Love and Anger

Carlo Lizzani (born 3 April 1922) is an Italian film director, screenwriter and critic.

Born in Rome, after World War II Lizzani worked on such notable films of the late 1940s as Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, Alberto Lattuada’s The Mill on the Po (both 1948) and Giuseppe De Santis’ Bitter Rice (1950, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story).

After helming documentaries, he debuted as a feature director with the admired World War II drama Achtung! Banditi! (1951). He films an episode of L’Amore in Città. Respected for his awarded drama Chronicle of Poor Lovers (1954), he has proven a solid director of genre films, notably crime films such as The Violent Four (1968) and Crazy Joe (1974) or erotic comedy Roma Bene (1971).

He worked frequently for Italian television in the 1980s and was a member of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994.

His film Celluloide deals with the making of Rome, Open City. —Wikipedia

Bernardo Bertolucci proved to be Italian cinema’s great prodigy, making his debut The Grim Reaper at the age of 22, and Before the Revolution at the age of 24; achievements comparable to Orson Welles directing Citizen Kane at the age of 25. He was born in Parma in 1940. He initially followed the footsteps of his father Attilio, a noted poet and critic. His poetry received prizes at competitions and a collection of his work was published while he was still a teenager. But his attention was already diverted to the cinema, especially after viewing Godard’s Breathless. His planned transition from poetry to cinema found an accomplice in fellow poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. A family friend, he regarded Bertolucci as a kindred spirit and tasked him as his assistant on his landmark debut, Accattone. The experience, described by Bertolucci as witnessing “the invention of the cinema” further ignited his own ambitions.
The Grim Reaper was based on a story by Pasolini but the resulting film displayed a visual style at some distance from the director of Mamma Roma. Where Pasolini’s camera was often static, framing his characters as subjects in Renaissance paintings, Bertolucci moved his camera constantly. His was an exuberant cinema, pivoted around visualizations of intense emotional states. Before the Revolution further extended this approach, where the protagonist’s vacillation between political engagement and his restrictive middle-class upbringing was dramatized in images of powerful lyricism. Partner was his first film in colour; it featured Pierre Clementi in a tour-de-force performance which anticipates his collaboration with Marlon Brando. The film was made in 1968, the year in which student protests broke out in different parts of the world. Like the characters of his first films, Bertolucci was a youthful Marxist, one especially attuned to the often schismatic relationship between ideology and personal character. The films which followed probed deeper into these internal schisms, inspired in part by Bertolucci’s experience with psychoanalysis.

He released two films in the year of 1970. The Spider’s Strategem, marked his first collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro; who, along with art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti and editor/writer Franco Arcalli, became Bertolucci’s most important collaborator. The film revolved around a favorite theme of Bertolucci’s – the son struggling under the shadow of his father. This conflict was taken even further with The Conformist. This landmark film featured Jean-Louis Trintignant in the title role of a man who wishes to conform to society by transforming into a fascist. The film proved to be a critical and commercial success, its impact rivaled by Bertolucci’s next film. Last Tango in Paris was a sensation in its initial release, a path-breaking exploration of sexual relationships which influenced film-makers from around the world. The honesty with which it explored its subject and Marlon Brando’s performance made it a worldwide commercial success, although the film proved extremely controversial in Italy and other parts of Europe. In Italy, Bertolucci was charged with obscenity and given a suspended sentence with his civil rights revoked for five years.

Novecento (1976) would prove to be Bertolucci’s most ambitious undertaking (rivaled only by The Last Emperor). The film pivoted around an epic clash between peasants and landowners in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. The title in Italian meant “The 20th Century” which it chronicles from 1900 to 1945. Despite boasting a cast that comprises of Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster and Gerard Depardieu, the film failed to find the large public response his previous films had received, although it was a success in Europe. Succeeding features La Luna (1979) and The Tragedy of A Ridiculous Man (1981) gained a muted response while projected adaptations of Red Harvest (with Jack Nicholson) and La Condition humaine failed to come into fruition. The Last Emperor, made in 1987, was a stunning return to form. The first international production to receive access to shoot extensively in China; it became a worldwide success winning nine Oscars including two for Bertolucci (Best Director and Best Screenplay). This was followed by The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993), the three films comprising an “Eastern Trilogy”.

He returned to Italy with Stealing Beauty (1996) and Besieged (1998); the latter film cited by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as one of his best films. The Dreamers (1964) was a nostalgic exploration of 60s Paris, centering on youthful cinephilia and political engagement; a belated return to the themes of Bertolucci’s earliest films. His next film is an adaptation of Niccolò Ammaniti’s You and Me, projected for release in 2012. —Mr Bongo

Born in Bologna in 1922, Pier Paolo Pasolini left behind a searing legacy that haunts contemporary Italy more than thirty years after his death. More than anyone, Pasolini gazed deeply into Italy’s role in the spread of Fascism and, more controversially, the continuing influence of its ideas in post-war Europe. For him, this was a matter of great personal significance; his father was a soldier in the Fascist Army (he had once protected Mussolini from an assassination attempt) while his brother joined the resistance only to be murdered in an ambush. This personal trauma coincided with a period of intellectual development as Pasolini engaged with Marxist philosophy; especially the works of Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party (PCI). His relationship with the PCI, however, was tense. As a poet and intellectual, Pasolini scrutinized his fellow Communists as critically as he did bourgeois society. His enemies retaliated by targeting his personal life; the first instance being his 1949 expulsion from the Party when they learnt of his homosexuality. Employed as a teacher in the Udine city of the Friulian province, Pasolini lost his job and was forced to move to Rome with his mother.

Rome, however, proved to be the site of Pasolini’s artistic flowering. During his time there, he took various odd jobs to make ends meet. He lived in the shantytowns on the outskirts where the borgate resided. Pasolini was fascinated with their unique way of life, their unconscious subversion of Catholic rituals and bourgeois morals. His novel Ragazzi di Vita, published in 1955, was a chronicle of Rome’s lower depths; its non-judgmental portrait of criminal behavior earned it condemnation from both the ruling Christian Democrat party as well as the Communists. Federico Fellini, however, was sufficiently impressed with its wealth of detail and the accuracy of the dialogue to employ Pasolini as a dialogue consultant on Nights of Cabiria (1957). The resulting experience led Pasolini to consider cinema as a medium to express his eclectic ideas.

Bernardo Bertolucci, who served as Pasolini’s assistant on Accattone (1961), noted that the film’s visual style owed more to the Renaissance masters than the cinema. In his first film, the framings of the titular pimp (played by Franco Citti) and his fellow vagabonds hearkened to the religious paintings of Massacio and Mantegna. He continued in a similar vein with Mamma Roma, where the casting of Ettore Garofalo as the son of Mamma Ro (Anna Magnani) was based on his resemblance to a Carravaggio painting. Both films also took inspiration from Italian Neorealism with Anna Magnani’s casting in Mamma Roma a deliberate reference to her performances in Rome, Open City, L’Amore and Bellisima. Like Arthur Rimbaud, Pasolini’s art endowed a sacred dimension to those on the margins of society, outlaws whose lifestyle subverted the morals of the establishment. Pasolini’s use of religious iconography referred to the peasant origins of the Christian religion which the modern Church had strayed away from.

His 1964 film on the Life of Jesus, The Gospel According to St. Mathew was shot in the South of Italy. It was a “literal” reading of the chosen gospel, with dialogue drawn from the text. The film’s style was similar to Accattone and Mamma Roma in its casting of non-professionals and its eclectic musical and pictorial references. With the exceptions of Teorema and The Hawks and the Sparrows, all of Pasolini’s later films were adaptations of classic texts. These included Greek tragedies (Oedipus Rex and Medea) and the films which formed the ‘Trilogy of Life’ – The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Arabian Nights. These period films aimed to portray the richness of peasant cultures by portraying its roots in the ancient world; highlighting its importance in the rise of civilization. These flights into the past, manifested as a result of Pasolini’s growing disillusionment with contemporary Italy. He decried the spread of consumerism in Italy which led to increasing homogenization, suppressing the proletarian culture he took inspiration from. His despairing vision was fully unleashed in Saló, which proved to be his last film.

The film was a loose adaptation of The 120 Days of Sodom written by the infamous Marquis de Sade; its setting was transplanted to the final days of the Second World War, in the Nazi-established Saló Republic. The film’s shocking violence made it one of the most controversial films ever made, subsequently banned in many parts of the world. Its notoriety is heightened by the fact that Pasolini was murdered two weeks before its premier. The circumstances of his brutal killing resulted in a cloud of speculation, further fueled by the Italian police re-opening the case in 2005. At 53 years of age, Pasolini achieved a considerable body of work, a cinematic oeuvre of stirring originality. For Bernardo Bertolucci, his sudden passing marked the end of an era in Italian cinema. —Mr Bongo

The lynchpin of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland – during World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss citizen – he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine which also grew to include staffers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, among others. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958), the latter co-directed by Truffaut.

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Based on a rough story outline contributed by Truffaut, it was shot without a script, its inspiration the American gangster movies which its director loved so passionately. Crafted with a rough-and-tumble, home-movie-like quality, it dodged all accepted notions of narrative and visual storytelling, adopting a freeform hipness unlike anything before it and sparking a revolution in low-budget, on-the-fly independent filmmaking. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

Quickly, however, Godard’s refusal to be pigeonholed became apparent, and despite a few works of lesser quality, his work over the course of the upcoming decade was a remarkable period of innovation, experimentation, and sustained genius. In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism – similar to the charges of indulgence leveled at Michelangelo Antonioni over his frequent use of actress Monica Vitti – that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features – Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle – bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard’s so-called “radical” period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director’s dominant focus. Through Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife, Godard was initiated into Paris’ Maoist underground. Ultimately, his entire worldview shifted from that of the obsessive cinephile to a radical outlook which even prompted him to reject his own film oeuvre as “bourgeois.” The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues punctuated by telling images and symbols. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One – a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil – followed. The final project of 1968, One American Movie (a planned cinéma vérité collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), went unrealized.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gerard Martin, Armand Marco, Nathalie Billard, and Jean-Henri Roger) Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make “political films politically” and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism, all in an attempt to revive a kind of proletarian culture. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, in particular Gorin, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective’s work – 1969’s British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d’Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970’s Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu’a la Victoire – went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles, existing outside of common theatrical situations and never even appearing in the U.S.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective’s messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972’s Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution (primarily by passing out videotapes to networks of friends and associates). There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974’s Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975’s Numero Deux and the following year’s Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work. After a decade, Godard began moving away from radical politics, returning to more personal material, exploring issues of subjectivity and individuality.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his “trilogy of the sublime,” a collection of films – 1982’s Passion, 1983’s Prenom: Carmen, and 1983’s highly controversial Hail Mary (which Pope John Paul II denounced as “blasphemous”) – all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.

After 1985’s neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England’s Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986’s TV film Grandeur et Decadence d’un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987’s Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990’s Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France’s film legacy; most of Godard’s 1990s work was auxiliary to the series, including 1991’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero and 1994’s JLG/JLG – Autoportrait de December. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L’Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L’Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:91804~T1)