FILMS INTO NOVEL - Peter Hourigan looks at a novel that swirls around Fellini and Pasolini - THE SILVER BOOK by Olivia Laing

Several months ago, cinephiles had the treat of a novel built around a cinematic moment. Daniel Kehlman’s The Director introduced us to major early German director, G.W. Pabst, trapped in Germany and trying to keep the integrity of his film  career with the Nazis now fully in control.

Now comes a novel, where the background is the making of two major Italian films of the ‘70s, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma. This is The Silver Book by Olivia Laing.

Our way into the story of these two films is through Danilo Donato (below) who was the costume designer for the two films.  Donato had a career of over forty years, and worked with many top directors, as well as Fellini and Pasolini. His final films were for Roberto Benigni, with Life is Beautiful (1997) and Pinocchio in 2002. Rossellini, Bolognini, Cavani and Zeffirelli were just a few of the other Italian directors he worked with, as well as several international names.

But the protagonist of the novel is Nicholas, a young Englishman who has fled to Italy after the suicide of a married man with whom he had had brief relationship. In Venice, he’s seen by Danilo who has gone to Venice himself, sulking over Fellini, and a bad clam. Nicholas is sketching, but it’s his angelic beauty that attracts Danilo. 

 Through Donato, Nicholas becomes involved with the films.  After taking Nicholas back to his hotel room, Danilo realises he has a person who can help him with drawing sketches of details of buildings that may be useful for Danilo’s work with Fellini. 

And so, the structure is set up for us to visit  two real filmmakers as they go about trying to make two now significant films. 

Alberto Grimaldi also figures in the story through his role as producer of both films.  He took over the producer role on Casanova when original producer De Laurentiis bowed out.  The history of the production of both films included an event in which several reels of both Salò and Casanova were stolen from one of the rooms of Cinecittà Studios, as well as some reels of a Western. All three films were still in production, and Fellini at least had to reshoot some scenes for his film. This theft is part of Nicholas’ story in The Silver Book, though we don’t get any specific insights into the reasons behind the theft.

Fellini and Pasolini go about making their films in different ways.  Fellini, we’re told, holds a very tight rein, being very particular about the smallest detail. This can mean many takes of one shot when an observer probably couldn’t see any difference between any two shots. Pasolini selects his personnel  and then leaves it to them to present him with useful material. 

Casanova is mainly filmed in Cinecittà. Salò needs locations, and the relationship between young Nicholas and Donato develops during the time when they are scouting locations mainly in the areas around Northern Italy where the German puppet state of Salò was created in the latter part of World War II. 

Later in the story, Nicholas visits Pasolini’s home in the EUR area of Rome.  “They talk about the Salò edit. The film is being dubbed into French, not Italian. To assert its status as an intellectual work, Pasolini explains. Though it will no doubt be banned as pornography whatever I do. The sex is a metaphor, he adds. Did I say that already? Who gets fucked and how. It isn’t literal.”

As you can see, Olivia Laing’s prose style is rather staccato and little nuggets of the author’s research are thrown away in a somewhat off hand way, as though to say, “Look at how much background my research has uncovered!”

But it also exposes some of the problems with the book. That’s all there is to read about the language(s) of the film. I was not aware of the French version although  it does appear that Pasolini regarded it as the “official” language of the film. (Apparently, Michel Picolli dubbed himself in the French version.)  But there’s nothing more about this detail. And before we’ve really had a chance to think about this as much more than an item of trivia, we’re on to a comment about how Pasolini expects the film to be received. 

And then even more quickly, a new paragraph with Pasolini shutting the bedroom curtains for Nicholas. 

The book is an easy read, but it is ultimately disappointing.  Nicholas’ s sexual adventures are not explored with more than superficial insight. And our pictures of the two film directors at work don’t deliver many real discoveries or details that a reasonable cinephile would not have been aware of.   Rather, there’s a sense of I knew all this before – and what I didn’t know wasn’t really necessary to gain new ideas into the films. 

Reading the book did at least inspire me to watch Salò for the first time in quite some years, so at least I guess there was something positive to say about the book.  And I’m still not sure why it was called The Silver Book.

In Praise of Claudia Cardinale - John Baxter extols the virtues of the great Italian actress - Screening at the Randwick Ritz 18-21 July

CLAUDIA CARDINALE: BEYOND BEAUTY

Cinema Reborn is partnering with the Italian Institite of Culture in Sydney, FARE Cinema and the Randwick Ritz to present a mini-retrospective of the films of the great Italian actor Claudia Cardinale. In case you are still wondering about how many of the four film selection you should see at the Randwick Ritz from 18-21 July  here is a specially written appreciation of the star by Australian writer John Baxter who, among his many books, wrote the best biography in English of Federico Fellini.  John writes:

Is there a more radiant moment in the western than that where Claudia Cardinale alights from the train in Sergio Leone’s  Once Upon a Time in the West? A little ridiculous in her straw hat (above), she’s initially lost in the bustle of other passengers, the strangeness of some Native Americans filing stoically past. Even the hands of the station clock don’t agree with those on the tiny watch on her wrist. It’s as if the next gust of desert wind will blow her away. But then a few notes of a lone and wordless female voice signify her growing resolve. With each step increasingly in charge, she strides ahead, two boys in her wake struggling with her bags, and, passing through the station building, steps out into her new life while Tonino Delli Colli’s camera and Ennio Morricone’s music soar above our heads. 

Few performers do entrances as wellas Cardinale, and this is one of the finest. To it, one could add her radiantfirst appearance in Visconti’s The Leopard, once again her own woman, sailing through the gaping men in the prince’s salon to pay her respects to the senior woman in the room, and the moment in Otto et Mezzo, where she appears (below) at the spa to Marcello Mastroianni’s jaded film-maker. Fellini was nota director of women, for whom he had little time on or off the set, but for Cardinale he made an exception.  In this film, she becomes the embodiment of hope, a manifestation of the feminine purity and joy in which Guido Anselmi has almost ceased to believe.

The same quality enchants young Jacques Perrin in Girl with a Suitcase, the deranged Mastroianni in Henry IV, and the men in any other of her performances one cares to name: grizzled western mercenaries Burt Lancaster and Woody Strode in The Professionals; Jean Sorel in Visconti’s operatically over-wrought Sandra;  as the puzzled young wife to an impotent Mastroianni in Il Bel’Antonio,  and, among the most memorable, the gypsy thief Vénus opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo’s swashbuckling 18th century brigand of de Broca’s Cartouche. When her character is killed in that film, somethingis extinguished in the men who love her. Having draped her in jewels and reverently lowered her body into the river,  sole passenger in a golden coach, Belmondo says quietly to his followers “Now to die, and quickly.” Nobody disagrees. 

For bookings and session times: https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/events/claudia-cardinale-beyond-beauty

LE SAMOURAI RETURNS

…and for those who missed out on the big hit of Cinema Reborn’s 2024 season the Ritz, and in Melbourne the Hawthorn Lido and the Elsternwick Classic, are now screening dailyJean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 masterpiece Le  Samourai. Book via the theatres’ websites.

CINEMA REBORN - JULY NEWSLETTER - AN HOMAGE TO CLAUDIA CARDINALE AT THE RANDWICK RITZ

 

Claudia Cardinale as seen in Federico Fellini's 8  1/2

DONT FORGET CINEMA REBORN’S 2025 DATES In Sydney we’re at ther Randwick Ritz from Wednesday 30 April to Tuesday 6 May. In Melbourne we are at the Hawthorn Lido from Thursday 8 to Tuesday 13 May. In the meantime here’s news of a splendid short season of films paying homage to the wonderful Italian star Claudia Cardinale. The season gets underway on Thursday 18 July and on that occasion there will be an introduction by the highly-esteemed Australian film critic Julie Rigg, founding presenter of the Movie Show on ABC  Radio National and a long time lover of Italy and Italian Cinema. BEYOND BEAUTY  The Italian Cultural Institute of Sydney, as part of the FARE CINEMA project of Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, has organized a mini-series of four feature films dedicated to the great Italian actress, Claudia Cardinale, in collaboration with Cinecittà, Moving Story, and Cinema Reborn. The films will be screened at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick on 18, 19, 20 and 21 July.  The titles on the program are iconic in the more than 150 films of her career: Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968), 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), The Girl with the Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini, 1961) and Enrico IV (Marco Bellocchio, 1984). Intended as a tribute to what has universally been considered one of the most enchanting figures of Italian cinema, the series offers the opportunity to appreciate Cardinale's artistic talents, as recognized by the many awards obtained during her sixty-year career, both in familiar and rarely seen performances. The scope of her brilliance is such that she could effortlessly move from the spaghetti western of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time to the neo-realism of Valerio Zurlini’s Girl with the Suitcase to the surreality of Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Bellocchio’s Enrico IV. All films have been restored by the Cinecitta’s labs and will be presented in 4K digital screenings. Claudia Cardinale (Tunis, 1938) is one the most important Italian actresses to emerge in the 1960s and achieve international fame, on a par with Sophia Loren and Monica Vitti. During her long career, she acted in a vast range of film genres participating in more than 150 films, some of which are considered milestones of cult cinema. She played to great public success against the most acclaimed actors of her generation -- Marcello Mastroianni, Gian Maria Volontè, Sean Connery, William Holden, Henry Fonda, Eli Wallach, David Niven, Burt Lancaster, just to name a few. Like other actresses of the 1960s and 1970s, she embodied a new female model, an emancipated, strong-willed and combative woman, striving to be free and independent, and aspiring to an equal role in emotional and professional relationships. Cardinale was awarded multiple prizes and recognitions for her performances, including five David di Donatello, five Nastri d'argento, a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, a Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement at the Berlin Film Festival, and the Lumière Prize. Once Upon a Time in the West Once upon a time in the West: a modest plot of land near Flagstone (an imaginary US Western city) is at the center of a conflict since it has the only supply of water in the area that is necessary for the upcoming steam locomotives. Sent by railroad magnate Morton to intimidate the plot’s owner into leaving, the hitman goes too far and kills the owner. When the property seems to be up for grabs, a former prostitute arrives from New Orleans, revealing that she is the murdered man’s new wife and therefore the legitimate owner of the plot. For some most appreciative thoughts about the film you can read Adrian Danks program notes written to accompany the screening at Cinema Reborn in 2022 IF YOU CLICK HERE 8½: Guido Anselmi is a film director with a successful career, who is now dealing with a crisis of inspiration that is stalling his next film and making the producer anxious. At the spa where Guido consumes his apathy, while the making of the film continues to lag behind, a varied humanity drifts about -- film critics, technicians, cardinals, psychics, as well as Guido’s women: Carla the devoted lover, Luisa the disillusioned wife, and Claudia the beautiful actress that Guido has idealized as a sort of muse.   Jacques Perrin, Claudia Cardinale The Girl with the Suitcase The girl with the suitcase: On a hot summer between Parma and the Romagna Riviera, young Aida Zepponi is left alone after Marcello, a Casanova who seduced her and made her false promises, departed in the attempt to get rid of her. Aida eventually catches up with Marcello. But when sees her in front of his house, he sends his sixteen-year-old brother, Lorenzo, to meet her. The boy, while not revealing the truth, first takes pity on Aida, then develops a crush on her.  Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale Enrico IV Henry IV: An adaptation of the play by Luigi Pirandello. To indulge the madness of an Italian nobleman who believes he is Henry IV, the family reenacts the German Emperor's court in the castle. After a while, the man suddenly regains his wisdom and, recognizing in a friend the cause of his madness, he kills him. At that point, all he can do is continue pretending to be mad. For further information: https://iicsydney.esteri.it For bookings: https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/events/claudia-cardinale-beyond-beauty

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his remarkable series of essays - 6 (22) - Italy Part 5 Post-neorealism (ii): Fellini, Olmi

Editor's Note: This is the 28th essay in Bruce Hodsdon's series chronicling what he has called International Art Cinema. The series started in March 2022 and at the foot of this entry on Italian masters Fellini and Olmi  there are links to the previous 21 posts. The series will continue throughout 2024.

Federico Fellini

Fellini biographer John Baxter makes clear that there was certainly no love lost between Federico and Luchino Visconti. “It is hard to think of two men with less in common than Fellini and Visconti […] For all his success Fellini never earned the respect Visconti accepted as his right. Although always courteous, even deferential to Visconti in public, in private Fellini was scornful (57-8). Roberto Rossellini’s background could also not have been more different but “he was the first man Fellini fell in love with. The relationship wasn’t physical but the attachment was passionate… Rossellini’s charm and glamour swept the naive Frederico into his circle. ‘Rossellini was the father he never had’ says one friend of the time. (69-70)” 

Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini

For Federico Fellini (1920-93) Italian neo-realism entailed a commitment primarily to artistic honesty rather than to a particular style or content” (Bondanella 229). Fellini saw La Dolce Vita as a “development rather than a closing’’ of neo-realism which he identified with Rossellini.

Fellini moved permanently from his home town to Rome in 1939 where he enrolled in the University of Rome although there is no record that he ever attended classes. As a freelance journalist he had the flair of a natural “for maximising the profit from a good idea” (Baxter 49). He supplemented his income from journalism by selling caricatures for publication. Working as a writer for radio gave him the experience in writing dialogue. He persuaded the owner-editor of a magazine to let him write about film and theatre stars. It was a small step from interviewing stars to thinking about a career in film. He found plenty of work as a film journalist and increasingly as a gag writer for movies achieving his first writing credit in 1943 for a film starring Anna Magnani. “His script work made him new and influential friends” including Benito Mussolini’s film-struck son Vittorio. Like every young Italian male Fellini became preoccupied with evading the draft (ibid). 

Fellini’s first contact was an approach by Rossellini about co-writing a scenario with Sergio Amedei for a tragi-comedy based on the life of a priest executed by the Nazis, the embryo of Rome Open City. Fellini’s final contribution to Open City is visible in only one scene - the priest’s encounter with a nude statue (ibid). It was working with Rossellini on Paisà and The Miracle that Fellini first experienced the exhilaration of filmmaking.

I Vitelloni

I vitelloni (1953) is a portrait based on memories of his hometown group in his birthplace, the provincial town of Rimini. His early films form “a trilogy of character” with Luci dei varietà/ Variety Lights, co-directed with Alberto Lattuada (1950 ), and Lo sceicco bianco/ The White Sheik (1951) “devoted to the clash of illusion and convention, social mask and authentic personality” (Bondanella 130). In his breakthrough international art house success starring his wife Giulietta Masina, La Strada (1954), Fellini here and in his two following films Il bidone/The Swindle (1955) and Le notte di Cabiria/The Nights of Cabiria (1956), moves “beyond his concerns with characters to a new dimension, one motivated by a personal vision and particular Fellinian mythology [exploiting] the already existing mythology of Christianity ” -  a trilogy on the theme of “spiritual poverty and inquiry into the nature of growth and salvation […]  outside a proper Catholic context” (ibid)

Fellini came to realise, as the years passed, that the script from his story “Moraldo in the City” was no longer viable because Rome was no longer the city he knew when he first arrived there” (Liehm 174).  La Dolce Vita (1959) was born from the nights he spent in Via Veneto in the company of a crowd he was never attracted to: the paparazzi congregated to make and take scandalous photos to sell to the yellow press. Out of it Fellini created an episodic fresco on the widescreen held together by two picaresque ‘heroes’, a journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his photographer. “Fellini danced his way through the hell and purgatory of modern life wearing a sardonic grin sometimes compared to that of Dante in the ‘Divine Comedy’ “(Liehm 221).

La Dolce Vita

He creates an idiosyncratic world of images and dream fantasies abandoning traditional cinematic realism. His obsession was already with the problems of the artist with its mix of modernity, recollection and reflexivity. 

Otto e mezzo/ 8 1/2 (1963) is the representative film. “In all its essentials, the film’s action grew out of Fellini’s life” (Baxter 180). A successful filmmaker is with his entourage in a remote spa to complete the script for his new film. Far from relaxing, Guido is racked by dreams in which “the vision of childhood is spacious and welcoming.” Baxter relates that Fellini’s  discovery of the work of Gustav Jung in the late 50s “made the process of refining his ideas for a new film even more tortuous” while encouraging him to further abandon realism. He had a confused desire to make a film about a day in a man’s life. “Convinced by his reading of Jung that he need no longer apologise for his imagination, Fellini intended to celebrate it in a film dedicated to the concept of the director as creator” (ibid 172). A film “entirely based on his own personality” was assembled into parades and processions marching to Nino Rota's obsessive music broadening its appeal to again attract the more general ‘La Dolce Vita audience’. 

8 1/2

At the same time, 8 1/2  has a special place “for the remarkable influence it had on the development of modern cinema.” While Kovács sees Last Year at Marienbad (1961) as marking “the closure of the romantic period, 8 1/2  represented the new consolidated status of modern cinema” (316). He also sees it as “the first film to focus entirely on the modern conception of ‘authorship' in the cinema. In Kovacs’ view, Fellini’s film emerged “at a crucial time in the context of the cultural debates over art and modern culture, “engaging with Ingmar Bergman’s doubts about the capability of cinema to express deep philosophical concerns about human existence that Bergman first personified in the characters in his 1949 film Fangelser/ Prison (1948) (ibid).

With Satyricon (1969), Kovács notes that, like Pasolini, Fellini “feels free not to reconstruct Petronius’s fragmentary “original” self-contained world of antiquity in ancient Rome but to construct his own visual and narrative mythology outside of time. From fragments originating from here and there, from antiquity, from modernity, history of art, and from his fantasy Fellini makes “an everlasting metaphysical structure of decadence salient in the midst of this pile of cultural debris and mythical fragments” (187), creating “a mythos, not merely a plot”  (Bernard Dick quote in Kovács).  Kovacs identifies this “mythical ornamentalism” is for Fellini, “a way of conceptualising, in an allegorical way, the actual reality around him,” an alternative to modern minimalism. This is something, as Kovács points out, that Tarkovsky also “takes up most seriously” (ibid).

Wider concerns are also at times admitted by Fellini such as those of women in a repressive society (Juliet of the Spirits 1965) which Fellini acknowledged  was “inspired by Giulietta and based on her.” He wanted her to play a character different from Gelsomina (in La Strada) and Cabiria. In Amacord (1974) it was the freedom of the individual in an era of social and political conformity.  

Mira Liehm describes Roma (1972) as “a stream of apparitions from Fellini's life” (298).  He was “the author of an oeuvre that holds together as a unit… The modes and times changed as he changed […] as society and the world changed, but his films continued and developed the same essential themes and ideas.” (Morando Morandini essay 587 Nowell-Smith “World Cinema’ ed.)

“Fellini, Fellini, what have you done with your youth? He is almost the only one who can answer without telling a lie: ’I’ve told everything about it.’ ”  - Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, foreword, ‘Amarcord’

                                                                  ***

Ermanno Olmi

The national heritage of socially committed neo-realism exemplified by the early films of De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti, was the starting point for a style of naturalism or ‘post neo-realism’ for a modern generation of directors in the early 60s such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Rosi and Ermanno Olmi (1931 - 2018).  Formal characteristics of post-neo-realism include a greater focus on individual personality and psychological factors which frequently meant the casting of professional actors. Another important difference from early neo-realism is the selective use of modern narrative techniques such as parallel narratives and memory flashbacks initially by Bertolucci and Olmi. The more complex formal objective/subjective interplay in post neo-realism had a substantial impact on the Czech new wave and other filmmakers in Eastern Europe struggling to free themselves from the dictates of socialist realism. Although the tone of his work is different, Milos Forman acknowledged Olmi’s influence in formally freeing his approach to narrative.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Olmi was a devout Catholic brought up in a peasant family in Bergamo, Lombardy where he filmed his masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), a faithful portrayal of peasant life in the late 19th century, a “remembrance of things past” based on his grandmother’s recollections. Beginning as a documentary filmmaker Olmi subsequently moved into what was to be a sustained career, completing 20 feature films, 1959-2007, inventively over a wider generic range than for which he has generally been credited. He chose to remain based in the north rather than moving to the centre of the film industry in Rome, preferring to work in low budget artisanal mode. As writer-director and in most cases also as cinematographer and editor, he achieved a “refined clarity” on wide-ranging projects of his own choosing unified by his underlying sense of the sacred which has been compared to that of Rossellini.

From his first feature film starting more in the manner of De Sica and Zavattini, his commitment was to chronicle his characters’ lives in apparent observational style replacing the art cinema’s subjective alienation thematic with the need for a sense of belonging for his characters. The de-dramatised lives of ordinary men and women played by non-professional actors was filmed and edited in a mix of deeper focus images in longer takes using the zoom lens rather than camera movement and closer shots of faces only in important psychological moments. 

Il Posto

Olmi’s first feature, the aptly titled Time Stood Still (1959) which began as a documentary, is about the cementing of a relationship between an older and younger man working otherwise alone together in manning a hydro-electric dam in the Italian Alps. For his second and third features, Il Posto/The Job (1961) - originally probably ironically titled The Sound of Trumpets - and I fidanzati /The Fiancées (1963), Nowell- Smith’s descriptors of “laid back rhythm and innocently conservative political stance” as marks of Olmi’s approach (155 Making Waves), also seem apt.  Sitney claims Olmi as embodying ‘the opening to the left’ which characterised both religious and parliamentary politics in Italy from the early sixties. Olmi’s ambition, however, was to challenge, in his own way, the hegemony of the left in the Italian cinema with The Tree of Wooden Clogs as “an explicit response” to Bertolucci’s leftist interpretation of Italian history in 1900 released in 1976 (ibid ).  

I Fidanzati

Apparent in Il posto is “Olmi’s genius […] for expressively employing the simple and seemingly meaningless gestures, glances, and actions gathered from the daily routine of his rather insignificant characters” (Bondanella 174). Olmi made more than 40 short industrial films, 1952-9, from which he formed an insider’s perspective. From his first feature Sitney finds in Olmi an unlikely link in the displaying of cinematic originality comparable to that of Pasolini. Olmi concentrates on how the new conditions of Industrial labour in the years of the so-called Italian economic miracle of the late 50s and 60s “took hold of the lives of workers” (184). The general soul-destroying tedium and accompanying depression in the bureaucratic work environment is softened by Olmi’s sense of humour often in play in his films, together with the feeling for his characters’ predicaments. In I fidanzanti/ The Fiancés (1963) about a young couple who are unable to marry because of the enforced poverty of ill-paid jobs, Bondanella and Sitney both note that Olmi sought to replace the typically simple plot structure of the neo-realist model with a more modernist, abstract perspective in a montage-based free mixing of events out of their chronological order also deploying psychologically based memory triggers evoking loneliness in a looser plot structure. 

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

 6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

Federico Fellini's LA STRADA (Italy, 1954) at the Ritz and the Classic - John Baxter's appreciation

One of the bits and pieces  of info assembled for the Cinema Reborn 2020 catalogue and website was this note by John Baxter on Fellini’s Oscar-winning classic La Strada.  It was originally intended to be screened on 35mm in Canberra only. The film will  now screen at the Ritz Randwick  and Elsternwick Classic  in a beautifully restored digital copy on Monday 13 July at 7.00 pm. Click on the theatre names to book. 

LA STRADA (Federico Fellini, Italy, 1954) – With Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina

 

Giulietta Masina

           
The wonder of La Strada – “The Way” or “The Road” – is not that it is so good, but that it was made at all.  At a time when documentary-style NeoRealism dominated Italian cinema, Fellini told a story which reflected his own dream-based vision of the world as a theatre of wonders, inhabited by extraordinary people. Childhood in rural Romagna made him familiar with itinerant showmen like the phoney strong-man Zampano (slang for a kind of sausage, shaped like a pig’s foot)  and his dreamy helper – or slave?- Gelsomina,  but putting them on screen aroused the enmity of such realists as Zavattini and Visconti.  Riots followed its prize-winning screening at Venice, with rival supporters brawling in the streets. Anthony Quinn thought so little of the film that he sold his share before it was even released.  La Strada’s success disconcerted Fellini, particularly since most of the praise went to his wife Giulietta Masina.  

Conceived as a Pierrot Lunaire-innocent, the character of Gelsomina became in her hands a shrewd and observant individual, with a quality of watchful dignity. We watch her emerge from Zampano’s shadow  into the film’s tragic heroine, an emblem of man’s inhumanity to women.  Not above jealousy, Fellini foiled attempts by producer Dino de Laurentiis to make sequels featuring the character: Gelsomina on a Bicycle was suggested. He also resisted her suggestions about music, proposing a piece by Corelli, until Nino Rota presented him with a nameless tune, marked tranquillo, on a single sheet of hand-ruled music paper. “Do you want this?” he asked off-handedly.  The first recording alone of Gelsomina’s plaintive trumpet theme sold two million copies.