The school show

Three Italian classics from the silent era

Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (Mario Caserini 1913). The last days of Pompeii,

caught with impressive flair and unexpected subtlety. It’s silent, of course, so remember to go ‘boom’ at the appropriate moment.

Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone 1914). The best of Italy’s silent epics was written by

nationalist poet and all-round show-off Gabriele D’Annunzio. Bartolemeo Pagano, a Genoese docker, found stardom playing Maciste, a muscular Roman slave, in the story of a damsel’s distress in the Second Punic War. Cabiria was a hit well beyond Italy; the American premiere was held in the White House.

Assunta Spina(Gustavo Serena 1915). The finest of the early Italian melodramas starred Francesca Bertini (who also helped out with the writing). She brought an impressive realism to the titular role, a Neapolitan washerwoman with a murderously jealous fiancé.

Letting the Americans in

The Futurist movement (see 3.1.5 for the details), with its taste for modernity and movement, was impressed with the new medium of film. However, whilst the collective published a manifesto on Futurist cinema in 1916 (they were big on manifestos), they didn’t make many films. Thais

(1917), directed by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, author of the aforementioned manifesto, probably got most attention. The Futurists’ contribution to cinema lay more in championing new technology. Unfortunately, Italy’s post First World War governments didn’t pay much attention: they didn’t regulate the flow of foreign films into Italy and the formerly vibrant Italian industry was swamped by cheap American movies, a situation made worse by Italy’s post-war economic discomfort.

“CINEMA IS THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPON.”

Cinecittà slogan, 1937

Film with the Fascists

The Italian film industry recovered somewhat in the 1930s. The arrival of ‘talkies’ helped (audiences had a new reason for choosing Italian over American) and so did the Fascist government: financing studios, encouraging directors and limiting the influx of foreign films. Like Hitler, Mussolini used newsreel for propaganda, but the regime’s cinema wasn’t as blatant as it was in Nazi Germany; in Italy, they used historical parallels to glorify the Fascist party. For instance, the Fascists paid accomplished director Carmine Gallone to make Scipione l’Africano (1937), set in Ancient Rome but commissioned to bolster public support for the shameful campaign in Abyssinia.

Figures like Alessandro Blasetti, whose 1860 (1934) anticipated Neorealist cinema with its commonplace hero, showed how directors could make very good films and still satisfy the regime (in this case with stirring stuff about the Risorgimento). Other films were inevitably more plodding, diluted by the restrictions on subject matter. Many fell into the telefoni bianchi genre: moralising, derivative (of American) movies made in the late 1930s and named for the white telephones found in the living rooms of their affluent characters. Il Signor Max (1937), a comedy about a newspaper salesman done good, was typical.

Europe’s biggest film set

Mussolini spent a considerable sum building Cinecittà, the sprawling film studios on Rome’s south-eastern fringe. Unveiled in 1937, it became the hub of the Italian film industry after the war (but not before briefly serving as a refugee camp). Cinecittà’s cheap post-war rates enticed American film-makers over in the 1950s: Charlton Heston went hell for leather sandals here in Ben Hur (1959) and Liz Taylor met Richard Burton for the first time on the set of Cleopatra (1961). Italian director Federico Fellini made all his films at Cinecittà. After some lean years in

the late 20th _{century, Cinecittà (now privatised), still the}

largest film studios in Europe, is back on the filmic map, attracting directors like Martin Scorsese, who shot Gangs of New York (2002) there.

“I’VE LOST ALL MY MONEY ON THESE FILMS… BUT I’M GLAD TO LOSE IT THIS WAY.”

Vittorio De Sica

Is that the postman at the door? No dear, it’s Neorealism

Critics rarely agree on what the first film of Italian Neorealist cinema was. Some cite Rossellini’s Roma, città

aperta (1945); others

point to Ossessione (1942), Visconti’s unglamorous adaptation of The Postman Always

Rings Twice, which

moved James M. Cain’s story of murderous passion from California to northern Italy. Mussolini allowed the film’s release, even though his son Vittorio famously walked out of a screening shouting “This is not Italy”. However, the Fascists would later sentence Visconti to death for hiding Partisans in his villa. He escaped prison, and the capital sentence, with the help of his jailors.

Shooting from the ruins

A new strain of Italian film-making took shape in the Second World War. Neorealism was born in part of necessity: the wartime sacking of Cinecittà compelled new directors to shoot on location, amid the rubble, in a documentary style, whilst a lack of funding often gave the lead roles to non-professional actors, with mixed results. There was also an urge to purge the artificiality of telefoni bianchi (the genre in which many Neorealist directors and actors got their first break), to capture instead the real social (usually-working class) concerns of the times, often in real language. All these factors gave Neorealist cinema a rawness that articulated Italy’s post-war pain.

Who were the important Neorealist directors?

Neorealist cinema was largely confined to Rome, where three key directors were at work. Roberto Rossellini took the most documentary, guerrilla approach, invariably using wartime as a theme. Vittorio De Sica, a matinee idol in the Fascist era, was a more conventional directorial talent. He took Cesare Zavattini’s scripts and made emotive, engaging films that used the personal stories of betrayal and love to comment on social themes ranging from crime to the elderly. The third great director, Luchino Visconti, an aristocrat, made more overtly political films on the plight of the poor – most memorably of Sicilian fishermen.

All three directors made significant films in later

decades, reinventing their style, but each remains closely associated with Neorealism. It was a short-lived genre (and never a formal ‘school’), essentially over by the early 1950s. Its end was speeded by poor box office receipts (most post-war Italians wanted escapism not grim reality), and by the easing of the socioeconomic strife it portrayed. Despite the abrupt end, Neorealism would prove hugely influential on subsequent Italian cinema.

The five Neorealist films to watch first

Roma, città aperta (Roberto Rossellini 1945). An early milestone in Neorealist

cinema, shot on Roman streets six months after the Nazis left. It told the tense story of partisans fighting Germans. Anna Magnani emerged as Neorealism’s leading lady.

Sciuscià(Vittorio De Sica 1946). Two shoeshine boys, played with impressive subtlety by a couple of untrained actors, come unstuck in unsympathetic post-war Rome.

La terra trema (Luchino Visconti 1948). Another cast of non-professionals, here

using Sicilian dialect, rendered the lives of poor, exploited fishing folk in a film commissioned by the Italian Communist Party.

Ladri di biciclette

(Vittorio De Sica 1948). A destitute man and his son (non-actors) scour Rome for the stolen bike on which his job hanging posters depends. Bleak but utterly compelling: the best film you’ll ever see about a stolen bike (probably).

Riso Amaro (Giuseppe

De Santis 1949). Two jewel thieves hide out amid tough migrant workers in the paddy fields of the Po Valley. Silvana Mangano’s feisty, busty character helped sell the film.

What a Cary on

Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri

di biciclette has become

the most acclaimed of the Neorealist films, combining, as it did, critical and commercial success. The plausibility of its central father and son characters, played by amateur actors, is key to its authenticity. However, it could all have been very different. Iconic American producer David O. Selznick offered to fund the film so long as De Sica placed Cary Grant in the role of the father. De Sica suggested Henry Fonda instead, before deciding on his cast of amateurs and other sources of funding.

In the pink

As Neorealism waned in the early 1950s, a new golden age of Italian cinema developed in tandem with the nation’s ‘economic miracle’ (see 8.4 for more). One genre was dubbed neorealismo rosa (Pink Neorealism), which kept the location shoots and working-class characters of Neorealism but swapped edgy social critique for matters of the heart, usually tinged with comedy. Pink Neorealism rapidly withered, being superseded by the popular commedia all’italiana genre in the late 1950s. It wasn’t as lightweight as it might sound: the films were bittersweet, finding humour in mocking the posturing of Italy’s new- found prosperity. Commedia all’italiana made repeated use of the same actors, notably Vittorio Gassman, star of the genre’s first big hit, I soliti ignoti (1958), a Mario Monicelli-directed effort about a gang of bungling crooks.

The age of the auteurs

While commedia all’italiana was the commercial success story of the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, critically the period is better remembered for its auteur directors, figures who drew on different genres and themes to produce distinctive, highly personal cinema. Some used the cynicism of commedia all’italiana, pointing the finger at Italy’s new consumerist society; others used sex or the ideological clash of the era as themes.

Five legends: the auteurs and their films

Federico Fellini. Recognised by many as the greatest

of all Italian directors, Fellini began writing scripts in the Neorealist era (he worked on Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta) before turning to direction. In 1956 he won an Oscar for La strada (1954), in which Anthony Quinn played a callous circus strongman, before producing La dolce vita (1960), a satire on celebrity that broke new ground with its unusual structure (a series of set-piece

characters were extreme, used to parody the excess and superficiality of modern life – La dolce vita was typical with Anita Ekberg’s voluptuous actress and Mario Mastroianni’s shiftless journalist trailing rather pointlessly around decadent, modern Rome. Another Fellini masterpiece, 8½ (1963), came soon after, before his allegorical style became increasingly surreal and the narrative looser, spoiling the legend somewhat.

Michelangelo Antonioni. A clutch of stylish early

1960s films cemented the Antonioni brand. He shunned traditional structure: plotlines fizzled out or didn’t exist at all; the editing was intentionally abrupt and jarring; and the characters were cool and undemonstrative, revealing little of themselves as they struggled with psychological angst. Why explain when you can stare moodily out of the window making vague existential comments? It was demanding stuff, but audiences and critics responded positively. The first big hit was L’avventura (1960); a missing young woman, frustratingly, is never found but the disappearance sheds light on her friends.

Antonioni’s first colour film, Il deserto rosso (1964), is often considered his masterpiece. Later films were made in English, notably Blow Up (1966), set in swinging London.

Francesco Rosi. Like Fellini and Antonioni, Rosi cut his

teeth on Neorealism, helping out Visconti on La terra trema, but unlike his contemporaries kept the focus on social and political misdeeds in the 1960s. In the golden age, he made movies about the corruption of power, laying out the evidence in documentary style, waiting for the public to draw its own conclusions. Il caso Mattei (1972), perhaps his best work, explored the demise of an oil tycoon in a plane crash.

Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Catholic Marxist homosexual

Pasolini threw his religious, ideological and sexual concerns into his films. His directing career began with Accattone (1961), a realist slice of the rough lowlife Rome he knew well, and his talent was confirmed with Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), a rendering of the Gospel according to Matthew. Pasolini is best remembered, however, for the scandalising trilogy of Decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (1972) (in which Pasolini himself played Chaucer) and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974), sexed-up classics that voiced a disdain for modern life.

Bernardo Bertolucci. His first job in film was working for

Pasolini, and he shared some of the older director’s taste for allegorical commentary even while developing more psychological themes and a much slicker cinematic style. In La strategia del ragno (1970), his first major success, a young man searches for answers about the murder of his father by Fascists. Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972), starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider as the intimate strangers, brought worldwide renown as well as notoriety. Bertolucci’s subsequent films grew more epic

Pasolini, the movie

The furore generated by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, cited for blasphemy and obscenity but also greatly admired, mirrored the director’s own turbulent life. His brother was murdered by Yugoslav communist partisans in the war, and yet Pasolini became a staunch leftist. He took a teaching job after the war but lost it after being convicted of obscene acts and corrupting minors. By the time the conviction was reversed and Pasolini cleared of all charges, he’d spent two years living in the slums of Rome. He was arrested again in 1963, this time charged with blasphemy over La ricotta, a short film starring Orson Welles as a director making his own film about the Crucifixion. Pasolini’s death in 1975, aged 53, was suitably nonconformist; he was found dead on the beach at Ostia, near Rome, after being run over several times by his own car. A 17-year-old male prostitute pleaded guilty and was convicted of murder, but has since retracted his confession.