreen frame is used to isolate characters within architecture, to make them feel like figures in a Flemish painting who have wandered into the wrong century.
Framing preferences across his work suggest a cinematographer drawn to the medium shot as his native register — close enough to read emotion, wide enough to situate a character in their environment. Extreme close-ups are deployed sparingly, which means they land with force when they appear. Marchetti is not a cinematographer who reaches for the lens rack or the crash zoom as punctuation; his images tend to earn their intensity through composition and light rather than through aggressive optical choices.
Light
Marchetti's lighting across his most significant work reflects the Italian cinematographic tradition of crafting warmth without sentimentality. In the Marco Risi social films — Boys on the Outside, Mary Forever — the southern Italian light is used honestly, not aestheticized into postcard beauty but acknowledged as the actual atmospheric condition of these stories. Interiors carry the slightly harsh, inadequate quality of real domestic and institutional spaces: fluorescent supplements natural window light, shadows fall where they would logically fall rather than where they might be most pictorially pleasing.
Cemetery Man demands and receives a completely different lighting logic. Here Marchetti constructs a nocturnal world in which moonlight, cemetery lamp fixtures, and the occasional guttering candle become the organizing sources. The lighting in this film is theatrical without being stagy — it acknowledges the film's roots in Italian horror and its debt to the giallo tradition while refusing to simply pastiche those earlier aesthetics. Flesh tones are allowed to go slightly cold in exterior night sequences, which plays against the warmth of interior scenes and creates a persistent visual tension between the living and the dead that operates below the level of conscious audience perception. The film's most celebrated visual passages — the mist-laden cemetery at night, the surreal cityscapes that intrude in the film's final act — reflect a lighting design that is fully integrated with the film's philosophical themes of death, desire, and repetition.
For Boris: The Film, Marchetti demonstrates command over a more deliberately unflattering register — the overlit, flat, slightly depressing look of cheap Italian television production becomes the film's visual environment, achieved with a precision that required him to work against his own instincts toward beauty and craft. This controlled ugliness is one of the film's funniest and most sophisticated achievements.
Color and Texture
Marchetti's color sensibility is warm but not saturated, leaning toward the amber and ochre registers of Mediterranean visual culture without tipping into the heightened palette of tourism imagery. His social realist work with Risi presents a version of southern Italy that is dusty, sun-bleached, and slightly worn — colors that suggest a world where things are used and have histories, where nothing is fresh out of the packaging. This textural quality extends to the treatment of skin, of architecture, of the fabric of the physical world that characters move through.
Cemetery Man introduces significantly more color design, reflecting both the creative ambition of Soavi's direction and the film's status as a genre piece that could sustain a more expressionist palette. Blues and greens inhabit the film's nocturnal sequences; the warm flesh tones of the film's several romantic and erotic passages work as a chromatic argument against the death that surrounds them. The film was shot on 35mm, and the grain structure of the original photography contributes to the textural richness that has helped it age so well — it has the material density of an object rather than the smoothness of a simulation.
The Boris: The Film color palette deliberately evokes the slightly washed-out, magenta-biased look of Italian broadcast television of the period, and here Marchetti's tonal control becomes a form of cultural criticism. Color in that film is used to make a joke, and it lands because the joke is precise.
Signature Techniques
- Warm-light isolation in social space: Marchetti frequently uses a single warm practical or tungsten source to carve a protagonist out of a socially degraded environment — a technique visible in the Risi films that quietly argues for individual dignity within systemic failure.
- The held observational medium shot: Rather than cutting away from moments of emotional difficulty, Marchetti tends to hold in medium shot and allow actors to work through the moment — a technique that builds trust with audiences and respects the performer's process.
- Theatrical night-exterior construction: In Cemetery Man, his approach to large-scale night exteriors combines hard moonlight sources with carefully controlled fog to create depth and atmosphere without sacrificing legibility.
- Deliberate aesthetic mimicry: In Boris: The Film, Marchetti reverse-engineers the visual grammar of low-budget Italian television production with enough precision that the film functions simultaneously as satire and as artifact.
- Contextual color warmth: Rather than applying a consistent color grade across a film, Marchetti modulates warmth according to dramatic context — warmer in moments of human connection, cooler in moments of isolation or threat.
- Architecture as character framing: Particularly in Cemetery Man, Marchetti uses architectural elements — walls, gates, archways — to frame characters within compositions that suggest entrapment or circumscription, reinforcing the film's thematic concerns.
- Restrained handheld intimacy: When following characters through unstable social environments, Marchetti's handheld work is disciplined and close — it communicates urgency without the visual aggression of more stylized approaches, maintaining empathy while acknowledging instability.