Boccaccio '70

Few European film-makers combined artistic ambitions with a genuine populist spirit in the manner of Vittorio De Sica. In his prolific career, the actor-director made many films on social subjects which nonetheless engaged a mass audience. A Neapolitan by birth, De Sica came from humble roots, working as a theatre actor in the early 1920s. His stage success led De Sica to films where he proved to be a popular actor, mounting more than thirty film credits before his directorial debut with Rosa Scarlatte (which he co-directed with Giuseppe Amato). Even after his success as a director, De Sica was a much sought after performer; appearing in such classics as Max Ophüls’ Madame de… and Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere.

De Sica’s fourth outing as a director was his first collaboration with screenwriter and film theorist Cesare Zavattini. The Children Are Watching Us anticipated neorealism in its detached focus on a young boy’s growing isolation from his mother. De Sica’s skill at directing actors, especially children, is strongly borne in this film and in Shoeshine one of the earliest neorealist films. A story of the friendship between two boys who sell shoes for a living in post-war Rome, the film received a special Oscar at the Academy Awards and earned praise from Orson Welles and Luis Buñuel. The Bicycle Thief, made in 1948 became one of the most successful Italian films of all time as well as the representative work of Italian neorealism. Inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s films as well as King Vidor’s The Crowd, De Sica made use of a non-professional cast and on-location shooting to create an indelible portrait of post-war depredation. The fable-like simplicity of a man whose life is thrown in disarray after his bicycle is stolen struck a chord with audiences around the world and remains constant in the repertoire of international cinema to this day.

Umberto D is often regarded by some commentators as the final neorealist film; a tragicomic portrait of a lonely old man’s bitter struggle to maintain his home. The Gold of Naples was a multi-episode comedy, boasting a cast that comprised of actors such as Silvana Mangano, Eduardo De Fillippo, Paolo Stoppa, Totò, and a young actress whom the director discovered – Sophia Loren. One notable episode featured De Sica himself; the role of a Count who struggled with a severe gambling addiction. This was an ironic self-parody of De Sica’s real life gambling woes. Frequently strapped for cash, he often took purely commercial assignments (such as David O. Selznick’s international production Terminal Station) merely to cover his growing debts. His personal efforts in this difficult period included The Roof, a neorealist love story of a couple struggling to find a home to live in.

He would return to form with a series of collaborations with Sophia Loren. La Ciociaria (Two Women) adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravia is notable for its sobriety in dealing with the rape of women during wartime. Sophia Loren’s performance was especially commendable and she won an Oscar for Best Actress, the first time the award was given to an actress in a foreign film. The Lottery, De Sica’s contribution to Carlo Ponti’s omnibus Boccaccio’70, was a satire of Italian machismo starring Loren as a carnival worker who offers herself as a prize at a fairground lottery. Marriage Italian-Style, which paired Sophia Loren opposite Marcello Mastroianni, was a ironic examination of marriage. The film’s refinement and its powerful sense of time passing marks it as a deeply personal film. However, these late triumphs were brief and with the exception of the 1970 The Garden of Finzi-Continis, De Sica’s final period was one of slow decline. Yet nearly forty years after his death, his best films survive as part of an artistically rich period in film history. —Mr Bongo

As Martin Scorsese notes in My Voyage to Italy, no 20th Century film-maker can lay claim to the unique disposition of Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the final heir to one of Europe’s oldest aristocratic families. For much of his youth, Visconti exulted in the privileges of his lifestyle. His house was a frequent retreat for the likes of Arturo Toscanini, Gabrielle d’Annunzio and Giacomo Puccini. His lifelong engagement in theatre and opera was imbibed from an early age along with brief passions such as raising horses and maintaining stables. It wasn’t long before Visconti began questioning the limitations of his lifestyle. Inspired by his intellectual yearnings, Visconti wandered away from his comfortable shelter and visited Paris. This would be a turning point in his life. Through his friendship with Coco Chanel, Visconti met French director Jean Renoir. He served as assistant director on some of Renoir’s best films from the 30s, including Toni, Partie de campagne and The Lower Depths.

In addition to his newly discovered interest in film-making, the political climate of France proved an equally transformative experience. For an Italian under Mussolini’s Fascist rule, the spirit of the cross-partisan Popular Front provided a much needed political education. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Luchino Visconti completed the unexpected transition from a privileged aristocrat to a lifelong member of Italy’s Communist Party. Visconti directly participated in Italy’s resistance to Fascism (which led to a period of brief imprisonment in 1944). Simultaneously, Visconti served as a founder of Italian Neorealism, an aesthetic revolution that sprung out of the war. Ossessione, made in 1942, was an adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice transposed to contemporary Italy. Deeply influenced by Renoir, Ossessione’s tale of carnal passion among the lower reaches of society was released two years before the worldwide success of Rome, Open City. His first film already displays Visconti’s distinctive skill in juxtaposing naturalistic detail with an operatic approach to violence and human relationships.

Visconti’s second feature was more obviously neorealist in construction. Commissioned by the Communist Party, La Terra Trema was an unprecedented production; shot on location in Sicily with a local non-professional cast who spoke in their own dialect. The film was a box-office failure but was highly lauded by Michelangelo Antonioni and later cited by John Cassavetes as an influence on his work. This was followed by Bellisima, an uncharacteristic comedy which boasted a vibrant performance from Anna Magnani. Senso, shot in Technicolor, depicted the outcome of an aristocratic woman’s misplaced passion during Italy’s Risorgimento. This lush period film, which boasted two international stars (Alida Valli and Farley Granger), was a complete turn from the director of La Terra Trema; as such, Visconti was accused of artistic betrayal. The richness of the film’s recreation of the 19th Century was described by supporters as “a neorealism of the past” while Martin Scorsese remarked, that “if Stendhal had a camera it would be like Senso.”

Visconti’s baroque sensibility was already perceptible in his neorealist works. In his review of La Terra Trema, André Bazin (founder of Cahiers du Cinéma magazine) astutely observed that the director had ennobled Sicilian fisherman with the bearing of princes in Renaissance paintings. Visconti sought to enshrine a level of grandeur to the struggles of the working class by evoking classical foundations. Rocco and His Brothers borrowed elements from Thomas Mann’s works as well as Dostoyesky’s The Idiot to portray the destructive fraternal relationships of a working-class family. His mature period, pivoted around period narratives, nonetheless boasted a more modern perspective; one rooted in the 20th Century while gazing into the 19th. Visconti’s depiction of the gradual decadence of Europe’s aristocracy introduced a self-reflexive and autobiographical dimension to his films. The psychosexual melodramas of American dramatist Tennessee Williams (which Visconti successfully mounted on the Italian stage) was a powerful inspiration for his mature period.

In the short term, films such as Senso, Ludwig and Death in Venice received acclaim for their detailed recreation of bygone opulence. Visconti’s critical vision in depicting the gradual decadence of Europe’s aristocracy, their erosion into madness (Ludwig) and obsolescence (The Leopard, Conversation Piece), was often overwhelmed by his luxurious mise-en-scène. A harsher expression of his mature perspective can be found in The Job (Il Lavoro), his contribution to the omnibus Boccaccio’70. The film depicts the existential crisis faced by a young aristocratic housewife (played by Romy Schneider) when her husband becomes publicly embroiled in a sex scandal. Visconti’s compassionate portrait of her slow spiral into despair stems from his complex identification; a former denizen of the life of privilege he had renounced but which his characters remained mired in. Aristocrats, in Visconti’s films, were prisoners of the same power and privilege which they wielded to oppress their subjects; leopards who eventually confronted the golden bars of cages built by themselves. —Mr Bongo

Federico Fellini was born in 1920 to a provincial middle-class family in Rimini, a small town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. The lack of available options to young men in provincial towns is an important theme in some of his films, most notably I Vitelloni and Amarcord. In fact, Orson Welles once described Fellini as “a small-town boy who’s never really come to Rome. He’s still dreaming about it. And we should all be grateful for those dreams.” He initially arrived in Rome as a law student but his career as a satirical cartoonist and gag writer was already well established by then. His childhood fascination with the circus and the Grand Guignol also governed his cinephilia in these early years. His favourite films were American comedies by Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon and the Marx Brothers. It was only after he came into contact with the circle of Ettore Scola, Cesare Zavattini, Aldo Fabrizi and Roberto Rossellini, that he would seriously consider the cinema as a medium of expression.

Fellini’s collaboration with Rossellini would prove important to both men. He contributed to the dialogue of neorealist classics such as Rome, Open City, Paisan and also worked as an actor alongside Anna Magnani in the controversial short Il Miracolo. After collaborating with Alberto Lattuada on Variety Lights, Fellini directed his first solo feature, The White Sheik. Already visible is Fellini’s focus on the media’s influence on people’s private fantasies, a theme that informed La Dolce Vita and 8 ½. The White Sheik also marked the start of Fellini’s lasting collaboration with composer Nino Rota and most notably featured his wife, actress Giulietta Masina, in a brief cameo as a prostitute named Cabiria. Her comic performances channeled the spirit of silent cinema and directly inspired two of their most notable collaborations – La Strada and Nights of Cabiria. Both films won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film. They also best illustrate the relatively restrained and sober style of Fellini’s early films. The visual style is closer to his neorealist beginnings with its content focusing on exploitation of people at the lowest level of society.

Under the aegis of psychologist Dr. Ernest Bernhardi, Fellini discovered the works of Carl Jung whose works inspired him to move away from the objective neorealist style to a subjective approach. Through use of a complex system of symbolism he would evoke a “collective unconscious” that enveloped his thoughts and feelings with that of his characters and the society they lived in. La Dolce Vita was the first film to display this new style. Made in 1960, this multi-episode narrative marked his first collaboration with Marcello Mastroianni, the actor who became his virtual alter-ego. The film became one of the defining portraits of Rome, a time capsule of the period of Italy’s economic miracle. La Dolce Vita received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and its success made Fellini world famous. The dark subtext of the film was the manner in which media organized modern life into a vacuous and superficial spectacle. This theme is borne out even strongly in The Temptation of Dr. Antonio, Fellini’s contribution to Carlo Ponti’s omnibus Boccaccio ’70. The title character is a censorious professor who slowly loses his sanity when a giant billboard of Anita Ekberg is installed across his apartment window. This short marked Fellini’s first use of color in film.

By 1963, Fellini had directed six features and three shorts; totaling them he concluded that the next would be, film no. 8 ½. This landmark film is regarded as Fellini’s masterpiece, a technical tour-de-force that is considered to be the definitive glimpse of an artist’s creative process. Fellini would depart even further away from the conventions of narrative cinema in his 70s films. Stories were organized around a mosaic of vignettes, often depicted in self-contained tableaux. Amarcord and Roma, which exulted in the director’s proud command of form, achieved critical and popular support. Casanova was praised for its visual expression but its cold gaze into the vacuous life of the legendary 18th Century adventurer alienated the usually supportive critics; it’s deliberate undermining of the erotic allure of the story marking it a challenging film. The films of his final period includes further collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni – City of Women and Ginger and Fred (also starring Giulietta Masina). But it was also marked with frustrations, owing to lack of funds for projects which remained unrealized. He received an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1993, two months before his death. More than 70,000 people attended his memorial service at Rome’s legendary Cinecittá studios, a fitting celebration to a legitimate national treasure. —Mr Bongo