Shoeshine (1946)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica


We are the people who, in pursuit of our passions, abandon our children to fend for themselves. And our children are alone. All alone.

In the 1940s Vittorio de Sica directed three of the best and most moving films about children ever made—The Children Are Watching Us (1942), Shoeshine (1946), and Bicycle Thieves (1948). In each of these films, children find themselves in a world where the behavior of adults makes little sense to them, where they are powerless to control their own lives, and where they are unable to protect themselves from disappointment and hurt. It's a sad, mystifying world for children, de Sica seems to be saying, and we adults are too self-involved to feel their pain and confusion and help them through it.

In Shoeshine two boys, Pasquale and Giuseppe, live in poverty just after the end of the Second World War in Italy, shining shoes for American servicemen to finance their dream, to own a horse. They've been making payments on the horse for a while but can't claim him until they make one large final payment. When Giuseppe's older brother offers them a way to make part of the money they need for that payment, they jump at the opportunity, even though it involves doing something shady, delivering stolen American blankets to an elderly fortune teller for resale on the black market. While at the apartment, Giuseppe's brother shows up with two men who identify themselves as policemen. The boys appear to have been set up as pawns in a sting operation but are lucky to escape and are able to keep all the money from the transaction as well, enough to make the final payment on their horse.

The boys are so ecstatic that they spend the night in the stable with their horse, only to find the next day that their good fortune has turned sour. Picked up by the police, they are accused of being accomplices in the robbery of the fortune teller, for the two men were not policemen at all. The most damning evidence against them is that large sum of money they used to make the final payment on the horse. The boys cannot explain where they got the money without implicating Giuseppe's brother, and their sense of honor won't let them do this. Unable to convince the police that they had no prior knowledge of the robbery, Pasquale and Giuseppe are sent to a juvenile prison to await trial.

Only twenty minutes into the movie the circumstantial trap the two boys find themselves in has already snapped shut, and from there things only go downhill. Separated at the detention center, the boys find their friendship and loyalty to each other constantly challenged—by their cellmates, by manipulative prison officials who try to play one boy against the other, and most of all by the soul-destroying machinery of the justice and penal system. The film blends elements of a Warners-style prison movie of the 1930s with a Kafkaesque atmosphere in which the boys are caught up in institutional machinery beyond anyone's comprehension or control.

The prison is a hellish place plagued by overcrowding, bad food, bullying inmates, and corrupt guards. Any of the prison staff with good intentions have long ago given up hope of improving conditions. At every turn the boys are duped—by their adult criminal confederates, their cellmates, the prison officials, even their lawyers. Worst of all, the degradation Pasquale and Giuseppe suffer is not the result of intentional malice, but simply the outcome of neglect, indifference, the self-concerned attitude of the adults in charge of them, and the impossible situation they find themselves in. To call these boys helpless victims of circumstance would be putting it too mildly.

Throughout it all, the horse the boys love—the horse is the first thing we see in the film and the last—remains a symbol of their hope. Their hope for freedom, for a connection to the natural world which the grim conditions of their urban environment denies them, for the affection Giuseppe, the son of impoverished war refugees, and the orphaned and homeless Pasquale experience only from each other. When the boys are separated from their horse and from each other, they are set adrift and become prey to all the worst personal and social evils that come their way.

Shoeshine isn't as well remembered today as other films of the postwar Italian neorealist movement, in part perhaps because it has never received a deluxe home video release by a company like Criterion and is revived less often than better known neorealist films. Yet it has made a strong impression on some very knowledgeable people. Martin Scorsese admired de Sica's empathy with his child characters: "There are no barriers at all between de Sica and these children whose tragic lives he understood perfectly." Orson Welles once called it the best movie he had ever seen and praised its invisible technique, remarkable praise indeed from a director of such highly visible technique. Welles was certainly justified, though, to recognize that de Sica was too savvy to allow a showy style to distract from the highly charged emotions of the story or the truth in the performances of his actors.

In 1948 Shoeshine became the first film ever to receive a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best foreign language film of the year. (This didn't become an official category until the 1956 awards year.) The Academy's citation stated that it was chosen because "the high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity." This seems an unintentionally ironic way to put it, in view of the way the bleak conditions in postwar Italy are mirrored by the film's unflinchingly bleak outlook. Not only do Pasquale and Giuseppe not triumph over adversity, but on the contrary are thoroughly crushed by it.

You might also be interested in:

• Umberto D. (1952)
• Two Early Films by Italian Masters: The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
• My Voyage to Italy (1999)

This post is part of the Horseathon, which runs May 25-28. For more information and a schedule of posts, visit the host site, My Love of Old Hollywood.

Umberto D. (1952)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica

A great film about what it is like to stand by and watch helplessly as you slip into poverty and even your dignity becomes excess baggage.

—Martin Scorsese on Umberto D.

In the 1940s Vittorio de Sica directed a string of movies that were both popular and critical successes, movies that helped focus the world's attention on Italian cinema and the emergent postwar film movement of neorealism. These films centered on children and told stories largely from their point of view—pictures like The Children Are Watching Us (1944), Shoeshine (1946), and The Bicycle Thieves (1948). In 1951 de Sica turned his attention in a different direction, to a bleak story about an impoverished elderly man and his dog. The picture, Umberto D., was De Sica's first box-office flop in Italy, and its failure prompted him to turn away for nearly a decade from the serious subjects and realistic presentation of the hugely influential school of filmmaking he helped pioneer. Today Umberto D. is generally considered one of his two greatest works, along with The Bicycle Thieves. De Sica himself cited it as his own personal favorite of his films.

Umberto D. opens with a scene that might have come directly from a modern newscast. Down a street in Rome a large group of people march toward the camera, waving placards and chanting slogans. As they approach, we see that these are not ordinary street protesters but dignified elderly men dressed in overcoats, hats, suits and ties. They are retirees who, seeing their fixed incomes eaten up by inflation, are shouting "Justice for pensioners" and pressing for a raise in their pensions. Near the front of the demonstration is an elderly man accompanied by a small dog. The man is Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant, and the dog is his Jack Russell-like mongrel, Flike. When the police arrive and break up the demonstration, Umberto and Flike scurry away. "I'm just a good-for-nothing old man," he says to another pensioner, explaining that he is in debt, has no relatives to help him, is plagued by a persistent cough and fever, and is about to be evicted from his room because he is a month behind in his rent.

The film is Umberto's story, and he is in every scene, everything shown from his point of view. The plot of the movie is quite simple, a series of small everyday events that little by little give us a complete picture of Umberto's life in all its abject humiliation and hopelessness. Umberto responds to his dire circumstances with a series of increasingly desperate actions. He sells his possessions, beginning with his gold watch and his books. He tries begging in the street but cannot bring himself to carry through with it. Instead he has Flike sit up and beg with a hat in his mouth while he hides behind a nearby building. When an old acquaintance recognizes the dog, Umberto runs up and tells him that Flike is only playing. He even contrives to have himself admitted to the hospital so that he can save the money he would ordinarily spend on food to apply toward his back rent.

After Umberto is released from the hospital, his situation begins to go seriously downhill. He returns home to find that his landlady is redecorating the apartment in an absurdly frou-frou style, the wallpaper half stripped from the walls of his room, a huge hole knocked in the wall between his room and the next one. Umberto's world seems to be literally crumbling around him. Worst of all, Flike is missing. Rushing to the animal shelter to look for his dog, he is horrified by the casual indifference to the fate of the animals there and barely manages to rescue Flike before he is euthanized. Returning to his room late that night, he finds himself standing at his window looking into the deserted street below, and we can tell from the numb expression on his face and a quick zoom to the pavement below that he is about to jump. It is only when he turns around and sees Flike sitting on the bed waiting for him that he abandons his suicidal thoughts, at least for the moment.

In Umberto D. de Sica, like Chaplin in his films, presents the world as a place populated by victimizers and the victimized. When people are not outright malicious like Umberto's callous, social-climbing landlady, they are indifferent to the suffering of others. Just about the only other person in the film who elicits a sympathetic reaction is Maria, the meek, kind-hearted teenage maid in the apartment where Umberto lives. When Umberto packs his belongings and sneaks out in the middle of the night, he unexpectedly encounters Maria on the staircase and says goodbye to her. The dejected expression on his face makes it clear that he has given up all hope and decided to kill himself and that Maria—like himself another of life's sad victims and the only person in the film to show him any affection—is the one person he will be genuinely sorry to leave behind.

Much of the second half of the film is occupied with Umberto's futile attempts to make some sort of provision for Flike's future. No matter what he tries, though, nothing seems to work out. Apparently convinced that he and his dog are destined to stay together until the end, he finally takes Flike in his arms and walks around the barrier at a train crossing and toward an oncoming train. When the terrified dog leaps from his arms and runs away, cringing behind a tree, this rejection is too much for Umberto and he pursues Flike, wheedling him until he comes back. De Sica might portray Umberto's world as an inhumane place, but in the end he declines to treat his viewers with such cruelty. If we can't be certain what the future holds for Umberto and Flike, we now know that for them there will at least be some kind of future. In a final scene reminiscent of the one in Chaplin's Modern Times, we last see the old man and his dog walking away from us down a path in the park, playing fetch with a pine cone.

This ambiguous ending might seem a timid one, the result of a reluctance by de Sica to follow through on the grim situation he has set up so relentlessly, but I think closer examination tells us it is not entirely arbitrary. If Umberto's pride has been the thing that has kept him going this long, the inflexibility and selfishness it has engendered have also been his greatest flaws. Perhaps his concern for Flike manages to chip away enough of that stubborn pride to make him more adaptable and less self-involved. After all, his resources may be limited, but he does have resources. And it's a psychological truism that nothing can take us out of ourselves and help us transcend self-pity like loving someone else more than we love ourselves. Maybe in the end, rather than Umberto saving Flike, the truth is the reverse, and it is Flike who saves Umberto.

There is no doubt that of all the neorealist filmmakers, de Sica had the strongest streak of sentimentality, and my description of Umberto D. might make it sound quite the tearjerker. But de Sica didn't see the film that way, maintaining that rather than being sentimental, it was a realistic film made "without compromise." I think he was being absolutely honest when he said this, because even though the subject of the picture might break your heart, de Sica does present it in a totally realistic, unmanipulative way. This is a technically simple film with no fancy camera work and only one brief instance of showy editing, when the train is bearing down on Umberto and Flike and de Sica uses some rapid cutting and the shrill sound of the train whistle for heightened effect. Otherwise he makes no overt attempt to pull the viewer's emotional strings either through technical means or through overemphasis, recognizing the powerful emotional force of the story and standing aside to let it do its work.

Still, there's no denying that Umberto D. is a litmus test of any viewer's susceptibility to sentiment in film: if this movie doesn't melt your heart, none ever will. It's the kind of movie which contains scenes, situations, and images—and inspires emotional responses—that you will never forget. And it contains two of the greatest performances ever committed to film. One by seventy-two year old Carlo Battisti, a retired professor from Florence who made exactly one movie in his life, as Umberto. The other by a mongrel named Napoleone as his devoted canine friend Flike.

You might also like:
• Two Early Films by Italian Masters: The Children Are Watching Us (1944) and Story of a Love Affair (1950)
• My Voyage to Italy (1999)

This post is part of the Classic Movie Dogathon hosted by the Classic Film & TV Cafe, which runs February 19-22. Click here for the full schedule.

La Terra Trema (1948)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Luchino Visconti

The postwar Italian neorealist school of cinema has to be one of the most influential movements in film history. Neorealism came about almost by accident when the Italian film industry resumed after Liberation and directors were forced by the lack of studio facilities and a dearth of trained actors to turn to real locations and nonprofessional actors. What began as an adjustment of subject and technique to practical necessity quickly became a full-blown aesthetic, as these filmmakers, most of whom had experience making documentary films, found inspiration in events of the war and the immediate postwar era and sought to break down—or at least create the illusion of breaking down—the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in movies.

Within ten years, though, neorealism in its original form no longer existed. Roberto Rossellini had moved on to more personal stories starring his wife, Ingrid Bergman, while Vittorio de Sica, with his more sentimental brand of neorealism, had progressed to projects of greater universality like Umberto D. Luchino Visconti's directing career followed a similar path. His first fiction film, Ossessione (1942), was based on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. This was a proto-neorealistic work that, in its use of actual locations and unglamorous, often untrained actors, looked ahead to the first truly neorealist film, Rossellini's Open City (1945), while approaching Cain's theme of doomed, obsessive love in a more conventional way, treating it with an eroticism and emotional pitch of near-melodramatic intensity. From the 1950s on, Visconti made films that departed ever further from neorealism, films with an increasing emphasis on ornate pictorial values and almost operatic emotions. (Visconti called the style of these later pictures neoromanticism.) But between Ossessione and his later, more sensuous and grandiose movies, Visconti made a film that is the purest expression of neorealism I've seen, La Terra Trema (1948).

The film takes place in the small fishing village of Acitrezza in Sicily and deals with the fortunes and misfortunes of a family of fishermen, the Valastros. Returning to the village after war service on the mainland is the eldest son of the family, 'Ntoni. His father has recently been lost at sea, and the family now includes his grandfather, mother, three sisters, and younger brothers. The village fishermen all work for a syndicate of wholesalers who own the fishing boats, employ them, and buy their catch at rock-bottom prices fixed by the cartel. There is little hope that any of the fishermen will ever be able to break free of their economic dependence on the wholesalers. But 'Ntoni brings home with him new ideas that threaten to shake up life in his village, where little has changed in the last hundred years. He wants to buy his own fishing boat and go into business for himself, and to finance this scheme, he persuades his family to mortgage their house, their only asset. His hope is that when he succeeds, others in the village will follow his example and break the power of the wholesalers who control their lives.

All seems to be going well until 'Ntoni and his brothers are lost at sea in a sudden storm. For several days his mother and sisters wait anxiously on the shore while a search party hunts for the missing men. Although they are eventually found and hauled back to shore, the boat is damaged beyond repair. 'Ntoni now finds himself without a boat, blacklisted by the cartel, and unable to pay the mortgage on the family's home. Evicted from their house, the Valastro family rapidly begins to fall apart as one by one, each member of the family suffers the dire effects of the failure of 'Ntoni's plans. Unemployed, 'Ntoni begins drinking and carousing with the village derelicts. Worst of all, the villagers and wholesalers accuse him of being responsible for destroying his family by his arrogance in defying tradition. He must face not only personal defeat and the ruin of his family, but also the destruction of his hopes to bring about a change in the fearful and hidebound attitudes of his fellow villagers.

It's not surprising that La Terra Trema was originally intended as a straight documentary on the lives of the fishermen of Acitrezza. It soon became a fictional picture, though, when Visconti decided to graft onto this original concept an adaptation of the novel I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga, the rights to which he already owned, and to use the locations and villagers he had previously scouted out. The final film is imbued with a compelling sense of authenticity. This is due in part to the decision to film entirely on location, in the streets and houses of Acitrezza, in the harbor and in the boats of the fishermen, an approach not unlike that of other neorealist films of the time. Even more responsible for the film's sense of authenticity is Visconti's decision to use the villagers, none of whom had any formal training, as actors. Other neorealist directors successfully mixed trained and untrained actors—although I don't think anyone watching Open City, for example, would mistake Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi for nonprofessionals—but Visconti chose to use no professional actors at all.

Visconti must have had tremendous rapport with the villagers who play the characters in La Terra Trema, for they avoid amateurishness just as surely as they avoid any hint of the calculation of trained actors. These people express simple, direct emotions in a convincingly realistic manner that seems completely unlike performance, and in doing so they have a powerful effect on the viewer. Our sympathy for the harshness of their lives seems wholly earned. They make us really feel for these people without making us suspect that we have been in any way unfairly manipulated. Visconti plays his own part in this by neither overemphasizing the emotions of his characters, as he sometimes did in other films, nor taking an aloof, clinical attitude.

Yet for all the realism of its setting and characters, La Terra Trema is a tremendously artful film, and the person responsible for that artistry is clearly Visconti. This is a movie whose cinematic technique is one of great simplicity. There is no fancy editing and no fancy camerawork. The camera hardly ever moves; in the picture's nearly two and a half hours I noticed exactly one traveling shot. The rest of the film consists of static camera placement, with the camera panning and tilting to follow the action during long takes. Much of this might have been dictated by the limitations of location shooting, but because this minimalist style seems entirely natural to the subject, it actually works in the film's favor, helping the film achieve a kind of grandeur in its simplicity.

Despite this technical simplicity, La Terra Trema contains images as dazzling as any in cinema. Visconti accomplishes this visual splendor through the beauty of the individual shots. He creates one stunningly composed and lighted shot after another, selecting and organizing everything in the frame—the rugged landscapes and seascapes, the earthy, subtly expressive faces of his actors, the groupings of characters—with the eye of a painter. Even a purely descriptive passage such as the one near the beginning of the movie documenting the way the villagers fish at night and return with their catch before dawn is filmed with ravishing beauty.

It's not surprising either that the original documentary film that became La Terra Trema was commissioned by the Italian Communist Party. Born into a wealthy Milanese family, Visconti joined the Communist Party during World War II and remained committed to its principles for the rest of his life. La Terra Trema has a plot of obvious appeal to a person of Visconti's political beliefs. It deals with an underclass of workers who are ruthlessly exploited, excluded from ownership of the means of production by being prevented from owning their own fishing boats, which would allow them to bypass the wholesalers and sell directly to the seafood distributors. Moreover, they are persuaded to accept their status by being brainwashed and intimidated into believing that class hierarchy is part of the natural order. These are the very things 'Ntoni wants to overcome.

Today, the political views expressed in La Terra Trema strike me as a very mild form of Marxism indeed, closer to modern entrepreneurial capitalism than to communism. But whatever an individual viewer's attitude toward the politics of the film, you don't have to be a Marxist to know that when the source of their power is corrupt, those in power will use all available means to crush opposition. Viewers of any political persuasion should be able to identify with 'Ntoni's resentment at his powerlessness and his desire for economic independence, and to feel the pain and humiliation of his failure to bring about change. Anyone watching La Terra Trema can take away the message that a small personal defeat with little impact on the world at large can in its own way be as moving as a big event that changes history. If the ultimate point of neorealism was that ordinary lives are just as interesting and as meaningful as great ones, then I can't think of a better film to illustrate that point than La Terra Trema.

My Voyage to Italy (1999)

Country: Italy-US
Director: Martin Scorsese

"I like to think of neorealism as the seed from which a beautiful, solid tree has grown, and the branches on that tree represent virtually all the major Italian filmmakers of the postwar era."

—Martin Scorsese in My Voyage to Italy

My Voyage to Italy—part reminiscence, part film essay—is Martin Scorsese's splendid four-hour long valentine to post-World War Two Italian cinema. Concentrating on movies made between Open City (1945) and 8½ (1963), it examines the origins of the neorealist movement, which he calls "the most precious moment in film history," and its influence on Italian cinema. Scorsese focuses on the five most important directors who came out of the movement and have been inspirations both for his own films and in one way or another for nearly all Italian films made after them.

Scorsese spends the first half hour of his documentary relating how as a boy he first became acquainted with Italian cinema—by watching subtitled Italian movies shown on television on Friday nights with his family and neighbors, beginning with the first Italian movie he ever saw, the neo-realist Roberto Rossellini's Paisan. He tells how his grandparents, immigrants from Sicily who never even became American citizens, and his family's friends and neighbors in New York's Little Italy, where he grew up, gathered at his home to watch these movies for scenes of their homeland and to hear the Sicilian dialect they spoke themselves being spoken by the actors in the movies. The experience was the first time he really became aware of his own family's origins, and for a young boy already fascinated with the American movies he saw regularly with his father, he found that a new world of cinema had opened to him. Interspersed with excerpts from Italian films are home movies of his own family and neighborhood in the late 1940s. Together they paint a vivid picture of Scorsese's own boyhood, both the real and the imaginary.

After a half hour or so, Scorsese moves on to an overview of the neorealist movement and then to the films and directors themselves. Neorealism was, he says, something that arose spontaneously. It came about not as a deliberate movement based on a manifesto of any kind, but as a collective response to Italy's traumas of World War Two. It was born not only of the psychic need to make sense of the painful events of the recent past, an aim that required greater realism than was typical of prewar Italian movies, but also of practical necessity. With the studios bombed and then taken over as refugee camps, filmmakers turned to the streets and bombed-out ruins of the cities and to the countryside for locations. When there weren't enough professional actors to populate a movie, they turned to non-professionals. These decisions initially born of necessity led to an artistic style that perfectly suited the desire of these directors to capture reality on film, as he puts it, "to dissolve the barrier between documentary and film."

Scorsese spends nearly an hour on an exhaustive survey of the early films of Roberto Rossellini, identifying his first postwar work, Open City, as the first true neorealist movie, as have film scholars virtually without exception. He illustrates the movie with copious excerpts, something he continues for the rest of the documentary. Some of his descriptions of the films run in excess of ten minutes (the longest is a twenty minute segment on Luchino Visconti's Senso that includes a fascinating analysis of the movie's color design) and practically consist of a condensed version of the movie, an approach which provides a visual and emotional feast for those already familiar with the films, but which those unfamiliar with them and sensitive to spoilers might find too detailed. Curiously, the one major early Rossellini work he barely touches on is Journey to Italy (1954), the one from which he took the title of his own documentary, although the reason for this apparent neglect becomes clear when he returns to this film later on.

From Rossellini, Scorsese moves next to Vittorio de Sica, noting that if Rossellini filmed the facts, de Sica concentrated on the emotional responses of his characters to such an extent that, as Orson Welles remarked, the camera became invisible. He continues with the other major neorealist directors—Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni. As he examines each in turn, he shows how as a director, each of these men contributed something more to Italian cinema as his own personal style evolved and he departed further from the original documentary-like aspirations of early neo-realism, leading postwar Italian cinema to its zenith in the early 1960s. To Rossellini's objective realism and de Sica's stress on emotions, Visconti added politics, history, and an emphasis on style that transformed his films into something almost operatic. Fellini brought to Italian cinema a strong sense of autobiography, injecting into each of his films an authenticity based on his own personal experience. Antonioni embarked in his films on an existential quest that ended in enigma, a search for meaning in life that yielded no clear answers beyond the fact that individuals seeking connection, whether with one another or with life itself, are fated to isolation.

Towards the end of My Voyage to Italy, Scorsese finally returns to Rossellini's Journey to Italy, right before turning to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. As I watched scenes from Journey to Italy, I was struck by how much they seemed like scenes from an Antonioni movie of the early 1960s, a real surprise since Antonioni's sensibility at this time strikes me as having little in common with Rossellini's straightforward nerealism. Scorsese then gives us a further surprise by concluding My Voyage to Italy with a thorough and loving examination of Fellini's 8½, another film that seems in a world far away not only from Rossellini's but at times from reality itself, a film that Scorsese compares to experiencing a dream. In this way Scorsese ingeniously manages to relate the origins of neorealism to its ultimate, and seemingly far-removed, expressions.

Scorsese makes My Voyage to Italy a moving and personal experience. He shows how these directors and their films affected him both as an impressionable boy and as an adult, inspiring him and teaching him in his own career as a film director. Yet he manages to filter his perceptions through his own reactions to these films without ever falling into the trap of this New Journalism approach to non-fiction—solipsism, that is, making himself the main subject. Even more impressively, he makes an informative movie of real substance, offering penetrating and insightful analysis of those five directors who emerged from neo-realism and of their work, and he does this without even a trace of academic or intellectual pretension.

I just cannot recommend this documentary more enthusiastically to anyone interested in Scorsese, in the neorealist movement, in Italian cinema, in postwar European cinema, or in film history in general. If you are already well-informed on the subjects covered by Scorsese, you can revisit them all over again, like a cinematic gourmet savoring a banquet of many of your favorite dishes. If you consider yourself moderately familiar with these subjects, you're certain to find previously untasted delights to add to your must-see list, just as I did. If you're new to these subjects or just want to learn more about them, I can't think of a better place to start. In any case, I can guarantee that a real treat lies in store.

FILMS DISCUSSED AT LENGTH IN MY VOYAGE TO ITALY

Rossellini: Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, The Miracle, The Flowers of St. Francis, Stromboli, Europa '51, Journey to Italy (a.k.a. Voyage to Italy, Strangers)
De Sica: Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D
Visconti: Ossessione, La Terra Trema, Senso
Fellini: I Vitelloni, La Dolce Vita, 8½
Antonioni: L'Avventura, The Eclipse

MARTIN SCORSESE SPEAKS

• On Open City:

"a one-of-a-kind film where history and cinema met to create something uniquely powerful"

• On Paisan:

"a film about Liberation and its price"

• On Germany Year Zero:

"I think that Rossellini was pleading with the nations of postwar Europe to find some sympathy and tolerance for their former enemy so that they could all go on together"

• On The Flowers of St. Francis:

"a film about having faith, the embracing of faith"

• On Journey to Italy:

"it feels like you're watching a real-life married couple"

"small events and details are the movie"

• On Shoeshine:

"there are no barriers at all between de Sica and these children whose tragic lives he understood perfectly"

• On The Bicycle Thieves:

"this was the movie that many people around the world regarded as the peak moment of neorealism"

• On Umberto D:

"a great film about what it is like to stand by and watch helplessly as you slip into poverty and even your dignity becomes excess baggage"

• On Luchino Visconti:

"Visconti worked through total artifice as a way to the truth"

• On Senso:

"style is everything"

• On Fellini:

"in the films of his I love the best, the emotions feel very personal, as though they've actually been lived through"

• On I Vitelloni:

"humor always has a way of creeping into a serious situation and [Fellini] always pulls it off"

•On La Dolce Vita:

"a milestone, a watershed, a breakthrough . . . a new kind of storytelling"

"a spiritual epic"

• On 8½:

"[Fellini] reinvented what we all knew as cinema"

"the really thrilling thing about 8½ is that you're basically watching Fellini create the film before your eyes"

"the purest expression of love for the cinema that I know of"

• On L'Avventura:

"the pain of just being alive"

• On The Eclipse:

"a real step forward in storytelling . . . it feels less like a story and more like a poem"

"the final seven minutes . . . suggested that the possibilities in cinema were absolutely limitless"

• On the cinema of the early 1960s:

"I wish that every young person with an interest in film could have had the same experience that I had back in those days—to be young, open to everything, and to walk into the theater and have your expectations not just met, but surpassed, time and time again."

Two Early Films by Italian Masters

The Children Are Watching Us (1944)
***^½
Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio de Sica

The Children Are Watching Us, made in 1942 but not released until two years later, is a superior tearjerker that, being told largely from a child's point of view, anticipates Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thieves. The child is a boy about five years old, Pricò. His family is middle class: The father works as an accountant, they live in a modern apartment block in Rome with a live-in housekeeper, and the mother is secretly having a love affair. The movie opens with his mother taking Pricò to the park to watch a puppet show, after which she sends him off to play while she meets her lover, who is trying to pressure her into running away with him. Unknown to her, however, Pricò is watching from a distance, and although he doesn't really understand what is happening, he knows instinctively that it is something which threatens the security of his comfortable life.

This sequence sets the tone of the rest of the movie. As Pricò observes from a distance, we see nearly everything that happens from his point of view. When his mother abandons the family for her lover, we see his sadness and confusion, and we share his sense of being lost as he is passed from one relative to another, each one less sympathetic and caring toward him than the last. We also sense his joy when, after he becomes seriously ill, his mother returns. But even though she resolves to break off her relationship with her lover, he is so persistent that she eventually finds herself torn between him and her child.

De Sica's attitude toward the behavior of the adults in Pricò's life—his father, the housekeeper Agnese, the mother, and her lover—is quite objective. He makes us understand the complexity of their relationships, how the feelings and desires of each conflict with those of the others and also the incredible difficulty of the decisions they must make. He guides the actors who play these parts to restrained performances that convey only too clearly their quiet inner turmoil over their choices. (His attitude toward the other adults in the movie is much less tolerant, their negative qualities exaggerated almost to the point of satire.) Yet in the end they are always guided by their own emotions even though they are aware of the unfortunate effects their choices will have on others. Sadly, it is Pricò, who has no say in their actions, who always ends up suffering the most.

A seaside holiday intended to be a celebration of his parents' reconciliation provides some terrific set pieces including a magic show at the hotel where they are staying, encounters with a group of decidedly odd fellow vacationers, and a very touching episode absolutely typical of early de Sica in which Pricò runs away and tries to get back to his father, who has already returned to Rome, after he sees his mother furtively meeting her lover in a scene that mirrors the one in the park at the beginning of the movie. In many ways The Children Are Watching Us is quite similar to the later Umberto D., only here the lonely, misunderstood, and helpless main character is a small boy rather than an old man. The boy who plays Pricò, Luciano de Ambrosis, who was not even five years old when the film was made, is marvelous at expressing the sensitivity and sadness of his character, and his ability to cry on cue amazing. To call his performance moving would be a tremendous understatement. Heartbreaking would be more like it.

At the end, Pricò is confronted with his own difficult decision, one which he makes with greater maturity and less selfishness than the adults in the the film. Perhaps all that silent watchfulness taught him more than the unobservant adults ever suspected.


Story of a Love Affair (1950)
***^½
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

I couldn't help thinking of the recent Tilda Swinton movie I Am Love while I watched this film. Both involve the wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist, trapped in a loveless marriage to a rather cold older man, who has an affair with a poor but younger, more sexual, and more vital man. But I Am Love, which consciously evoked Antonioni, couldn't stop drooling over the very goodies it seemed to be condemning as emblems of shallow materialism and even provided the heroine with a hopeful future with an earthy stud, an attempt to coat a simple story of adultery with a slick and oppressively elaborate veneer that for me gave the movie a distinct air of artifice. In contrast, Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair, his first fiction film after working for several years as a screenwriter and director of documentaries, seems completely genuine.

Compared to Antonioni's spare later films, Story of a Love Affair is positively packed with plot. Parts of it resemble film noir, while other parts are closer to romantic melodrama. In Milan, a wealthy businessman hires a firm of private detectives to investigate the past of his beautiful young wife, Paola (Lucia Bosé), whom he married without knowing anything about her and who has never revealed anything about her life before their marriage. He also suspects she is having an affair, so he wants her followed. Through the investigating detective, we learn that Paola's best friend was killed in a freak accident—a fall down an elevator shaft—just days before she was to be married and that Paola hastily moved to Milan right afterward.

We also learn that the dead friend's fiancé, Guido (Massimo Girotti), has recently shown up in Milan and that he is indeed having an affair with Paola. Further, it seems that the two were in love before and that even though they did not actually kill the friend, they were passively responsible in allowing the accident to happen. The feelings of guilt over her complicity in her friend's death drove Paola to flee to Milan and find refuge in an impetuous and loveless marriage to a wealthy older man. Now that Guido has returned to her life, she wants to be with him, but she doesn't want to give up the material comforts she has grown used to. So she hatches a plot with Guido to murder her husband so that she can have both her lover and her husband's money.

This may sound like the typical film noir material of movies like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, but Antonioni puts his own stamp on the story, finding and developing elements that would become fundamental to his later work. He hasn't yet arrived at his fully evolved mature style, but the beginnings of it are unmistakable. I think of Antonioni as one of the most visual of all filmmakers, and you can see that tendency already at play here. In Story of a Love Affair are many examples both of his lingering static shots with their formalistic compositions and also of his fascination with architecture and the urban landscape, traits that were to become hallmarks of his films. Also in evidence is Antonioni's characteristic unwillingness to fragment the interaction of his characters into edited sequences, his preference being to follow them with the camera in precisely choreographed long takes—especially in confined interiors—a technique modern filmmakers might do well to study as an alternative to the overuse of the hand-held camera.

Most striking of all, though, is the gradual introduction into what starts as a genre film of themes that would later become preoccupations. The world Antonioni depicts in Story of a Love Affair is one in which people are eager to forget both their collective and their own personal pasts. Yet willingly cut off from the past, they seem adrift in the present, unable to move forward, only to spin around and around in endless circles without ever getting anywhere. Antonioni uses conventional noir tropes to explore his fascination with the twin vortices of the post-World War Two human condition: the alienation of his characters from their lives and the enervation that at the same time prevents them from doing anything to change their lives. And running as an undercurrent through the entire film is a sense of personal isolation that results from the profound inability of these people to connect. At times it's hard to believe this film was made sixty years ago, so fresh does it seem in its attitudes.

I Vitelloni (1953)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini

What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.

The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.

I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).

With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.

But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.

Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.

Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.

One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.

L'Eclisse (1962)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

The first time I watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse was years ago, and I remembered so little about it—two brief scenes and the amazing silent coda which lasts several minutes—that when I recently watched it again I was essentially seeing it for the first time. The greatest impression the film left with me was what a completely visual filmmaker Antonioni was. Paul Cézanne once said of Claude Monet, "He's nothing but an eye, but what an eye." I think this comment could equally be applied to Antonioni, for here incident is less important and has less impact than visual detail. Each shot in L'Eclisse is masterfully composed, at once abstract and fraught with significance. The choice of objects and people; their placement and movement in the frame; the geometry, perspective, and depth of the intricate yet crisply delineated compositions; the subtle tonal gradations of the black-and-white images; the purposeful transitions from one image to the next; the architecture of buildings, rooms, and streets—all visual aspects of each image in the movie are carefully and precisely planned by Antonioni.

In contrast to this complete control of the visual elements of the movie, the most important elements of conventional narrative—character and plot—seem startlingly casual. The main characters, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a translator, and Piero (Alain Delon), a stock trader, are only sketchily defined. She is a detached observer of her own life living almost entirely in the sensations of the moment, while he is a shallow materialist driven by an ethos of competition and acquisition. The events of the movie seem almost self-propelled, unfolding in an episodic way that defies conventional narration in which one event leads to the next as the plot proceeds to its conclusion. Antonioni instead simply lays out a series of incidents whose impact is essentially cumulative.

The movie does have a clear beginning, as Vittoria breaks off her engagement and her relationship to Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in a long, elaborately choreographed and edited sequence as self-contained and visually distinctive as the lengthy montage at the end. But from that point on events, although presented chronologically, seem to evolve spontaneously as the movie meanders from episode to episode. Events occur almost in isolation from one another, and the most memorable parts of the movie have little causal connection: The evening Vittoria spends with her girl friends, chatting, dressing up, and fooling around. The eerie episode when Piero's car, having been stolen by a drunk, is lifted from the river where it has crashed, with the drowned thief still in it. The frenzy of the stock exchange where Piero works, at one point interrupted by a minute's silence for a dead colleague before the trading bell rings and pandemonium instantly resumes. A quiet interlude in a small private airplane, where Vittoria seems to come unmoored from her ordinary existence and float free for a brief time, a sequence that more vividly than any other in the film gives a sense of the contrast between interior confinement, with four people crammed into a tiny airplane, and the openness of exterior space, with the plane floating through the sky and clouds.

Even the ending is wholly ambiguous. After their last tryst, Vittoria and Piero vow to meet again that evening and every day after that. Yet after they part, Piero replaces all the telephones he has taken off the hook for the duration of the tryst and resumes his normal commercial life, while Vittoria wanders down the staircase hesitatingly, her facial expressions hinting at indecision and conflict, actions that mirror those of the first sequence when she was working up the nerve to tell her fiancé she had decided to end their relationship. Yet there is method to this apparent narrative randomness: it corresponds exactly to what I take to be the point of the film, that in the modern world people's lives simply proceed from one stage to the next without clear meaning or purpose. Tellingly, Antonioni declines to do with his narrative what storytellers traditionally have always done—impose form where there is none inherent.

The one element of conventional narrative that Antonioni does not minimize is setting. In fact, he makes this the centerpiece and the unifying element of the movie. Always there is the emphasis on space—the lack or surfeit of it—and the contrast between overfilled interior spaces and empty exterior spaces—the vast, soulless ultra-modern postwar suburbs where Vittoria lives, places that are nearly silent except for the rustling of foliage, the spooky vibration of metal fence posts in the breeze, the clang of metal gates as they open and shut.

All this attention to visual detail is not just decorative, but profoundly thematic. The places where these people live and work, the landscapes through which they move tell us more about them than do their words and actions. The people in the foreground and what is happening to them are less important than the buildings, streets, objects, even other people in the background and on the periphery, for it is through location that Antonioni reveals his preoccupation with mood. The movie is ultimately more about the shifting moods of its characters than about their personalities, problems, or motivation. The people in the movie are almost vacuums. The places where they exist have greater substance and form than they themselves do, in a sense standing in for the vacancy of their inner lives.

Then there is that stunning final montage (Antonioni's version of Ozu's pillow shots?) when we revisit outdoor locations where scenes in the movie have taken place, but without any of the main characters present, ending as the streetlights come on and night falls. Containing no dialogue and with no obvious narrative connection to the rest of the film, this sequence is still perhaps the most meaningful in the entire movie. Antonioni seems to be saying that people and events are transient, that only places last. This is most strongly expressed in recurrent images of a barrel of water in which Vittoria earlier dropped a stick and which has now sprung a leak. As Antonioni repeatedly returns to the barrel we watch the water slowly emptying from it and flowing down the street and into the gutter. Life simply goes on, he seems to be saying, slowly flowing away, leaving behind only the empty vessel that once contained it. It is to Antonioni's credit that he has made a film about ennui that itself is never boring, a quality due largely to his astounding ability to use the camera to evoke mood and to transfer that mood almost subliminally to the viewer.

The strongest memory of a living person we take from the film is of Monica Vitti, whose Vittoria—in her aimless drift through life, unable to connect for long with anyone or anything—is the human focus of the movie. And the strongest human images that remain behind are the many lingering shots of her unreadable face, her expressions enigmatic yet hauntingly suggestive of a woman lost in a strange, bewildering, and apparently meaningless world.