Bongiorno Roma! Melting Pot Cinema Part VI - Italy's Cinema
For Italian filmmakers, the years between 1950 and 1960 would prove a most inventive and exciting juncture, in that they would be privy to a sustained and astonishing dominance of European film culture by a community of directors and writers that would leave the world in thoroughly unadulterated awe. Fellini, Rossellini, DeSica, Antonioni, Visconti and the criminally neglected Pietro Germi, obliterated the complacent image of Italian cinema which had flourished under the rule of Mussolini.
Their mastery of this medium was practically immediate and their talent acknowledged both provincially and abroad and their productivity prolific.
By 1952, films such as Renato Castellani's Sotto il Sole di Roma (Under The Roman Sun, 1948) and Due Sulde di Speranza (Two Pennyworth of Hope, 1952) Luciano Emmer's Domenica d'Agosto (Sunday in August, 1950) had led to a new phrase coined that described a branching-out from the schools of neo-realism to neorealismo rosa, or realism through the rose tinged spectacles.
A little Pietro Germination
Pietro Germi's canon, irrespective of their ostensible backgrounds, were invariably preoccupied with questions of personal honor and allegiance to codes of behavior. Although the director had never visited Sicily before the making of In Nome della Legge ( In The Name of Love, 1949), he often would return to the island, with its brooding ambiance of fearful independence, it's tribal paranoias and its perverse moralities. Marcello Mastroianni's restlessly comic wife-murderer in Divorzio all' Italiano (Divorce - Italian Style , 1961) is a victim of the same society as Saro Urzi's heart sleeve wearing carabiniere of in The Name of The Law and the fallen heroine of Sedotta r Abandomata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964) a Sicilian girl (Stefania Sandrelli) whose life is virtually ruined as a result of the rigid code of honor which prevails on the mafioso-ruled island.
The famed Cinecitta studios
The largest studios of Cinecitta, had resumed production in 1947 with a rota of five films. In the decade beginning in 1950, Italian film production rose to an average of 140 films per year. Box office admissions peaked at 819 million in 1955 alone and compared to the 662 million in 1950 that was saying something indeed. Italy would boast this consistent market until the year 1978, when sales would falter to the likes of a mere 300 million.
From the Christian epic Quo Vadis? (1951)
The key factor as per, was moolah. The American studios had millions of dollars suspended in Italy via post-war exchange controls. They were unable to take any such liquidated earnings back home without offering some form of retribution to the Italians. They had a choice of using the blocked funds on the spot, as MGM would do with Quo Vadis? or they could enter into various co-production deals. United Artists would sign with Rizzoli to produced DEAR Films. MGM charted the Titanus waters and would produce such spectacles as the Mario Lanza picture Arriverderci Roma (Seven Hills of Rome, 1957) and Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis (who would partner until 1957) joined the Paramount camp for epics such as Kirk Douglas Ulysses. In 1951, Italy's government and the American industry concurred that the studios take their share of their blocked money home - provided the other half would remain in Italy as temporary or long-term finance for Italian movies.
The cost of production in Italy however, was cheap. Hollywood studios were still reeling from the effective unionization of the Screen Actors' Guild, whereas in Rome, there were no limits as to how many hours an actor could be expected to work, also, an actress for a speaking part could even be paid as little as five dollar a day, without any such eye being batted. The studios had tacticians and craftsmen from the grander pre-war period, and filming on location was frugal and in fact cheaper than anywhere in Europe. American actors were eager to work in Rome, since their agents informed them that working 18 months outside of the country would ransom them from the obligations of paying US income tax.
Hollywood goes Tiber
From the early 1950s, Rome would become Hollywood-on-Tiber. The main quotient was the 'epic' film - lengthy movies that were comprised of an equal mixture of apparent culture and flesh. Italian film-makers, with American participation either before or following production, would churn sagas focusing on Aphrodite, Barabbas, Barbarossa, Byzantium, Constantine the Great, Coriolanus, Herod, Hannibal, ' My Son Nero,' and Sappho of Lesbos.
These guys were in need of a serious peplum talk.
Although there would be more public and critical attention paid to the epics and mythological peplum films, the cape-and-sword dramas were not exactly devoid of interest. They would however lack the budgets an the lightness of touch of their Hollywood brethren, but often their lurid mixture of juvenile plot development and blatant sadism would echo a revisited theme in Italian popular culture. Two films that were directed by Mario Soldati and starring Mai Britt, a would-be Greta Garbo who never quite reached her seemingly unattainable heights, are pure examples : Jolanda la Figlio del Corsaro Nero ( Yolanda, Daughter of the Black Pirate) and it's simultaneously shot follow-up I Tre Corsari ( The Three Pirates,1953). Bloody revenge, flogging, transvestism and bondage embellish the threadbare plots of these swashbuckling epics. Later, the spaghetti Westerns and progressively prurient comic books or furmetti, of the late Sixties and Seventies would sufficiently illustrate developments of these aforementioned themes.
Don't turn around uh-oh - the Camillo's in town, uh-oh
Italy's film series would often be degenerated in quality and each successive film reworked the material of the former. Occasionally a subsequent or sequel release in a series could be congruous to the original production. Both Julien Deviviers' Il Piccolo Mondo di Don Camillo ( The Little World of Don Camillo, 1952) and his Il Rittorno di Don Carmillo (The Return of Don Camillo, 1953) were exceedingly funny and had an allegiance to Giovanni Guareschi's tales of sacrilege and unholy discord between a wily priest ( Gino Cervi) of a small village in the Po valley. Later Don Camillo films would become veritable caricatures , formulaic and would not have the same such gravitas and would pale to their infinitely funnier predecessors.
The comely Lollobrigida represents...
The Bread, Love and... series which also had worldwide distribution began with two efforts directed by Luigi Comencini, Pane Amore e Fantasia ( Bread, Love and Dreams, 1954) these both would feature Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida at their most appealing. It would be however the third in the series , Dino Risi's Pane Amore e...( Sandal in Sorrento, 1955) with the stunning Sophia Loren, and this would achieve the greatest success of all the releases.
It wasn't easy being green for Toto
The Toto films were the most enduring of the series, low budget comedies which were almost never exported but were turned out by the dozen between the years 1948 to 1964. Toto (Antonio de Curtis Gagliardi Ducas Communo di Bizanzio) was a clown of the classic tradition, even though he would be born in a ducal house in Naples in 1898. He would overcome the objections of his aristocratic parents and would grace the stage before the ripe age of twenty and by the time the 1920s would roll around, was already an established comedian of the cafe-concert. By the 1930s, he would front his own revue company and would remain a noted major star until his demise in 1967. A lilliputian fella, he moved in verisimilitude to that of a marionette with comical inflections of a trotting penguin. His face would however, with its vast eyes and permanently raised eyebrows, never yield to his look of hurt pride, regardless of the circumstance.
Roma Citta Aperta
The main international selling point of Italian movies was indeed sex. A lip-smacking litany of publicity enhanced Italian actresses. Even Roma Citta Aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) was promoted on a degree of sexual content. The publicity fueled itself and serious papers and publications at the time, debated whether or not the innocent orgy scene of Fellini's La Dolce Vita ( The Sweet Life, 1959), could pass customs. Less serious journals spoke of Gina Lollobrigida's ' justly famous anatomical assets' and Vogue anointed her as ' creamy as a mauve bonbon' Parisian slang for a brassiere was buried - despite Carlo Ponti's best efforts - in her early reputation as Europe's Number One Cover Girl.' This arrant sexism was vital in promoting Italian movies during an era when American studios in particular were hellbent on more lubricious material to distribute, and reluctant to incur the moral opprobrium of producing it.
Film production companies in Italy rarely did specialize in particular genres and individual producers were far more adventurous than their British and American counterparts. Carlo Ponti and Dini De Laurentis formed Ponti- De Laurentis Productions in 1950 and in the seven years they were together would work on projects as eclectic as Toto films, Rosselini's Europa '51 ( The Greatest Love, 1951), Jolanda la Figlia de; Corsaro Nero, Le Notti di Cabria ( Nights of Cabiria) Germi's Il Ferroviere ( Man of Iron, 1956) an epic Hollywood co-production in the vein of King Vidor's 1956 wower War and Peace.
Carlo Ponti's earlier collaborations had included neo-realist films by Germi. Alberto Lattuada and Luigi Zampa, and after the disbanding of Ponti-De Laurentiis would soldier on and to great success to produce a broad variety of films, that would often star his wife, Sophia Loren. De Laurentiis was the more ambitious of the pair. After a number of underwhelming low-budget features, he had achieved colossal success with Bitter Rice and worked inexhaustibly to increase his international liaisons
Producers, both old and new had their own response to the call of the booming Fifties. Angelo Rizzoli had started in films in 1934, but went virtually AWOL for years and when in 1950, he produced Rosellini's Francesco, Guillare di Dio ( Flowers of St Francis) For the rest of the decade, he was extremely active and often he would set up French co-productions including Rene Clairs' Les Belles de Nuit ( Beauties of the Night, 1952) and Les Grandes Manoeuvres ( Summer Manoevres, 1955) as well as the first two Don Camillo films and in coalition to this, Fellini's La Dolce Vita.
Franco Cristaldi was all of 30 when he produced his first three films in 1954. His early films were romantic dramas that did relatively well at the box office. Following bigger success with Steno's Mio Figlio Nerome ( Nero's Weekend, 1956) starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio De Sica, he showed himself willing to take risk and would agree to produce Visconti's White Nights. He backed Francesco Rosi's first two features as director . La Sfida ( The Challenge , 1958) and I Mahliari ( The Swindlers , 1959)and was later to finance the same director's politically aware examination of the myth of the Sicilian bandit, Salvatore Giuiliano (1961). He also produced some of the most raucous Italian comedies to date with Persons Unknown and Divorce - Italian Style.
The Fifties were years of sheer enthusiasm and manic energy, both genii and hacks alike would rub shoulders in a claustrophobic yet jostling film factory. An industry that was virtually wiped out in the year 1944 was now back and with a boom
The Main Directors
Born in 1920, in Rimini on the Adriatic coast, Frederico Fellini would begin to show signs of the autobiographical preoccupations which predominated several of his later films, namely in the case of I Vitelloni. The film is also interesting in the sense that it flirts with the concept of the cynical and despairing representations of male sexuality that was featured in his later work, and cultivated in Il Casanova di Frederico Fellini ( Casanova, 1976).
It would be the world over success of his fourth release La Strada, (1954's The Road), in which Fellini would stake his claim for serious critical embrace. The film would star Fellini's own wife, Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina, a meek maiden who is brought by Zampano ( Anthony Quinn) as his assistant in his traveling strong-man side-show. La Strada is essentially concerned with Gelsomina's uncomprehending and unwavering love for the detached, womanizing Zampano, her ultimate abandonment and tragic death, followed by his gradual acknowledgement of his loss and need for her love, when it is all too late. The film is crucial to Fellini's avowed sense of man needing to be seen as far more than a mere creature of lust and loin, and of woman as his potential redemption. In addition the role of Gelsomina, which would also crystallize Masina's image in future Fellini's films as one of vulnerability, an endearing spirit that hosted purity of heart and soul.
Il Bidone ( The Swindlers, 1955) and Le Notti di cabiria ( The Nights of Cabiria, 1957) would maintain public as well as critical embrace of its work. The basic tension that formulated in Il Bidone is between a world of basis drives and ugliness and its alternatives. The world of beauty and the spirit - again symbolized by women. Le Notti di Cabiria ( the film that would inspire Bob Fosse to create Sweet Charity) stars Giuletta Masina as a prostitute. Although she is mugged in two different situations by her respective lovers, her simplicity and innocence give her the moral countenance in which she troops on.
It was with La DolceVita that Fellini once again took the world by storm. The film is concerned with the descent of Marcello, a writer ( Marcello Mastrioianni) into a modern Roman world of debauchery, disillusionment and ennui.
Fellini's following two films would give testament to his reputation as a personal and auto-biographical film-maker. Otto e Mezzo ( 8 1/2 , 1963) deals with the artistic crisis of an auteur, Guido ( Marcelo Mastrioanni) who is also in the midst of marital ado with wife ( Anouk Aimee) and is having an affair with a younger woman.
Juliet of the Spirits immediately raised the assumption that it was based on his marriage with Masina, the character of Giulietta remains constant to Fellini's theme of women in otherwise healthy spiritual terms. Whereas Marcello in La Dolce Vita, succumbs totally to the alienation of modern, urban man, Giulietta, faced with a personal crisis centered around her home, soon realizes in existential fashion that life lacks meaning without personal or moral codes.
Fellini's Satyricon (1969) and Roma ( Fellini's Roma, 1972) show a change of emphasis and direction away from the autobiographical elements of his prior work. Depsite the optical spectacle, they are infinitely more cerebral in theme. Based on Petronius' text Fellini Satyricon is clearly the director's vision of Roman society before Christ. In the amoral and Dionysian world of the film, the sole drive that animates society is sexual gratification, its totem being the hermaphrodite. The range of odd characters that inhabit it, are embodiments of the sensual palate, and they are often at times quite beautiful in their devil-may-care, unabashed sense of self. Although Roma does include recounting of Fellini's young manhood during the Fascist period, the focus is primarily on the city and history and lineage of its people.
The satirical Amarcord (1973) dialect for I Remember, is a personal and although humorous, a provocative piece, that recreates a Rimini of the 1930s with a boy who can be interpreted as the young Fellini, as the main character.
Casanova brings to life, its inevitable conclusion, the preoccupation which had employed nearly all of Fellini's films- and transparently so in I Vitelloni, La Strada, and La Dolce Vita , and also indirectly in his other films - the sexuality of man. The film offers a maudlin and despondent view of it as Casanova ventures, and through the bodies of women ,but yet goes nowhere . The atmosphere and visual imagery is elaborate but stringently allied to the thematic of the sexual anxieties upon which male identity is formulated.
Fellini's truest strength is not simply his vivid visual imagination but his irrefutable cinematic mastery . Once can revel in his imagery - surreal, ironic comic as it may be, marvel at the eccentric characters with which he fills his films ( he interviews thousands of non-professionals just to achieve the right look, usually dubbing a professional voice to also get that right and ponders over his thematic preoccupations, Identify his specifically Italian love-hate relationships with the Church and it's congregates and analyze it's symbolic and metaphorical use of the sea, roads circuses and clowns. but overriding all of this is the simple fact that he has a control of the film-making process which has probably never been surpassed.
The major success of Michaelangelo Antonioni came in the 1960s with L'Avventura ( The Adventure, 1960) and its successors would include the British production of Blow Up (1966) His main canon of the fifties were La Signora Senza Carmelie ( Woman Without Camellias ) which depicts the rise and the fall of a film star from a modest background ; La Amiche ( The Girl Friends, 1955) from a story by Cesar Pavese, about the complicated relationships of a convocation of middle-aged women and their various paramours, and Il Grido ( The Cry, 1957) an uncharacteristic attempt to cope with the ennui of working class life that culminates in the the disconsolate hero's taking of his own life.
Visconti would respond with his inspired historical entry Senso ( The Wanton Countess, 1954) and with a Dostoevsky adaptation, White Nights, which pose the aesthetic query of the option between reality and fantasy from the narrative perspective of a man who attempts to enchant a woman away from her dreams of an absent lover. The woman's dreams come to reality and fruition when her lover returns, while the 'realistic' lover is now discounted. Visconti intensifies the film's preference for romanticism through the deliberately artificial sets. When the 1960s commenced, Visconti made a partial comeback to his earlier social concerns in the emotive Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli ( Rocco and His Brothers ,1960) chronicling the adventures, make that misadventures of a Sicilian family that journey to Milan on a pilgrimage to find work.
-screenshot.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment