Biography[edit]

Sometimes credited as Peppino Rotunno, he was director of photography on eight films by Federico Fellini. He collaborated with several celebrated Italian directors including; Vittorio De Sica on Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, and Luchino Visconti on Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963), and The Stranger (1967). Rotunno also served as the director of photography for Julia and Julia (1987), the first feature shot using high definition television taping technique and then transferred to 35 mm film.^[2]


He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for All That Jazz and won seven Silver Ribbon Awards.


Rotunno was the first non-American member admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers^[3] in 1966.


Rotunno died on 7 February 2021,^[4][5] at the age of 97.^[6]


Mark Lager, on Senses of Cinema, praised Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography as "especially attuned to colour, composition, and perspective", particularly in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard and Federico Fellini's Amarcord, writing "Rotunno’s cinematography in Amarcord is nostalgic as it presents the carnivalesque citizens and their daily lives during the four seasons in Fellini’s reimagined seaside village of Rimini. His cinematography in The Leopard is elegant and panoramic as it surveys the rituals of the Sicilian nobility, centred upon Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina."^[7]