Italian Cinema

Arthouse to Exploitation

Barry Forshaw

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781842434208
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

From the unbridled sensuality of the orgy scenes in silent Italian cinema, through a topless Sophia Loren in a 1950s historical epic and the image of Silvana Mangano, her skirt provocatively tucked into her underwear, in the neo-realist classic Bitter Rice, to the erotic obsessions of Fellini and the more cerebral but still passion-centred movies of Antonioni, eroticism is ever-present in Italian cinema. And then there are the popular movies: the acres of tanned flesh (both male and female) on offer in the many sword and sandal epics of the peplum era through to the inextricable mix of sexuality and violence in the gialli of such directors as Mario Bava and Dario Argento, in which death and sex meet in a blood-drenched, orgasmic coda. Of course, there's far more to Italian cinema: it is one of the most glorious and energetic celebrations of the medium that any nation has ever offered. For many years, this astonishing legacy was largely unseen, but the DVD revolution is making virtually everything available, from Steve Reeves' muscle epics to long-unseen Italian art house movies. The one characteristic that most of the great (and not so great) Italian movies have in common is the sheer individualism of the directors. And this applies to the populist moviemakers as much as to the giants of serious cinema. While Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni have rightly assumed their places in the pantheon, so have such talented popular auteurs as Sergio Leone, who was doing something with the Western that no American director would dare do, so radical was the rethink. All the glory of Italian cinema is celebrated here in comprehensive essays, along with every key film in an easy-to-use reference format.

Italian Cinema: The Films

1900 (Novecento, 1976), directed
by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci’s attraction to the epic is matched by his fondness for epochal events. Recently this has seen a diverting, if slight, expression in The Dreamers, but here key events in Italian history are perceived through the eyes of Alfredo (Robert De Niro) and Olmo (Gérard Depardieu), both born in January 1901, following their lives until the Liberation in 1945. The two men come from vastly different social backgrounds (the peasantry and the aristocracy) and Alfredo, whose father is the lord of the manor, is the one least able to deal with the social differences between him and his friend. His father is played by Burt Lancaster, giving the kind of performance he had honed for Visconti. Music is used in a foregrounded fashion here (the score is by Ennio Morricone) and specifically the music of Verdi is utilised emblematically. While the wildly multinational casting generally works well, it is a shame that Donald Sutherland, as a petty Fascist, is encouraged to turn in a one-note performance, almost as if Bertolucci does not trust his audience’s intelligence in responding to the character. Nevertheless, the achievement of the film is considerable, with the visuals often truly breathtaking.

Africa Addio (1965), directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti

The Mondo Cane school of documentary-making was at one time phenomenally successful across the world, but later degenerated into such (largely faked) atrocity catalogues that were the hallmark of the Faces of Death films. This one is directed by Jacopetti, father of the genre, and thus deserves consideration, although it’s clear that he was by this point running out of steam, even though the copious scenes of animal slaughter, live executions and grisly tribal rituals provided as much material as ever. As always, the attempt at a balanced, scholarly tone is somewhat undercut by the relish of the filmmakers for the material (although audiences still clearly shared this relish).

Allegro Non Troppo (1976), directed by Bruno Bozzetto

When the Disney organisation belatedly made a sequel to its phenomenally successful Fantasia, they had in fact already been beaten to the punch. Disney’s bold attempt to marry state-of-the-art cartoon imagery with several sequences of much-loved classical music was a signature film in introducing music to generation after generation. But before Disney’s sequel, Bozzetto had made this imaginative and stimulating entry, utilising music by Debussy, Ravel, Sibelius, Dvorak and Stravinsky. For all the virtues of Bozzetto’s film, there are several severe miscalculations, such as the ill-advised live action scenes, which are desperately unamusing. Similarly, the sequences animated to the music of Sibelius et al are inconsistent, but there is enough imagination on view to ensure that the marriage is a happy one. And when the visual imagination on the screen falters, there’s always that glorious music…

Amici per la Pelle (Friends for Life, 1955), directed by Franco Rossi

Several directors have made a virtue of achieving truthful, unsentimental portrayals from child actors, notably Philip Leacock in the UK and Steven Spielberg in the USA. If the latter at times seems to be tempted by sentimentality he should perhaps look at Rossi’s remarkable film, which has two of the best performances by children in any movie. A schoolboy finds himself staying with the family of a friend, and becomes aware that life can be very different from that of his own unhappy home (his mother is dead). The two young friends have a disagreement, and the boy joins his father on a business trip to the Middle East, with unhappy results for both friends. The director’s observation of the rites and rules of childhood is handled with rigour and a clear-eyed view of the way human beings (of whatever age) behave towards each other.

The Arabian Nights (Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notti, 1974), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s erotic trilogy (this film and 1971’s The Decameron, along with the following year’s The Canterbury Tales) created something of a censorship stir in its day, with the earthiness of the sexual depictions (including the odd erection). Today, of course, they would hardly raise an eyebrow and time has, generally, been kind to them, even though Pasolini’s use of non-actors achieved (as always in such cases) mixed results. The ten tales from A 1,001 Nights were handled with real brio by the director, whose celebration of heterosexual love is not at all compromised by his own gay leanings. While the non-professional actors often find the demands of their roles beyond their limited abilities, an undoubted earthiness is conveyed by the use of such a cast, and the settings (including Iran and Yemen) are stark and beautiful. Looked at today, the trilogy has much to offer, alongside its occasional clumsiness and longueurs. Shot in the exotic settings of Ethiopia, Yemen, Nepal and Iran, The Arabian Nights celebrates guiltless, heterosexual love within a universe of magical signs and evil jinns who are all subject to the vagaries of destiny. Ennio Morricone contributes beautiful, sparse musical motifs.

L’Assassino (The Assassin, 1961), directed by Elio Petri

Petri and Marcello Mastroianni enjoyed a successful collaboration, and the director’s debut film shows a talent that already has much to offer. An antique dealer finds himself accused of murder, even though he is innocent. Mastroianni’s performance is subtle and allusive, conveying the conflicted personality of his protagonist with the actor’s customary skill. Petri is particularly good at building up the variety of vague threats to the equilibrium of his beleaguered hero.

The Bandits at Orgosolo (I Banditi a Orgosolo, 1961), directed by Vittorio De Seta

This 1961 film was an important later off-shoot of the Neorealist movement, with its cast of Sardinian peasants ably handled by De Seta, whose previous experience had been in documentary films. When a young shepherd finds himself accused of a crime he did not commit, he escapes, taking his sheep with him. The death of the sheep alters his destiny, however, rather in the fashion that a similar catastrophe changes the life of Gabriel Oak in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. The film enjoyed a wide audience outside Italy.

The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri, 1965), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

Over the years, the reputation of Pontecorvo’s powerful and gritty documentary-style film has grown, helped not a little by the fame of Ennio Morricone’s groundbreaking score. The radical approach of the film was to show the Algerian movement for independence from the point of view of the participants, shooting in the actual locales where the events took place. No newsreel footage is utilised in the film, but its documentary air is persuasive indeed. For many years the film was banned in France, but it is not simplistic in the conclusions it draws about the conflict. Pontecorvo’s film won the best film award at the Venice Film Festival in 1966.

Before the Revolution (Prima della Rivoluzione, 1964), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

This is one of the films with which Bertolucci initially made his mark as a director, and, in the light of recent works such as Little Buddha, it now seems very much part of a golden age for the director. Francesco Barilli plays a young man from a middle-class background living in Parma. While his lifestyle is the epitome of bourgeois steadiness, he is drawn to radical politics. Similarly, he is obliged to choose between a conventional marriage and a more sensuous affair with a young relative played by Adriana Asti. Bertolucci’s achievement here is highly impressive, with the various choices for his protagonist laid out intelligently. If there is a fault, it is the self-conscious, referential use of ideas from Marx and Freud.

The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury, 1971), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s 1971 attempt at filming a classic English author (who was himself influenced, of course, by The Decameron, which Pasolini had already filmed in the same year) is a mixed success, and in some ways a very strange film indeed. Plunging with gusto into some of the blackest and bawdiest of the tales, Pasolini celebrates almost every conceivable form of sexual act with a rich, earthy humour and weaves a visual magic which draws on the work of artists such as Bruegel and Bosch. Pasolini himself takes the part of Chaucer. One might have thought that the presence of English actors such as Hugh Griffith and Tom Baker in the film might have the effect of anglicising it, but as they are cast alongside Laura Betti and Pasolini regular Franco Citti, the final effect suggests some strange alternate universe which has little to do with Chaucer (or even Italy, for that matter). As always in Pasolini’s erratic trilogy, comic invention is always to be found, along with enthusiastic sexuality. If some of the performances seem strained, that is perhaps understandable; less acceptable are the rather dull stretches that interleave what one might expect to be a constantly eye-opening experience.

Il Caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972), directed by Francesco Rosi and Tonino Guerra

The collaboration between Francesco Rosi and the actor Gian Maria Volonté is not as celebrated as, say, that of Max Von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman or Mastroianni and Fellini, but the results are often very impressive indeed. One of Rosi’s most acclaimed films is this study of the life and death (in a plane crash) of the socialist oil tycoon Enrico Mattei. Utilising the naturalistic style of his early work, in some ways this is a Citizen Cane-like study of the corrupting influence of power, with Volonté fully up to the demands of his enigmatic role. The film won the best film award at Cannes in 1972.

Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si é Fermato a Eboli, 1979), directed by Francesco Rosi

With a striking score by Piero Piccioni and a remarkable performance by Gian Maria Volonté as the writer Carlo Levi, Rosi’s film is an outstanding achievement and a bold stab at Levi’s famous book. When the protagonist is forced to flee to an almost medieval southern village when his anti-fascist views become unacceptable in Turin, he is required to make adjustments to his new surroundings. The mountain village and its inhabitants force him to consider afresh his attitude to his fellow countrymen. The incidental pleasures throughout the film are many, although it is Volonté’s central performance that holds the eye. If the pace is a mite leisurely, patience is rewarded by Rosi’s insights.

Cinema Paradiso (1988), directed by Giuseppe Tornatore

This story of a small boy whose father has been killed in the Second World War and finds a surrogate father in the local projectionist is one of the most popular and celebrated Italian films to achieve worldwide recognition in many years. For all its virtues, however, it remains a notably meretricious and manipulative piece of work: mawkish, artificial and lacking in any real truth (apart from incidental details). Its massive success is, of course, due to its ‘cute’ child protagonist. For all the trappings of realism for which the film received acclaim, the use of the youthful Salvatore Cascio is not a million miles away from the heart-tugging appeal of Shirley Temple in her now unwatchable Hollywood films. The ever reliable Philippe Noiret (dubbed here) occasionally manages to triumph over his material.

City of Women (La Città delle Donne, 1980), directed by Federico Fellini

What were Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini thinking while they were making this film? The businessman who leaves a train to find himself in a society of women has many elements of the director and star’s earlier work together, notably 8?. The fact that all the things that make the earlier work great appear here as inept clichés surely must have occurred to them both, but did not provide the fresh injection of inspiration so sorely needed. There are good things here certainly (how can any film with this director and star be devoid of interest?), but there is none of the arresting cinematic flair of their earlier work together.

Il Conformista (The Conformist, 1969), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

One of Bertolucci’s most impressive films, with galvanic performances from Jean-Louis Trintignant and Stefania Sandr...