Informal Film Music: Morricone, De Seta and Un uomo a metà (1966)

Ennio Morricone’s original soundtrack for Vittorio De Seta’s second full-length movie, Un uomo a metà (1966), was the first film score to which the Italian composer systematically and almost entirely applied compositional techniques and sound conceptions typical of the serial and post-serial music. The complex, nonconformist, researched cinematographic language there experimented by De Seta under various aspects (layered narrative planes, sophisticated b/w photography, geometric as well as expressive construction of the framing, unconventional use of the words, a personal editing syntax) gave allegedly to Morricone the motivation to experiment in Un uomo a metà – with director’s agreement – a very updated music, which then he aimed to test intensively in the movie dominion. Nonetheless, the labyrinthine content of this psychoanalytic, subjective drama could help them chose such a musical language, even if the structural reasons seem the most relevant: the unpredictable and layering qualities of informal music, its characteristic suspended time, its potentiality to develop long-term arches and relationships out of the traditional thematic thought. How much highly Morricone considered this score among his own, is proved both by his memories (ever positive and regretting the bad criticism which the movie had at its première at the Venice Biennale), and by his remediation as a ballet score (Requiem per un destino) only one year later. The genesis of the collaboration between De Seta and Morricone has been retraced, also by means of archival documents previously never investigated, and the film music analysed in its own features and interrelations with the other media characteristics of Un uomo a metà, through the fundamental audio-visual sources. The reception of the film and its musical soundtrack, actually not so negative as De Seta and Morricone recollected, has been also highlighted: a particular, final problematic focus is given to the judgment of Sergio Miceli, the most authoritative scholar about Morricone’s music, attempting to reconsider it.