Love in the City

Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni redefined the concept of narrative cinema, challenging the accepted notions at the heart of storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large; his films – a seminal body of enigmatic and intricate mood pieces – rejected action in favor of contemplation, championing image and design over character and story. Haunted by a sense of instability and impermanence, his work defined a cinema of possibilities, a shifting landscape of thoughts and ideas devoid of resolution; in Antonioni’s world, riddles were not answered, but simply evaporated into other riddles.

Antonioni was born on September 29, 1912, in Ferrara, Italy; as a child, his interests included painting and building architectural models (an interest which continued in the design and decor of his films). After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Bologna, where he initially studied classics but later emerged with a degree in economics. While he was at college, his interest in the theater blossomed, and he also began writing short fiction and film reviews for a local newspaper, Il Corriere Padano, often running afoul of the motion-picture community for his savage attacks on the mainstream Italian comedies of the 1930s. Antonioni’s initial attempt at filmmaking was a documentary profiling a nearby insane asylum; the project was aborted because the inmates would lapse into fits of panic each time the lights of the camera were turned on.

By 1939, Antonioni had chosen the cinema as his life’s work, and he soon relocated to Rome, where he accepted a position at Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. After being dismissed over a political disagreement, Antonioni enrolled at the Centre Sperimentale to study film technique. By age 30, he was working professionally in the film industry; his first screenplay went unproduced, but he was soon hired to co-write Roberto Rossellini’s Un Pilota Ritorna, followed by a stint as the assistant director to Enrico Fulchignoni on I Due Foscari. In 1942, Antonioni traveled to France to work with Marcel Carné on Les Visiteurs du Soir. Antonioni was soon called back to Italy for military service, where he managed to wrangle funding from the Luce Institute for Gente del Po, a documentary portrait of the impoverished lives of the fishermen along the Po River.

The Allied invasion of Italy brought film production there to an end for some time, forcing Antonioni to earn his living as a book translator; he also wrote prolifically for a number of magazines, including Film Rivista and Film d’Oggi. Additionally, he was commissioned by Luchino Visconti to write a pair of screenplays, Furore and The Trial of Maria Tarnowska, neither of which was ever produced. Finally, in 1948, Antonioni was able to return behind the camera, and over the course of the next two years he directed no less than six documentary shorts; among them, Nettezza Urbana, L’Amorosa Menzogna, and Superstizione hinted most strongly at the work still to come, their style of photography Spartan and unadorned, forgoing strong contrasts to focus on the middle range of gray tones.

After completing the short subject La Villa dei Mostri, Antonioni was able to secure financing for his 1950 feature debut, Cronaca di un Amore. Here he turned away from the neorealism so much in vogue, employing professional actors and focusing on interpersonal relationships instead of social criticism. More importantly, the film further developed his increasingly unique visual aesthetic, honing a rigorously disciplined brand of “anti-cinema,” favoring long, deep-focus shots in opposition not only to the gritty, newsreel-like feel of the neorealists but even the montage dynamic perfected by Sergei Eisenstein. With Cronaca di un Amore, Antonioni first moved into a realm of film previously explored only by the likes of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, a form of interior cinema concerned far less with the body than with the soul, and less by the actual arc of his plot than by the characters’ reactions to it. Rather inexplicably, Cronaca di un Amore made next to no impact upon its original release, and Antonioni spent the remainder of the decade in relative obscurity.

In 1952, he collaborated with Federico Fellini on the script to Lo Sceicco Bianco, followed by a directing assignment helming an episode of the triptych I Vinti. Antonioni did not mount another feature-length project until 1953 with La Signora Senza Camelie, an essay on the world of show business which further developed the formula of internalized action. Yet again, the film received virtually no notice, and was barely even screened outside of Italy; Antonioni spent the next several years in relative seclusion, directing only a segment of L’Amore in Città as well as Uomini in Piú, a documentary commissioned by an international committee studying overpopulation.

Finally, in 1955 he was able to mount his third feature, Le Amiche. Though beset by troubles from the outset – financing even ran out halfway through the production, suspending the shooting schedule for several months – the completed film was Antonioni’s most mature to date. Based loosely on the Cesare Pavese novella Tra Donne Sole, it further rejected all notions of traditional narrative and literary value, even garnering some degree of attention from the international cinema community. Il Grido followed in 1957, and in 1958 Antonioni resurfaced with a pair of films, La Tempesta and Nel Segno di Roma. The period was one largely defined by artistic and commercial disappointment, and of the three films, the director allowed his name to remain on Il Grido alone.

In 1960, Antonioni’s masterpiece L’Avventura premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. His most extreme work to date, as a study of alienation among the bourgeoisie, it progressed at a snail’s pace, its long, beautiful shots telling virtually no story whatsoever. Even the basic plot – the search for a missing woman – willfully disintegrated at the end, prompting a near-riot among Cannes viewers. Ultimately, L’Avventura won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize, becoming a phenomenal success across the globe. Antonioni became a major figure in international cinema virtually overnight, and his lead actress, Monica Vitti – a luminous cipher perfectly suited to her director’s austere formalism – emerged as a huge star.

La Notte – the second film in the trilogy begun with L’Avventura – appeared in 1961, exploring the existential ground of alienation, non-communication, and meaninglessness. A transitional work also starring Vitti as well as Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, La Notte experimented more freely with editing techniques, relying less on the long, expansive takes which defined Antonioni’s earlier work. The 1962 release L’Eclisse reduced its plot structure to the barest minimum, replacing narrative with an acute psychological portrait of a woman (Vitti) who drifts from one romantic liaison into another. Il Deserto Rosso, his fourth and final film starring Vitti – as well as his first color feature – followed in 1964.

In 1966, Antonioni went to England to shoot Blow-Up, his most commercially successful effort. Set in the “Swinging London” scene of the mid-‘60s, it starred David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who accidentally photographs a murder. The wide popularity of Blow-Up brought Antonioni to America, where in 1970 he made his lone U.S. feature, Zabriskie Point. Chung Kuo/Cina, a four-hour television documentary filmed in China and subsequently denounced by the nation’s government, followed in 1972. The Passenger, a thriller shot in North Africa starring Jack Nicholson, appeared three years later, while Il Mistero di Oberwald did not bow until 1980.

With 1982’s Identificazione di una Donna, Antonioni’s career largely ground to a halt; a savage early review by New York Times critic Vincent Canby prompted the film’s U.S. distributor to drop the film, and due to the loss of potential revenue, Antonioni was unable to realize several planned projects. A 1985 stroke left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, but a decade later Antonioni returned to filmmaking with Par-Dela les Nuages (Beyond the Clouds), a feature co-directed by Wim Wenders.

It would be nearly another ten years before Antonioni stepped behind the camera again, but in 2004, at the age of 91, he involved himself with two new projects. The first film, Michelangelo Eye to Eye was a 35-minute documentary, while Eros featured multiple segments directed by such auteurs as Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, and Wong Kar-Wai. In 1995, Antonioni received an honorary Lifetime Achievement Academy Award. He passed away at the age of 94 on July 30, 2007, in Rome. —AllMovie guide

One of the most visionary figures to emerge from the fertile motion picture community of postwar-era Italy, Federico Fellini brought a new level of autobiographical intensity to his craft; more than any other filmmaker of his era, he transformed the realities of his life into the surrealism of his art. Though originally a product of the neorealist school, the eccentricity of Fellini’s characterizations and his absurdist sense of comedy set him squarely apart from contemporaries like Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini, and at the peak of his career his work adopted a distinctively poetic, flamboyant, and influential style so unique that only the term “Felliniesque” could accurately describe it.

Born in Rimini, Italy, on January 20, 1920, Fellini’s first passion was the theater, and at the age of 12 he briefly ran away from home to join the circus, later entering college solely to avoid being drafted. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, he wrote and acted with his friend Aldo Fabrizi, and during wartime he composed radio sketches for the program Cico e Pallina, meeting his future wife, actress Giuletta Masina. Additionally, Fellini worked as an artist on fumetti (Italy’s illustrated magazines), and occasionally even made his living as a caricaturist at Roman restaurants. He only entered film with the aid of Fabrizi, who recruited Fellini to continue supplying stories and ideas for his performances; between 1939 and 1944, the two men worked in tandem on a number of largely forgotten comedies, among them No Me Lo Dire, Quarta Pagina, and Campo de Fiori.

The pivotal moment in Fellini’s early career came in the days following the Allied Forces’ 1945 liberation of Italy, when he and Fabrizi both began working with Roberto Rossellini, a young, largely unknown filmmaker with only a handful of directorial credits under his belt. Rossellini’s initial plan was to film a fictionalized account of the Germans’ shooting of a local priest. With Fellini on board as a screenwriter, however, the film eventually grew to become Roma, Città Aperta, a landmark of Italian neorealism and one of the most widely acclaimed pictures of its era. For the follow-up, 1946’s Paisa, Fellini graduated to the position of assistant director, later collaborating on films by Pietro Germi (including In Nomine Della Legge and Il Cammino Della Speranza) and Alberto Lattuda (Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo and Il Mulino del Po), among others.
In 1948, Fellini completed the screenplay for Il Miracolo, the second and longer section of Rossellini’s two-part effort Amore. Here Fellini’s utterly original worldview first began to truly take shape in the form of archetypal characters (a simple-minded peasant girl and her male counterpart, a kind of holy simpleton), recurring motifs (show business, parties, the sea), and an ambiguous relationship with religion and spirituality, a relationship further explored in his script for Rossellini’s 1949 Francesco, Giullare di Dio, adapted from The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. In 1950, Fellini made his first attempt at directing one of his own screenplays (albeit with the technical guidance of Alberto Lattuda); the result was Luci del Varieta, which further developed his fusion of neorealism with the atmosphere of surrealism.

After two more screenplays – 1951’s La Citta si Difende and 1952’s Il Brigante di Tacca del Lupo, both directed by Pietro Germi – Fellini again took over the directorial reins for the romantic satire Lo Sciecco Bianc. The film marked his first work with composer Nino Rota, who emerged among the key contributors to his work throughout the remainder of his career. Fellini’s initial masterpiece, I Vitteloni, followed in 1953. The first of his features to receive international distribution, it later won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the first of so many similar honors that eventually an entire room in his house was devoted solely to housing his awards. The brilliant La Strada followed in 1954, also garnering the Silver Lion as well as the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture and some 50 other worldwide prizes and citations. The picture’s success brought his singular combination of the sublime and the grotesque to international fame, launching wife and star Masina to global stardom as well.

After helming 1955’s Il Badone, Fellini and a group of screenwriters (including a young Pier Paolo Pasolini) began work on 1956’s Le Notti di Cabiria; the completed film won a second Academy Award. Upon writing the screenplay for Viaggio con Anita, a tale based on the death of his father which remained unfilmed before Mario Monicelli agreed to direct it in 1979, Fellini mounted 1959’s La Dolce Vita, perhaps his most well-known film. The first of his pictures to star actor Marcello Mastroianni, who would become Fellini’s cinematic alter ego over the course of several subsequent collaborations, its portrait of sex and death in Rome’s high society created a tremendous scandal at its Milan premiere, where the audience booed, insulted, and spat on the director. Regardless, La Dolce Vita won the Palm d’Or at the annual Cannes Film Festival, and remains a landmark in cinematic history.

The success afforded to the film left Fellini in a state of confusion as he considered his next project. Ultimately, his writer’s block became the subject of perhaps his greatest film, 1962’s 8 1/2, the story of a filmmaker (Mastroianni) attempting to mount a movie which remains unmade. Again, the international acclaim was virtually unanimous, with yet another Oscar forthcoming, and after winning the Great Prize at the Moscow Film Festival, he never again entered festival competition. With 1965’s Giulietta Degli Spiriti, Fellini worked for the first time in color. After experimenting with LSD under the supervision of doctors, he began scripting Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna, inspired by the death of his friend Ernest Bernhard. Over a year of pre-production followed, hampered by difficulties with producers, actors, and even a jury trial. Finally on April 10th, 1967, Fellini suffered a nervous breakdown, resulting in a month-long nursing home stay. Ultimately, he gave up on ever bringing Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna to the screen, and his new producer, Alberto Grimaldi, was forced to buy out former producer Dino De Laurentis for close to half a billion liras.

As the decade drew to a close, Fellini returned to work with a vengeance, first resurfacing with Toby Dammitt, a short feature for the collaborative film Tre Passi nel Delirio. Turning to television, he helmed Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, a one-hour special for the NBC network, followed by the feature effort Fellini Satyricon, an erotic adaptation of Petronius’ text. I Clown, directed for RAI (an Italian state-TV broadcasting company), followed in 1970, with Roma bowing in 1972. Amarcord, a childhood reminiscence, won a fourth Academy Award in 1974, but as criticism that his work was becoming far too eccentric and self-indulgent continued to mount, it proved to be his final international success. After acting in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland and Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo Tanto Amati, he shot 1976’s Il Casanova di Federico Fellini, which found favor only in Japan.

After both 1979’s Prova d’Orchestra and 1980’s La Citta delle Donne also proved unsuccessful, Fellini turned to publishing with Fare un Film, an anthology of notes about his life and work. E la Nave Va and Ginger e Fred followed in 1983 and 1985 respectively, but by the time of 1987’s L’Intervista, he was facing considerable difficulty finding financing for his projects; consequently, 1989’s La Voce Della Luna was his last completed film. In the early years of the 1990s, Fellini helmed a handful of television commercials, and in 1993 he won his fifth Academy Award for a lifetime of service to the film industry. On the day after his fiftieth wedding anniversary, Federico Fellini suffered a massive stroke and lapsed into a coma; he never recovered, and died on October 31, 1993. He was 73 years old.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:89547~T1)

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