Before Ennio Morricone, the chilling sounds of a whiplash, the beats on a tin can or a whistled tune were hardly ever considered worthy of being part of a film soundtrack, especially for a mainstream film. With those, he created tunes that would be identified in any corner of the world, as the soundtrack of Spaghetti westerns. Yet, these form just a small chunk in Morricone's story, which is exhaustively chronicled in Ennio: The Maestro, the documentary on his life which is being screened at the 14th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK).
The fact that the documentary was directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, who has collaborated with him in several films, including the classic Cinema Paradiso and knows his working style inside out, has gone a long way in adding to the depth of this documentation effort. It begins from his early days, following in the footsteps of his father as a trumpeter, playing in clubs and parallelly getting the best of grounding in Western Classical Music from the masters in Italy.
This grounding in "serious" music would lead to a certain inferiority complex for the first few decades of working in films. His peers from that circle as well as the man who taught him initially looked down on his compositions for films. The man himself was faced with many dilemmas as to whether the music that he is making is worthy enough. All those doubts would end in the later decades, with even his detractors expressing openly the fact that they were wrong in not identifying the genius of his movie scores earlier.
