Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The Italian Cinema: Beyond Neo-Realism


In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Italy became the national force behind one of the most important movements in the modern cinema: the Italian Neo-Realist movement. Beginning with such films as Rome: Open City (Italy 1945) by Roberto Rossellini and La Terra Trema (Italy 1947) by Luchino Visconti, as well as the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica, the Italian cinema brought to the art of film making an overt social and political consciousness. With the fall of Mussolini's Fascist government and the end of the Fascist controls which had stifled the Italian cinema of the 1930s, an energetic spirit of film making literally took to the streets of Rome.

Though the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement were very different from each other, they shared certain common concerns. The recent political history and diverse social conditions of modern Italy were the central subject matter of the original Neo-Realist productions. Likewise, the Neo-Realist filmmakers combined a seemingly objective cinematic style with subjective, and overtly political, viewpoints. Whether they were moderate democratic figures like Rossellini and De Sica, or avowed Marxists like Visconti and, later, Bernardo Bertolucci, the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement immersed themselves in the vivid turmoil of contemporary Italy.

Aesthetically, the Neo-Realist movement presented the triumph of spatial realism over editing and montage. Long-takes and camera motion be­came the chief tools of this cinema. In these films, the artificial recon­struction of reality through the editing process was replaced by an intense concern for the ever changing nature of an open-ended sense of composition and perspective. The Neo-Realist camera would prowl the set (which often would be a real location), delineating the spatial dimensions perceived through the lens and allowing the compositional elements of the image to shift and change.

By the mid-1950s, the Italian cinema began to change, but the basic tenets of Neo-Realism remained an important influence. Increasingly, new forces were being felt by Italian filmmakers and the Neo-Realist cinema had to adapt to the unique demands of the period. The need for increased pro­duction monies led Italian filmmakers into a series of co-production ventures. This meant, however, that Italian films had to address themselves to broader European concerns and risk losing some of their Italian perspective. The Italian filmmakers also began shifting away from the special realism of the early films and toward the more internalized concerns of psychoanalysis. The short-lived economic boom of the 1960s and the rapid expansion of modern industrialization created an increasing sense of alienation in Italian society as the ancient landscapes and cities were seemingly replaced by the dehumanizing forms of modern technology. This resulted in a nostalgia for the pre-Fascist past, especially the 19th century and the agrarian culture of the Italian countryside. This nostalgia was not, however, uncritical; Italians explored their past in search of the roots of their contemporary problems.

It was because of these complex and diverse forces that the Italian cinema entered its second great period during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, a second generation of major film­makers emerged and many of the earlier artists of the Neo-Realist movement entered new stages in their own development, producing films which were sometimes even more impressive than their original work. It was an active and dynamic decade that still overshadows the minor achievements of the 1980s. In this program, we present some of the significant films in the Italian cinema during this last great period.

One of the most famous of the second generation filmmakers to appear in the 1960s was Bernardo Bertolucci. Though The Conformist (Italy/France/W.Germany 1970) was his first film to receive wide inter­national attention, Bertolucci was already known in Italy for his work both as a filmmaker and as a poet. His earliest films, such as Before the Revolution (Italy 1964) and The Spider's Stratagem (Italy 1970), were expressive of his political concerns with Marxist ideals as well as his revisionist view of recent Italian history. He became increasingly concerned, however, with Freudian psychology and sexuality, as demonstrated in his production of Last Tango in Paris (Italy/France 1972) and Luna (Italy/USA 1979). While Marxism and Freudianism are not necessarily contra­dictory, Bertolucci's growing interest in psychology paralleled his dis­enchantment with conventional Marxist politics. Both The Conformist and, especially, 1900 (Italy/USA 1976) are indicative of this developing con­tradiction in his films.

The question of sexual identity and political commitment are central to The Conformist. The film's narrative, in which Jean-Louis Trintignant's character attempts to hide a homosexual episode from his youth by mindlessly conforming to the Fascist society around him, suggests the coercive nature of ideology. Though his father is an imprisoned Leftist, Trintignant's character joins Mussolini's political party and becomes a member of the Fascist secret service. The meaninglessness and banality of his actions are ultimately exposed by a series of political, sexual, and finally, murderous confrontations in which his lack of convictions results in brutal­ity and betrayal.

Though his best-known films are those of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni originally emerged as part of the Neo-Realist movement. His earliest feature films, such as Cronaca di un Amore (Italy 1950), were already moving toward a cool, austere stylization which prefigured the abstract and demanding aesthetics of his later works. With the production of L'Avventura (Italy 1959), La Notte (Italy 1960), L'Eclisse (Italy 1962), and Red Desert (Italy 1964), Antonioni created a stunning series of films which successfully redefined the spatial concerns of the Italian cinema.

In Red Desert, as in his other films, the spatial relationships of Antonioni's compositions emphasize negative space and accent the strange and ugly appearance of the industrial landscape surrounding the film's characters. This was also Antonioni's first film in color; he used a striking range of garish contrasts and monochromatic design in order to invoke the madness and alienation felt by Monica Vitti's character. With Red Desert, Antonioni created a genuinely disturbing vision of a world dominated by slag heaps, factories, and industrial waste.

Like Antonioni's career, Pietro Germi's went back to the beginning of the Neo-Realist movement. Though Germi had a long film making career and had produced a substantial range of works, he is probably best known for two comedy films of the 1960s--Divorce, Italian Style (Italy 1962) and Seduced and Abandoned (Italy 1964).In these films, Germi presented a series of bitingly savage satires on Italian society and mores.

In Seduced and Abandoned, Germi deals with the contradictions of Sicilian culture and the self-serving mentality of the Italian male. The film's black humor systematically exposes the hypocrisies of the characters' actions and outlines the particular conditions of Sicilian life. As in Germi's other comedy films, the slapstick and farce of Seduced and Abandoned succeeds in chastening the more dubious aspects of Italian behavior.

As a filmmaker, novelist, poet, and essayist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most important — and most controversial — Italian artists of the 1960s, Even his violent death in 1975 remains a subject of heated debate. His films, however, provide a complex legacy which ranged from the harsh Neo-Realist statement of Accattone (Italy 1961) to the psychological and political subject matter of Teorema (Italy 1968) and Pigsty (Italy 1969). The abrasive, and often extreme, nature of Pasolini's films made him an unusual director for a religious film. Yet his production of The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Italy 1966) is one of the few serious and intelligent works ever made on the life of Christ.

The film was a fairly close adaptation of Saint Matthew's gospel, tracing the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Resurrection. By using a documentary style of photography and a cast of non-professionals for his cast, Pasolini invoked the spirit and stylization of the Neo-Realist cinema. In the film, he places a strong emphasis on Christ's place within the context of the politics and history of the gospel's time period. In making The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Pasolini attempted to create a grand synthesis of Christianity and Marxist politics. In the process, he created a film of unique intensity and integrity.

The paradoxical life and career of Luchino Visconti parallels the contradictions of modern Italy. A direct heir to the Visconti title, he rejected his aristocratic heritage and became a member of the Italian Communist Party. As one of the founding members of the Neo-Realist movement, Visconti actually lived with Sicilian peasants and fishermen during the production of La Terra Trema. Yet Visconti was a supreme aesthete whose films contained an odd combination of Marxist analysis and operatic grandeur. By the 1960s and 1970s, his films were obsessed by history and decadence as he articulated a series of visual treatises on the futilities and failures of politics and art.

Visconti's production of Death in Venice (Italy/France 1971) was a curiously personal production for him. Based on the novella by Thomas Mann, the theme of both the story and film were close to Visconti's own personal situation and concerns. His failing health and growing estrange­ment from the modern world was similar to that of the central character of Death in Venice and the eulogistic tone of the film was indicative of Visconti's own feeling of nostalgia as well as knowledge of the deceits of history and the social bankruptcy of the past.Bern

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