CINEMA REBORN WEEKLY UPDATE - TRAILER, ITALIAN SELECTION, THE GOLDEN COACH, IL GRIDO

Just to let you know a few news updates about Cinema Reborn 2024.

 

First we can report that advance bookings are running ahead of 2023 and already a few audience favourites are emerging. Most notably the Saturday evening sessions of Days of Heaven and Le  Samourai are already, as far as we are concerned, in the ‘selling fast’ category. We always expected they would be the most popular films. 

 

In Melbourne the Saturday evening session Days of Heaven is going to be introduced by Jake Wilson the film critic for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. In Sydney the Saturday evening screening will be introduced by critic and former director of the Sydney Film Festival Lynden Barber.

 

The Cinema Reborn 2024 trailer

Once again Organising Committee member and highly regarded young film-maker James Vaughan has produced the trailer for Cinema Reborn’s season. You should see it if you attend the Ritz or Lido Cinemas over the next month or so but if you are curious we have uploaded it to YouTube Click on the link to see what James has done. It’s quite a show in 1 minute and 12 seconds.

The Golden Coach

 

Italy at Cinema Reborn 2024

Way back in 2021 we had our biggest crowd ever come out to see Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. Since that time Cinema Reborn has been grateful for the support we’ve received from the Italian Institute of Culture to screen our Italian selections. This year is no different and we are pleased to have two superb films from Italy. One is a remarkable co-production with France La carrozza d’oro/Le carosse d’or/The Golden Coach starring the great Anna Magnani (above) and directed by Jean Renoir. The other is Il Grido/The Cry directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. This year our Melbourne screenings of these two great films are being supported by the Melbourne office of The Italian Institute of Culture

 

Renoir’s film, a story of a troupe of travelling players in 17^th century South America and the mayhem caused when the local Viceroy, the local bullfighter and one of the actors all fall for Anna Magnani’s leading lady Camilla, has been called by Francois Truffaut “the noblest, most refined film ever made…maybe Renoir’s masterpiece.”

 

Il Grido

Il Grido, made in 1957, was the first of the master’s films to demonstrate the distinctive style and content that would become the signature of his illustrious career. It was the Antonioni film made immediately before he became an overnight sensation with his famous trilogy. Some say that on reviewing today it’s just as good as any of them.  

 

By some coincidence this will be the second time that both Renoir and Antonioni have had their restored works screened at Cinema Reborn. In our first season we screened Renoir’s The Crime of M.Lange and in 2021 we screened Antonioni’s Le amiche/The Girlfriends.

 

…and don’t take our word for it

To read a report on Cinema Reborn, here’s what critic Silvi Vann-Wall published about us in  Screen Hub

 

Charitable Donations

And as always… Cinema Reborn’s work over the years has long been sustained by the generosity of our donors who help us make up the shortfall between our income and the costs of obtaining and screening our program. The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here

 

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 the Sixties part 6 (21), Italy Part 4 Post-neorealism (i): Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni

Seen as a time of crisis for neorealism, the 50s into the 60s saw “a proliferation of neorealisms.” Fellini sought freedom from the neorealist constraints of subject matter and ideology in what was termed “phenomenological realism.”  Visconti’s “troubled marriage of spectacular form and revolutionary content in Senso, ultimately broadened critical tolerance for film styles free of neorealist austerity. 

In the context of neo-realism and his early experiences with documentary filmmaking centred on the appearance of things, Antonioni developed his own approach to narrative in an art film mode.   

His concentration on the internals of character and psychology Antonioni saw as not deserting the neorealist legacy: “not trying to show reality“…[but] attempting to recreate realism.”  Millicent Marcus points out that this was not a play on semantics by Antonioni but an offer, on his part, “to go forward by going backwards, that is, by returning to the cultural antecedents of the post-war movement […] taking them along a different path” (189).

Massimo Girotti, Lucia Bose, Story of a Love Affair

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) in four features, 1953-57, beginning with Cronaca di un amore/ Story of a Love Affair (1950), within the limits of a detective story he commenced the opening up of new narrative and fictional possibilities in the very activity of dissolving conventional plots to emphasise internal rhythms in the story. This is most evident visually through Antonioni’s destabilising of forms and structures to accommodate new themes, making new forms appear (Rohdie 49). The tetralogy (1959-64) helped to radically reshape expectations of what cinematic narrative can be. 

Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, L'Avventura

Mira Liehm places the four breakthrough films as together exploring “the decline of emotions” in contemporary society:  L’Avventura (1960) represents the gradual development of this theme, “the plot becoming more contingent than causal” (Chatman) ; in La Notte (1961) the possibility of love still exists if in crisis;  in L’Eclisse (1962) love is eclipsed by the dominance of objects and their imagined value over human relationships, in the final sequence, an establishing shot in reverse frustrates the viewer’s expectations of a well-formed narrative” (ibid).  In Il Deserto Rosso /Red Desert (1964) the alienation from reality provokes a neurosis portrayed as a conscious yearning for the return of feelings (225). In the tetralogy as a whole, it is the women who are more sensitive to feelings.

Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Il Grido

Kovács describes Antonioni’s distinctive form of modernist minimalism, present in his early films prior to Il Grido, as “analytical” in its tendency towards geometrical compositions in long takes and associated camera movements. Compared to Max Ophuls’ camera movements in long takes identifying with the characters, “Antonioni’s camera tends to be more detached, more reflective, a more acute social observer” (Gilberto Perez ‘The Eloquent Screen’ 260).  Kovács identifies the split Antonioni made in his films “between different dimensions of the form: the background on the one hand, the plot and the viewer’s time experience on the other.”  His use of landscape and cityscape as framing for his wandering characters and their role in the plot, is identified by Kovács as “important watermarks of Antonioni’s breaking away from his neorealist roots” (149)”.

Kovács points to the disappearance, in Antonioni’s films, of the dramatic tension between the characters and their environment found in films like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and Stromboli (1950) which share neo-realist settings in poor or desolate locations emphasising emotional or spiritual emptiness in the characters. In Antonioni’s films this dramatic tension disappears. Their relationship to the environment is reduced to radical isolation and alienation. “This condition of disconnection is no longer indicative of a “social or cultural condition represented by the background world” (ibid). If “the perfect existentialist film could be imagined,” Bondanella suggests, “it would probably be one of the works in Antonioni’s trilogy, or possibly Red Desert” (221).

"radical isolation and alienation",  Red Desert

In contrast to those of Rossellini, Antonioni’s films in the early and breakthrough phases, in comparison, can have, it seems, a more predetermined feel although, like Rossellini, Antonioni said that he began each day’s shoot without clear ideas, preferring to start “from a virginal point,” the priority being ‘who he was’ at the moment of shooting, never working from the script - “autobiographical” with every line changed. In place of the sense of a completed work; when he looked back, Antonioni spoke of seeing an earlier work only in terms contemporary with his viewing (Bachman interview).

Antonioni in the tetralogy and Rossellini in Journey to Italy mark the “de-theatricalisation” of modern cinema. “L’Avventura has the breadth and structure of the novel, as well as its flexibility” (Pierre Laprohon Antonioni 70). Kovács notes that from Il Grido to L’Eclisse, most radically in the latter, “the peak of dramatic tension takes place at the beginning of the film before the development of the plot…representing a radical continuity independent of editing and camerawork” (155).

Rohdie’s focus is on narration and documentation of objects in the work of both Rossellini and Antonioni.  Above all, Rohdie notes their connection in the matter of documentation, of “writing” with the camera, its position not predetermined, “seeking to find and waiting to find, its subject.” In the case of Rossellini the subject is more certain and intuitively established, apprehension of it is relatively unproblematic and realistic which often resulted, at the time, in critical dismissal; in Antonioni, the uncertainty and slippage of the subject becomes the drama of the narrative” (Rohdie 149-50 quoted by Sitney 144-5).

The landscape and general atmosphere in the film preceding Antonioni’s initial critical breakthrough, Il grido/The Cry (1957), might seem to invite a symbolic interpretation as a physical extension of the central character’s depressed state. Kovács notes Antonioni’s expressed intention was not to use the environment to evoke a psychological state but “to create a landscape of memory: the landscape of my childhood” (quoted Kovács 150 -  Antonioni experienced “a happy childhood” in Ferrara on the Po River delta). 

Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, La Notte

As becomes fully apparent in the tetralogy, Antonioni “had arrived at another, modernist, conception of using the landscape - as that which isolates it from the psychology of the characters” (ibid). 

Rohdie writes that “Antonioni’s narrative reticence and ‘objectivity’ was something strikingly new in Italian cinema with reference to neo-realism,” not so much in terms of techniques of observation as in a different set of assumptions about the things observed. This accounts for his style being nominated as cold, inexpressive, without love, his objectivism seen as contrary to neo-realism’s humanism. 

Antonioni took this reticence a step further in his ‘distanced narratives’. What had potential to disturb was that the atmosphere and landscape failed to function as explicative or causal while being moved to the fore and given equal weight with the characters remaining ‘just there’ without connections. The social and physical are not, in his films, a determination. The characters are not only distanced from each other but disconnected from context. As Rohdie puts it, “it was as if Antonioni had taken his objectivity too far…an objectivity that had seemingly gone beyond ‘realism’” 

What was positive, “even exhilarating,” was the way Antonioni’s films opened up new possibilities in the very activity of dissolution referred to above, rejecting what neo-realism had made positive.  What had been declared established, unshakeable things, certainties and orders, by the mid-50s, even Antonioni’s critics had to admit, no longer held (see Rohdie 46-9).

Michelangelo Antonioni, Monica Vitti

Central is the defining presence of Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s tetralogy. Their symbiotic relationship has a lineage in cinema history between male director and female actor:  von Sternberg and Dietrich, Rossellini and Magnani then Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman, and Fellini and Giulietta Masina. Vitti’s acting in the tetralogy “is understated and minimal, relying on the union of camera movement and mise en scène, creating an aura of ambiguity, undermining the clear outlines of the character’s subjectivity yet conveying a sense of crisis” (Marcia Landy Italian Film’ 296).

Il Deserto Rosso/Red Desert (1964), set in Ravenna the famous artistic city, and then also an industrial city, is a radical extension of the trilogy, Antonioni’s first film in colour and arguably “the first film to use colour in a denatured, modern way.” In Red Desert  “colour is integrally linked to character, as landscape was in L’Avventura or architecture in The Eclipse, and the director uses colour in many cases in place of dialogue” (Bondanella 219). The above reference to ‘writing’ almost becomes a case of ‘painting’ with the camera. 

Monica Vitti, Red Desert

Red Desert marks the beginning of a shift from centring on female, to male protagonists becoming first apparent in Blow-Up. This is accompanied also by a shift in narrative techniques accompanying the move from Sicilian landscapes and modern Milanese architecture to the more abstracted environment of modern technological society.  As Antonioni indicated, this shift is not meant to carry with it a condemnation of technological society in the name of ecological purity and a romantic return to the past. He saw Giuliana’s neurosis as caused by her failure to adapt to a new world (see Kovács 153-4). While most commentators emphasise the ugliness of the industrial landscape belching poisonous yellow fumes it is in turn ugly and aesthetic (Antonioni painted the trees and industrial accoutrements).

This change, begun in Red Desert, is accompanied by a transition to a more rigorously objective narrative and camera positioning. “Concentration shifts from interaction between the characters in the trilogy to the relationship between the characters and the things around them” (Bondanella 218). There is also a move toward a more complete and comprehensive dissolution of the subject and the appearance of a fully abstract film (the desert island fable) within the narrative. Giuliana’s (Monica Vitti) instability is reflected in her relation to objects and colours viewed with an intensity as seen and felt by her but her gaze is a distorted and abstracting reality, including her own. As Rohdie observes, while the look of the camera is often subjective, the look, regarded objectively, becomes more the object being observed rather than identified with. Chatman refers to this as “a remarkable double vision through which we see alternately from Giuliana’s point of view and from the camera’s own” (97).

David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Blow-Up

Blow-Up (1966), his first film in English, in other critical ways represented a further new direction in which Antonioni employs a different rhythm in his editing, the sound track also assuming a new importance. He “developed the potential of cinema for heightening our aesthetic perception of the modern world as well as photography itself. 

There is a striking narrative correspondence in Blow-Up and earlier films (as in Lidia’s walk in Milan in La Notte) in the displacement of figures and bodies in space. Thomas, the photographer, obsessively seizes on ‘must have’ objects for them to immediately become throwaways. Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), in desperation attempting to retrieve the photographs that Thomas has wilfully taken of her and her companion in the park, becomes an object to be photographed amidst the disconnected spaces, objects and arrangements in the studio seemingly having a life of their own. “The narrative of Blow-Up literally loses its way in pursuit of an image“ (Rohdie 68). The diffuse fragments of life in swinging London adhere around the photograph at the film’s centre. What the photographer sees and what the camera sees are two different things 

Rohdie distinguishes the tetralogy which he terms the ‘women’s films’, from the later male centred films - Blow-Up,  Passenger, and Identification of a Woman.  While the couple in crisis is the central concern in the women’s films, the men are limited in their vision, “seeking to grasp something of the world and of themselves, and of the women they have encountered.” The women are more resistant, in comparison more open, lucid, interested in looking than seizing. The crisis arises from “the cross purpose of sight, of rigidity on the one hand, of flexibility and understanding on the other” (189).

Rohdie refers to Pasolini suggesting in his essay ‘Cinema di poesia’  that what was wrong with ‘the women’s films’, was that Antonioni imagined (perhaps inadvertently) that a female perspective is actually “a subjective alibi“ which enabled him to have a clear-cut narrative while at the same time escaping from it in a series of departures which, according to Pasolini, allowed him, in Il deserto rosso, “to present images purely for their abstract beauty” (ibid 153). However, as Rohdie further points out, this perception is more than a social alibi on Antonioni’s part: the women, at the centre of a changing  and uncertain fictional landscape, could in the films “perceive the multiplicity, variety and even incomprehensibility of the world while the men lack that facility and become victims of the world and their need to possess it. The first startling example of this,” Rohdie notes, “is Aldo in Il Grido” (189).

Maria Schneider, Jack Nicholson, The Passenger

Antonioni's modernist objectification in the later films shifted the subject from that of the images seen, to more directly, the act of seeing itself from the outside, as in The Passenger (1975).  “Antonioni no longer needed a narrative excuse for what he viewed. The narrative was elsewhere […]  Earlier, before The Passenger, ‘in’ the fiction he sometimes chose to wander from it (towards beauty, to follow a flock of birds, to fix an eye on colour, to become fascinated with an object), but always forced to return, to pull back and by so doing to encounter the necessities of the narrative he had only a moment previously seemed to escape” (ibid).  

In The Passenger, the central character, Locke (Nicholson), already suffering an identity crisis in an outpost in central Africa, assumes the identity of a man whom he had just met when he finds him dead in the hotel from a sudden heart attack. Locke dissolves his own identity as if into the landscape, a repeating trope in Antonioni’s films, then recreates it as if to seem unreal, “estranged from itself,” a blurring of the subject-object distinction. The subjective camera inside the fiction is displaced. David Thomson refers to this as “a loss of identity in the modern world [that seems] to hover on the brink of some ultimate memory loss” (Biographical Dictionary). In the memorably complex final shot of 7 minutes this process of objectification is doubled as the camera detaches itself from the fiction and “gazes upon itself.” Thomson observes that “a narrative never wholly eventuates suggesting a multiplicity of narratives.” 

Tomas Milian and Daniela Silverio, Identification of a Woman

In his last major film after five abroad Antonioni returned to Italy and familiar themes on the difficulties of establishing relationships in the modern world. Identification of a Woman (1982), like nearly all his films, as Rohdie points out, is structured as an (unresolved) investigation. A film director, Niccolò (Thomas Malian), searches for a woman as a subject for his next film, and for a second ‘ideal woman’ visualised by him in an image of Louise Brooks. He has brief affairs with two women: the elusive, aristocratic Mavi explicitly seeking it seems realisation through sex, and the warm, down to earth actress, Ida, offering inspiration and security to Niccolo. Neither cohere as assumed centres of the film. Each results in intense emotional contact, one in a dense fog, the other on the Venetian lagoon. Niccoló, the initially presumed centre of the main film - the camera is always non-judgementally with him - never assumes that central position. This leaves a fiction of two narratives in search of something which is never found.  As already mentioned, from 1966 onwards the central characters of Antonioni’s films are male and “the camera and narrator become, over time, completely ‘objective’, no longer viewing with the eyes, or from the perspective, of any character.” 

This objectivity first reached a new kind of coherence in the China documentary Chung Kuo Cina (1972), The Passenger (1975) and Identification of a Woman (1982) (Rohdie 187). In freeing the image from the functional demands of narrative without entirely dispensing with narrativity, interest lies in the mystery and profound uncertainty threatening the story. In these films, plus Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point, the fiction replaces the subjectivity of the characters, the film becoming what Rohdie calls, “a documentary of a fiction, including the fiction of its construction” (153). In other words Rohdie seems to suggest that, through the cumulation of these works, Antonioni, in cinematic terms, reworked/redefined the meaning of objective and subjective, fiction and documentary. In what would seem to be encapsulating  Antonioni’s implied critique of classical narrative’s self-sustaining fiction, Rohdie concludes, “women, along with men, have, if not their rightful place, a place free of any condescension, or, what amounted to the same thing, free of the fiction of subjectivity” (190).

Tonino Guerra, a scriptwriter on all Antonioni’s films from L’avventura on, is quoted by Don Ranvaud as confirming the director’s own account quoted above, of the way he chose to work. Guerra, spoke of how an elaborate, dense script was progressively abandoned until devoid of any literary values making it clear to the writer that Antonioni’s objective was “precisely that of destroying in the word anything that might interfere with the overall cinematic effect.” Carried to its furthest in The Passenger and Identification of a Woman, it was a cause of some early critical tentativeness at Cannes (before the critical and commercial success in Italy of Identification), and critical hostility after its screening at the New York Film Festival resulted in the evaporation of distribution interest in the US.

Speaking of The Passenger with its penultimate seven-minute sequence Antonioni said: “I have never quite felt this liberty. I have replaced my objectivity with that of the camera… the liberty in the making of this film is the liberty the character in the film tried to achieve by changing identity” (Rohdie 154).

***************************************

Sam Rohdie Antonioni, BFI 1990

Seymour Chatman  Antonioni or, the surface of the world 1985

Michael Pursell “Remembering Antonioni”  review of Chatman’s book in Literature Film Quarterly 4/3 1986 

Gideon Bachman A Love of Today  interview with Antonioni Film Quarterly Summer 1983                                                                                         

Millicent Marcus  Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism 1986

Don Ranvaud review of identification of a Woman and Chronicle of a Career Monthly Film Bulletin March 1983

Jonathan Rosenbaum  review of The Passenger  Monthly Film Bulletin  June 1975

*************************************

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

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 the Sixties part 6 (20)- A Postscript - Roberto Rossellini in Australia - Bruce Hodsdon's series continues

Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini

The growth in the use of 16mm film during war, gathered momentum in the post-war years. A film collection was established at the National Library in 1946 to lend documentaries on 16mm produced by the National Film Board (later the Commonwealth Film Unit and then Film Australia).  Within a few years the nucleus of a film study collection of about 100 classic (feature) films, biased towards key silent features, was supplied by the British Film Archive on 16mm c1950 and made available for loan by the National Library to the rapidly growing number of film societies especially in Victoria*. 

While 16mm was never accepted by the industry as of sufficient standard for theatrical exhibition, beginning in the late forties the local offices of major Hollywood and British overseas based distributors began to make 16mm prints of English language feature films available for hire in Australia for non-commercial screening (home, club, and educational ). These were generally American and British mainstream titles. The release prints of features were made from laboratory generated reduction (from 35mm) negatives producing release prints of good image resolution and with adequate sound for amplification, for projection to audiences in semi-theatrical conditions.

Late 40s to mid 50s: the war trilogy  Rossellini’s trilogy marked the seemingly spontaneous arrival of an aesthetic radicalism subsequently identified politically as a ‘neo realism’ in the context of a culture eager to throw off the legacy of Fascism, ”not just its pomp and propaganda but its conformism and narrow cast of mind” (Nowell-Smith,  Making Waves 29). This was the context continuing through the 50s and 60s of increased cultural awareness of the overall problem of availability of sub-titled viewing prints on 16mm (other than of French and German features - see below) from other European countries, Asia and Latin America, none more so than of the Italian art cinema. 

Paisa

My first contact with Rossellini’s cinema was a history teacher in class referring to the impact made on him by Rome Open City. The full trilogy came into Australian theatrical distribution through the first post-war decade beginning with a successful season of Open City at the Savoy, then Sydney's only cinema for the ongoing release of 'foreign films'. It began as Adyar Hall in 1924, was renamed the ‘New Savoy’ and equipped as a 450 seat cinema in 1939. It opened with a season of La Kermesse héroique  and continued as an ‘arthouse’ until its closure when the building was set for demolition in 1973. The Savoy was located in discreet isolation from the many, mainly first run, cinemas concentrated in the heart of the CBD. Open City was subsequently followed at the Savoy by Paisan. 

 Germany Year Zero, considered ‘too grim’ by exhibitors for a commercial run, premiered in 1954 at the first Sydney and the third Melbourne Film Festivals.  Thereafter Sydney University Film Group screened Germany Year Zero in collaboration with the newly formed Sydney Foreign Film Society (later the Continental Film Society).  By the early 50s “there were sufficient foreign films available to permit a single revival screening each month.” In 1952 the inaugural screening of the SFFS was Open City. 

 

The Sydney University Film Group’s ‘First Term Circular 1954’  to coincide with a screening of Open City, in a short note anticipates later analyses of ‘Rossellinian realism’ - see 6 (19) - in comparing Rossellini’s “off-the-cuff filming methods,” shooting in rough final shot sequence without a set script, then employing non-conventional editing in a “sort of visual short hand.” Rossellini does not decide on the next shot until the current one is completed thus “feeling his way” from shot to shot instead instead of following a pre-planned shot breakdown.   

Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini, The Miracle

 

The release of The Miracle (1948) attracted strident attacks in Europe, Latin America and the US where the Catholic Church and its arm, the Legion of Decency, demanded its banning, ultimately unsuccessfully, for “Communist inspired” blasphemy, despite claims made for Rossellini’s standing as “a good Catholic.”  Protest centred on the readily recognisable iconography of Christ’s Nativity, a birth scene in a cave reduced to a binary either as “properly” respectful or blasphemous parody. 

 Anna Magnani plays a disturbed goatherd who is made pregnant by a passing wanderer whom she believes to be St Joseph, played by the co-scriptwriter, Federico Fellini. Reference to The Miracle being “instantly banned in Argentina and Australia” (Brunette 97), if accurate, means that the ban was subsequently lifted, the film in some locations re-titled The Wanderer. Running  43 mins, The Miracle  was given its Australian premiere over 3 nights (on a double bill with a different feature each night) by Sydney University Film Group in 1954. The Group’s circular makes no reference to a previous banning, only to the high film rental, describing it as Rossellini’s “most beautiful film dedicated to the art of Anna Magnani.”

When the 5 year license on each of the war trilogy (and of The Miracle) expired it would not have been renewed and the 35mm prints were most likely destroyed, as required by the licensor. 

George Sanders, Ingrid Bergman, Voyage to Italy

1949-54  The ‘Bergman era ‘  My  awareness of a film director, beyond a name on the credits, was initiated by the Sunday press with an account of the Rossellini-Bergman ‘scandal’, when their films were reviled by the critics and rejected by the public. Stromboli,  was the first and the only one of the five Rossellini-Bergman features to be then released internationally by Howard Hughes’s RKO, in a form that was a travesty of the original - severely re-edited with re-recorded inappropriate voice-over ending.

1959-62: Rossellini’s ‘return to commercial cinema’.  I don’t remember any of Rossellini’s films being screened over the three years of my membership,1960-62, of the Melbourne University Film Society where I first engaged with cinema history on the screen and in print. After the war trilogy, his films, with one exception, were no longer available for screening on 35mm (or 16mm) unlike those, for example, of Antonioni, Fellini and Visconti and other select major European filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Luis Bunuel whose current films went into theatrical release on 35mm if selectively with little distributor regard for the auteur’s career chronology.

Hans Messemer, Vittorio De Sica, Generale Della Rovere

My first viewing of a Rossellini film was General Della Rovere (1959) at the Savoy in the early 60s, his second and final commercial success, a film that brought him little personal satisfaction, finding himself reinstated as “a national asset.”  As Gallagher points out, he had spent the previous decade trying to escape such type casting. Its thematic basis was in a true story that unfolded in Nazi occupied Rome.  Unlike Open City, it was fully staged in the studio and came to the Savoy with the endorsement of the Venice Film Festival’s jury and mainstream European critical and commercial success, stirring memories of Open City, more than a decade earlier.  Rossellini nevertheless withheld his doubts about the cinema’s future, holding in abeyance his germinating vision of television’s untapped potential for public pedagogy. 

Vanina Vanini (1961) is based on Stendahl’s novel Chroniques Italiennes ; it was Rossellini’s original  intention to title the film in the singular form, Chronique Italienne. Set in a period in which the Risorgimento was ignited, it provided inspiration for what Rossellini initially based on “historical research.” Thematically, but not stylistically, a companion to Viva l’Italia which brought him satisfaction, which Rossellini counted  among his personal favourites as a ‘de-dramatisation’ of a childhood hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, “as a visionary who turns his private illumination into a new reality” (Gallagher 528).                          

The producer set about cutting, without consultation, what the director saw as the film’s justification; on its release Rossellini denounced Vanina Vanini as a travesty. Attacked by the Italian critical establishment, it had its defenders in Paris and London who found sufficient of Rossellini’s original intentions and those of his collaborator, writer Jean Gruault, still intact. 

Distributed internationally by Columbia Pictures, after perfunctory screenings in Sydney and Melbourne, the single print languished on the shelf. Sydney University Film Group managed two screenings before, the print of Vanina Vanini was junked, the international screening rights still current, in order to re-use the reels and cans.

Sandra Milo, Vanina Vanini

In 1962 Rossellini stood in a bookshop in Rome and announced to reporters, “Il cinema e mort,” a view repeated by Jean-Luc Godard five decades later coinciding with the screening of his Film Socialisme (2011). Godard added auteurs and auteurism to the death list stating that “with mobile phones everyone’s an auteur.”  Rossellini was also about to attempt, on the small screen, to consciously extinguish his own claim to the role of auteur.

The arrival of VHS tape in the early 80s seemed to offer promise of more consistent sound and image  than 16mm, not requiring a publicly funded centralised library for acquisition and distribution to tertiary film courses and film societies to defray the high costs of 16mm print acquisition.* Rights assigned to video cassettes were limited to home use although this was de facto extended to cover classroom but not film society screenings without specific non-commercial rights clearance . Blowing up the image on video for projection to larger groups produced visual quality inferior to 16mm copies made from release prints which were subject to generational loss of image resolution. Laser disk had potential but the range of classic titles was limited - few if any of the key Rossellini films were available - and by the millennium, the laser format, together with VHS, had been made redundant by the digital disk 

1983-96:  Rossellini retrospectives.   The newly formed National Film Theatre of Australia (NFTA), at the commencement of screenings in 1968, had a Rossellini season on the agenda where it stayed unrealised during the NFTA’s 13 year screening history, permanently deferred by other more readily mounted and hence more viable screening opportunities.  Limited funding was already stretched for a national screening program.

The long postponed Rossellini retrospective finally arrived following the establishment of the multicultural broadcasting service (SBS) in 1980.  The then recently retired director of the Sydney Film Festival and film critic, David Stratton, was given a free hand, beginning in 1982, to select features for acquisition and presentation by him in the “Movie of the Week.”  This was extended to a parallel weekly series of “Cinema Classics” in 1983, including director mini-retrospectives work of great directors - Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Carné, Bergman, Bunuel, Ozu et al including Rossellini which (based on recollection) began with his first feature, La Nave Bianca/ The White Ship (1941), followed by the war trilogy, L’Amore (The Human Voice and The Miracle) and films from the five made with Ingrid Bergman - Stromboli and Journey to Italy. Importantly, for each of the movies presented on SBS an expert subtitling team prepared a new translation most often improving on quality of sub-titles that appeared on the theatrically released prints and in a number of cases English subtitles on foreign language classics for the first time.  

There were no other Rossellini feature films** available in the country on 16 or 35mm through the 60s and 70s the only option, even with rights clearances, seemingly being imported sub-standard 16mm prints.  An ex-tv 16mm copy of Viva l’Italia in colour had a film society screening in Sydney edited to about less than half its original length with only the well-staged battle scenes more or less fully intact.     

By c1990, the National Film Study Lending Collection (FSLC) see footnote) had some of the ‘essential’ Rossellini titles on 16mm, generally offering less than hoped for image quality. Missing were Europe 51, Francesco, India, and Viva l’Italia; - Louis XIV was available in the French Embassy collection. (French and German features were well served by quality 16mm prints, the former distributed through the French Embassy and German features imported by the Goethe Institute were distributed by the FSLC).

A further decade elapsed until the first theatrical Rossellini retrospective, a selection of 11 features was mounted by the Sydney Film Festival in 1996 - 11 titles, including nine imported 35mm prints; for the first time in Australia, theatrical screenings of key features, The Flowers of St Francis, Rossellini’s original cut of Stromboli, Voyage to Italy, Viva l’Italia and the poetic documentary feature India Mahri Butri.

Rossellini began his post-war film career with the major international critical and popular success of Rome Open City making him something of a celebrity. It was a breakthrough film for Italian cinema on Australian screens carrying with it the phenomenon of neo-realism. Its success virtually ensured an Australian release for the following films in the trilogy. Open City was, as is noted above, in many ways Rossellini’s least typical film, Paisá being a far more original contribution to neorealism and the third film, Germany Year Zero, a departure from “programmatic realism” in Rossellini’s search for a new cinematic language. Following the release of The Miracle (1948) as a short feature, it was more than a decade during which Rossellini made 9 features, before another, General Della Rovere (1959), was taken up for Australian distribution.

Michelangelo Antonioni, Monica Vitti

The release of Antonioni’s films in Australia, then an art cinema outlier, followed a reverse pattern to those of Rossellini.  From the role of critic, contributor to several screenplays (including for films directed by Rossellini and later, Fellini) and as an assistant director to Marcel Carné on Les Visitors du Soir (1943), Antonioni began his career as a director with short documentaries, 1943-50, which “provide dazzling early evidence of [his] powers.”  Chatman continues, “though they do not experiment with narrative structure, the documentaries evoke an unmistakably Antonionian mood” ( 5). They resemble his later films in various ways, Chatman notes, such as commitment to an “open text” and muted tonality.  Of his first four features Cronaca di un amore (1950) and Le Amiche (1955) are the most interesting in foreshadowing Antonioni’s future development. In the case of the former for various formal subtleties in direction (such as unprecedented use of the long take), designed to enlarge the film noir framework, continued in the latter, also benefiting from a screenplay (co-written by Suso Cecchi D’Amico) based on a novella by the gifted novelist Cesare Pavese. 

None of these early features made prior to the critical breakthrough with L’avventura reached Australian screens in the 50s, least of all through Italian distributors and picture houses serving the substantial Italian community at the peak of then post-war settlement in all capital cities, especially Melbourne. Diane Collins notes not entirely accurately in her history of Australians at the movies, ‘Hollywood Down Under’ (1987) that, “instead of the prestige productions of the Italian film industry which became so familiar to art-house audiences, these ethnic cinemas screened the cheaply made features specially produced by that same industry for small-town and rural audiences - the same films that screened in the migrants’ native villages“ (242). This split in the 50s and 60s between a (more often tertiary educated) middle class art house audience and a ethnic community audience, was based on a fundamental cultural divide not merely on language difference.  Although more pronounced because of the numbers involved, such a divide was not confined only to the screening of Italian films.

In their temperaments and cultural backgrounds, Rossellini and Antonioni would seem to occupy opposite ends of a creators’ spectrum.  Rossellini’s destiny, as Peter Bondanella puts it, seemed more befitting of a playboy than a film director. “There was something of the nonchalance of a non-specialist in his approach to cinema” (‘Films of Rossellini’ 1), for example in his insistence on the spontaneity of filming in single takes without a set script leaving room for sudden revelation.  Antonioni’s interest in writing and modern abstract art (he began painting for relaxation from filmmaking) is reflected in studied materiality, the off centre deployment of spatial compositions in which to frame his characters, not in terms of their subjectivity but as the objective expression by the director of their isolation.   

What was shared was the necessity they both felt to break with those conventions of narrative filmmaking such as imposition of closure and overriding pre-eminence given to the role of plot, seen by Rossellini and Antonioni to be no longer relevant,  

It is now barely two decades since digital technology has made it immeasurably more possible for a cinephile, critic, teacher, researcher and student, to follow the evolution of the work of auteurs relatively free, as in the other arts, of the further imposed imperatives of commercial film distribution and exhibition.

* The National Film Study Lending Collection (FSLC) on 16mm, from the mid 70s located as an entity within the National Film Lending collection (NFLC) of documentaries on 16mm forming film section of the National Library, Canberra, parallel with the National Film Archive. The FSLC was established in 1975 with a separate budget to expand the initial film study collection of classics into a curated collection of international features, shorts, experimental and documentary films on 16mm (and later videotape) to be made available to film societies and educational (tertiary and secondary) institutions. The priority role was to provide film study material on 16mm for then expanding tertiary film study courses. 

***  Three shorts  by Rossellini were in portmanteau films distributed in Australia :  ‘Envy’ in 7 Deadly Sins (1952), the short with Ingrid Bergman in We the Women (1953), and ‘Chastity’ in Rogopag (1962).

***************************

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