Love in the City

Michelangelo Antonioni once described his work as “archeological research” which sifted through “the arid remains of our times”. If Fellini claimed to treat the past as science fiction, Antonioni gazed deeply into the future already visible in the present (L’Eclisse) or a past which uneasily hung onto a present that had outlived it (L’Avventura). Born in an upper-middle class family in Ferrara in 1912; Antonioni studied economics at the University of Bologna, where he staged works by Luigi Pirandello as well as original work written by himself. Antonioni’s time as a film critic for the Roman Cinema magazine brought him in contact with Cesare Zavattini, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and others. For Rossellini, he would co-write Un pilota ritorna and with Fellini, he collaborated on the screenplay of his first feature The White Shiek.
Antonioni, however, yearned to begin his own career in film. To this end, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinemografia, the official state supported film school. This period included a brief detour to France where Antonioni worked as an assistant director on Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir. Antonioni began his film career in earnest with documentary shorts Gente del Po (about the poverty surrounding the Po River Valley) and N. U. (about janitors in post-war Rome). His feature film debut Story of A Love Affair (1950) departed from the existing norm of neorealism in its focus on the nouveau-riche middle class of post-war Italy. This haunting work contains the hallmarks of what became the Antonioni style – visual richness, intricate camera movements, sensual rhythm and an unsentimental approach to love and human relationships. Antonioni developed this style in his subsequent films: Le Amiche, an adaptation of Cesare Pavese’s Among Women Only which focused on the lifestyle of working women; The Lady Without Camelias, a scathing satire of the Italian film industry which features a powerful performance from Antonioni’s first muse Lucia Bosè and the haunting Il grido, which focuses on the desiccated life of a factory worker after his long-time lover (played by Alida Valli – The Third Man, Senso) leaves him.

L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, his succeeding films, formed a loose trilogy. The international acclaim made these films the director’s most representative work; refining themes from his early features while breaking new ground in its poetic approach to narrative and its magnificent black-and-white cinematography. These films expressed the uncertain nature of modern life and the overwhelming influence environment held on human consciousness. All three of these films starred Monica Vitti. Her next film with Antonioni, his first in colour and their last real collaboration (barring the uncharacteristic video-theater piece The Mystery of Oberwald) was The Red Desert. The film used colours as dramatic material in order to transpose the psychological state of Monica Vitti’s character. Where his black-and-white works used stark compositions to emphasize the psychological impact of physical spaces on his characters, Antonioni would use colour to move further inside his character’s subjectivity. Antonioni succinctly explained his changing approach to Jean-Luc Godard in a famous 1964 interview:

Jean-Luc Godard: The drama is no longer psychological, but plastic . . .

Michelangelo Antonioni: It’s the same thing.

A three-film deal with producer Carlo Ponti initiated a period of travel that took Antonioni to England (Blow-Up), America (Zabriskie Point), China (Chung Kuo) and Spain (The Passenger). These films reflected a new optimism in the director, emphasized by a widening of geographical horizons. They also served as significant documents of the late 60s zeitgeist; Blow-Up being a definitive portrait of “Swinging London”, and Zabriskie Point is an unforgettable time capsule of late-60s Los Angeles. The latter film featured one of Antonioni’s most extravagant set-pieces, a climactic montage of consumer goods and household articles exploding to bits and pieces. Antonioni would better this with the end of The Passenger, which featured one of the most elaborate camera set-ups in film history.

The final phase of Antonioni’s career reduced Antonioni’s output to a film per decade, with only three features and two shorts completed before his death in 2007. Identification of a Woman, made in 1984, is the strongest of his final films. While revisiting themes from his 60s films, it also signals a major shift in style. The drama is more impressionistic, the visual design is restrained; Antonioni’s composition and use of colour is solely concentrated on his characters state of mind. The film director protagonist (played by Tomás Milián) moves through unfulfilling relationships while deciding the theme of his next film. The film’s heightened self-reflexivity derives from Antonioni seeking a measure of serenity amidst the constant mutability of modern life. Serenity is the quest of many of his characters, what they seek at the end of their adventure, regardless of how fleeting and transient it proves to be. —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

Italian writer/director Alberto Lattuada is the son of famed composer Felice Lattuada, who scored several of Lattuada’s films. After studying to be an architect at the Berchet School in Milan, Lattuada supplemented his income as a newspaper and magazine writer. He entered the Italian film industry in 1933 as a set decorator, graduating to “assistant in charge of color” in 1935. Five years later, he directed his first film. With Luigi Comencini, Lattuada founded Italy’s first film archive, Cinetica Italiana, in 1941; that same year he published a popular coffee-table volume, The Photographic Atlas. Stepping up his directing activities in the postwar years, Lattuada specialized in stylish costume pictures, often adapted from famous novels. His ventures into neorealism—Bandit (1946), Anna (1951)—tended to be slicker and more professional-looking than the similar efforts of his contemporaries. He gave the career of Federico Fellini a boost in 1950, when he and Fellini co-directed the well-received Variety Lights (the film’s budget was provided up by a corporation formed by Lattuada, Fellini and their actress wives). The best of Lattuada’s subsequent films include The Overcoat (1953) and Fraulein Doktor (1967). He did a great deal of TV work in the 1970s and 1980s, notably the 1985 U.S.-Italian miniseries Christopher Columbus. From 1970 onward, Lattuada kept busy outside the movie industry as an opera director. Alberto Lattuada was once married to actress Carla Del Poggio. —allmovie guide

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

Dino Risi was born in Milan on 23 December 1917. He began his cinematographic career as Mario Soldati’s assistant on Old-Fashioned World (Piccolo mondo antico) in 1940 and then as Lattuada’s assistant in Giacomo the Idealist (Giacomo l’idealista) in 1942. During that period he also contributed to the scripts of the films Anna by Lattuada (1952), Totò e i re di Roma (1951) by Steno and Monicelli and Sunday Heroes (Gli eroi della domenica) by Camerini (1952).

After a series of short films (the most famous of which was Buio in sala), in 1952 he moved to Rome and produced his first fictional feature film, Vacanze col gangster. In 1953 he directed Paradiso per tre ore, an episode in the film Love in the City (L’amore in città) (the other episodes were produced by Antonioni, Fellini and Lattuada), his first experiment with a genre that he was to specialise in over the coming decade.

The costume comedy with a subtle bitter vein began to take shape in 1955 with The Sign of Venus (Il segno di Venere). The same year also brought the highly successful Pane, amore e…, the third chapter in the saga begun by Comencini and including a splendid performance from Sofia Loren. 1956 was a landmark year for Risi, when a film written and directed by him ushered in a new genre that marked the transformation of neo-realism into Italian comedy. His Poor but Beautiful (Poveri ma belli) tells the tale of a group of young people from the Rome middle classes at grips with their first romances. For this film Risi discovered several unknown young actors including Renato Salvatori, Maurizio Arena and Marisa Allasio. He repeated this formula in his next two films, Belle ma povere (1957) and Poveri milionari (1959).

The transition from light comedy to satire came with Il vedovo (1959), in which a small-time industrialist (Alberto Sordi) attempts to kill his wife and claim her inheritance in order to meet his debts. His collaboration with Sordi culminated in the film Una vita difficile (1961). Over the following years, he directed the pair Gassman and Tognazzi in a series of films that cast a clinical eye over the clichés of the Italian people (I mostri, In nome del popolo italiano). The collaboration with Gassman was certainly the longest in Risi’s career, with a total of fifteen films together. These included Il mattatore in 1960, The Easy Life (Il sorpasso) (1963), Il successo (again 1963), The Tiger and the Pussycat (Il tigre) (1967), The Prophet (Il profeta) (1968) and Scent of a Woman (Profumo di donna) (1974), a film that won two Oscar nominations. The last films made with Gassman were I nuovi mostri (1977), Dear Father (Caro papà) (1979) and I’ll be Going Now (Tolgo il disturbo) (1990).

In the 1960s Risi specialised in episodic films, directing the greatest Italian actors (Manfredi, Vitti) and relating small stories of Italian life. In 1970 he directed The Priest’s Wife (La moglie del prete) played by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and in 1973 How Funny Can Sex Be? (Sesso matto) with Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli. The cinema and fascism were the central themes of Telefoni bianchi (1975). The next year he made a psychological thriller, Lost Soul (Anima persa), taken from a novel by Gianni Arpino, and in 1977 The Bishop’s Bedroom (La stanza del vescovo) from a book by Piero Chiara. In 1978 he directed the film Primo amore, a story of unattainable love with Ugo Tognazzi. In 1993 the Cannes Festival organised a retrospective of his fifteen most important works. —italica.rai.it