Ma Lixin
In today's international film world, there is an Italian director who is particularly eye-catching, he inherits the Italian neorealist aesthetic tradition pioneered by Rossellini, de Sika, Visconti and others, and continues to draw inspiration from the poetic realist films of Fellini, Antonioni and others, thus forming his unique lens language; in more than 30 years of directing career, he has taken his hometown of Sicily as the base, constantly exploring and innovating different styles of video works, and has repeatedly won awards at major international film festivals. Hailed as "the master of bringing applause back to the Italian cinema", he is gissébe Tornatore, the most iconic Italian film director for more than a decade. Not long ago, his classic work "The Pianist of the Sea" was restored by 4K technology and was being screened in major theaters across the country.
The male protagonist of "The Pianist of the Sea" is 19000
Tornadore was born on May 27, 1956 in Sicily, Italy. As a child, he often watched movies at a cinema in his hometown. From the early 70s, he became a projectionist for the theater. The owner opened a new theater and asked him to go to the old theater to move the equipment in the studio, and after spending a few days in the dusty and disorganized theater, he decided to make a movie about the closed theater. Thus, in 1988, Tornadore's most iconic film, Cinema Paradiso, came out. The film, which is "sentimental, banal, nostalgic and intellectually intertwined", caused a huge sensation when it was launched, winning many awards such as the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize at the European Film Awards. Tornadore became famous in one fell swoop, and his favorite "Sicilian plot" began to surface. His subsequent journeys to Heaven (1990), Scouts in a New Paradise (1995), The Pianist at Sea (1998), The Beautiful Legend of Sicily (2000) and Baalia, which came out in 2009, all have distinct Sicilian complexes. From a kaleidoscopic perspective, these works not only vividly show the customs and customs of Sicily, but also profoundly interpret the history and reality of Sicily.
Tornadore The pictures in this article are all profile pictures
I. The Holy Hand depicting the Sicilian flair
"If you don't go to Sicily, you haven't been to Italy, because in Sicily you can find the source of Italy's beauty", is a sentence Goethe wrote when he arrived in Palermo (the capital of Sicily) in 1787 to start his journey to find the roots of Western culture. Indeed, Sicily, with its stunning natural beauty, unique geographical location and long cultural history, has been called "a true and beautiful legend". Born in Sicily, Tornadore received inexhaustible creative inspiration from here. Most of his works are set in Sicily, depicting the customs and customs of Sicily through his unique lens language.
"Although Sicily is a very small island, for Italy its role in history is special. To me, it was more like a spell that I could not get rid of for the rest of my life. Wrapped in this spell, Tornadore's films became a multi-prism for watching The Sicilian style. Viewers who have seen "Baalia" must remember the fantasy panoramic shot of the protagonist Pepe running and flying, when pepe overlooks the city, countryside, mountains and ocean, which is like the outline of a panoramic sicilian terrain in Tornadore's heart; and the beautiful and enchanting posture of Sicilian is like Marlena in "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily". Renaldo tracks Marlena through the square, avoiding the crowds, through the streets, through the alleys, up the stairs that turn around, to find her father who deliberately closes the door, Andronado's ghostly set of tracking shots is certainly showing Marlena's irresistible charm, and why not deliberately highlight the same spiced Sicilian street market?
Stills from "Baalia"
As far as the human geography of Sicily is concerned, the most common occurrence in Tornadore's films is the baroque architecture. Baroque squares, Baroque churches, Baroque town halls, and Baroque houses are an indispensable landscape in Tornatore's films. These buildings are like living fossils, silently telling the vicissitudes of Sicily's history and glorious civilization. In ancient Greece, the public life of the city-state was centered on squares. This long-standing square culture has passed through the long closed Middle Ages with unimaginable tenacity, and accompanied by the historical process of the Renaissance, harmoniously integrated with modern civilization, and the architectural style that accompanies the square has undergone a gradual transformation from classical to Gothic, to Renaissance, and then to modern Baroque. Today, they have become timeless historical and cultural landscapes throughout Sicily's urban and rural areas, and these treasures of human civilization have been skillfully integrated into Tornado's films. In his films, there are small squares and simple building complexes such as those in Cinema Paradiso, which represent places where people like Toto frequently gather and play, and the classical and solemn medium-sized enclosed squares and their buildings such as those in "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily", where the dignified spectators greedily consume and devour Marlena's beautiful body, and the imposing giant open squares like those in "Baalia". Political opportunists shouted their voices to the crowd around the monumental fountain sculpture, a modern scene that contrasts with the Gothic-style town hall that looms behind it.
It is not difficult to see that each of Tornatore's imitations of these unique cultural landscapes of Sicily is not arbitrary, nor is it a show off of the culture of his hometown, but has a deeper meaning. In this sense, whether it is the art auction house dominated by the protagonist Oldman in "The Best Bid", the ship's concert hall where the protagonist in "The Pianist of the Sea" shows off his skills in 1900, or the cinema that makes Tornadore dream (the specific image symbol of the cinema appears in almost all of Tornatore's films about Sicily), it is nothing less than a modern metaphor for the above-mentioned square architecture, because it is in these places that the life of modern society is constantly staged. So, when we watch his movies, we really look at the life of the city in Sicily: in the squares of all kinds, between the crowded buildings are hidden in countless alleys, Pepe and his friends play tops in the alleys, the men play cards noisily, the citizens who go to churches come and go, the vendors who sell sausages and eggs, the shepherds who drive sheep through the squares, and the people who compete to eat Ssisli... This is the typical Sicilian picture of life that "Baalia" presents us.
Marlena in The Beautiful Legend of Sicily.
Lemon is another frequently used symbol of life with a very Sicilian character. Sicily is rich in lemons, with lemon orchards, lemon trees and lemon fruits everywhere in his films. In Cinema Paradiso, when her mother calls Toto, there are lemons on the fruit plate on the table. Lemons can also be seen in the fruit market in "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily", and the scene of Marlena wiping her body with lemons gives us an insight into this unique Sicilian custom. What's even more interesting is that we saw the scene of children stealing lemons from the lemon garden in "Baalia", which can't help but evoke the same memories of the author as a child and his friends stealing the apple orchard in their hometown. Good works of art always reproduce the lives of ordinary people in a real way.
Also impressing the audience was Tornadore's emphasis on Sicily's unique maritime culture. Sicily is a shining pearl of the Mediterranean, home to the world's bluest and clearest waters, which naturally give birth to a unique marine culture. Tornadore's films are essentially part of this culture as well. In the film, the long winding coastline, the square-like beach, the towering white reef, the teenager playing by the sea in shorts and the goddess Marlena everywhere are indispensable artistic landscapes in Tornadore's films, such as the scene of Reinaldo and his friends basking in the sun on the reef by the sea with their bare bodies in "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily", and the scene in "Baalia" where the Pepe family took off their clothes and lay on the cold floor due to the hot weather. They are full of Sicilian life, and it can even be said that the fantastic life story told by "The Pianist of the Sea" is actually a symbolic interpretation of Tonador's maritime culture in Sicilian.
Stills from Cinema Paradiso
II. Interpreter of Sicilian social culture
Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean and a magical land. Here, the ancient Greek mythological culture, the medieval religious culture, the Renaissance culture and the modern culture have been successively followed, inheriting each other and stirring each other, forming today's Sicilian multi-integrated culture. Born and raised in Slovak, Tornadore is deeply influenced and infiltrated by this culture, and many of his works are actually images of this culture. Through vivid characters and sicilian stories they experience, Tornadore brilliantly shows the influence of this culture on the daily life of Today's Sicilians.
Tornatore's films are inseparable from the socio-cultural background of Sicily. In "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily", after hearing the bad news of her husband's sacrifice for the country, Marlena dressed up as a virgin and paraded in the streets to accept the people's mourning. At the same time, In order to express his infinite sympathy and love for the goddess, Reinaldo went to church several times to do Mass. In Cinema Paradiso, we see priests rigorously inspecting and cutting out erotic footage before each public film; people in Sicily go to church every Friday; and they draw crosses reverently with their hands on their chests as they rally in front of the newly opened theater doors, in both skillful and natural movements. These film plots make us feel that religious culture has become an inevitable and natural part of Sicilian life.
On the other hand, however, we see that the teenager Dodo in Cinema Paradiso is chased by priests for dozing off in a solemn church, while the faithful who regularly go to church for Mass each time shout and express their dissatisfaction with the censored films. In Baalia, church personnel in the pouring rain parade through the streets holding up a huge statue of San Giuseppe and saying to people who want to hide in the church: "Even God cannot enter until San Giuseppe comes in." What these scenes convey is clearly a great irony of the seemingly solemn but in fact hypocritical religious life of the Sicilians.
The historical background of Sicily for nearly a hundred years is also vividly presented in his own lens by the discerning Tornado ray.
In Cinema Paradiso, we see that the news propaganda of Mussolini's army is interspersed in every gap where the film is played. Mussolini's supporters also appeared many times in "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily", which gave the audience a deep appreciation of the fanatical face of fascism at that time, and of course, Tornatore did not forget to show the sober people who opposed fascism. The film passage in which Sicilians line up in the square to welcome American soldiers shows from another side the so-called Western free world as the victor of World War II and its values on the Sicilians.
Without a doubt, the most historical work of Tornatore's filmmaking career is "Baalia". By telling the story of the protagonist Pepe's growth, the film recreates the vicissitudes of Sicily for more than half a century from the 1930s to the 1980s. At the beginning of the film, we see that, on the one hand, the teacher leads the students in the classroom to sing songs praising Mussolini and the spirit of fascism; on the other hand, the actors of the opera house are arrested by the fascist army for singing songs against Mussolini, and some people deliberately break their feet in order to evade military service, and the scene in the square selling sausage vendors following behind the fascist officers and crying that "the raw material is a whole pig" is even more shocking and meaningful.
As the story progressed, World War II ended, and the Marxist trend that had begun to sprout during the fascist period began to appear on the political stage in Sicily, and Pepe was the at the forefront of this political movement. He was one of the first awakened revolutionaries and Communists of his age, full of enthusiasm for communism and actively involved in parliamentary struggles.
In other episodes of the film, Sicily's notorious mafia political culture and Western-style democratic electoral political culture are also reflected. For example, when Pepe's father was killed by the Mafia and his mother was devastated, and the Pepe family was helpless against it, Tornadore portrayed the material and spiritual damage inflicted on the local population by presenting such a scene. In the face of a severe economic crisis that has led to massive unemployment of workers and the gathering of homeless unemployed workers to protest and storm municipal authorities, paralyzing the functioning of the government, municipal leaders have done nothing but to escape. Through a few simple but tense shots, Tornatore reveals the hypocritical, feeble, and selfish nature of Western democracy.
It should be noted that although we can see too many details describing political events in Tornadore's films, he never directly expresses his political tendencies, but makes his political tendencies naturally manifest by shaping typical characters in typical environments. This is where Tornadore's brilliance lies.
As for the expression of political tendencies in literary and artistic creation, Marxist classic writers have long made exemplary aesthetic criticisms. Engels clearly wrote: "I am by no means against the poetry of tendency itself. Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were both poets with strong tendencies, Dante and Cervantes were not inferior, and the main value of Schiller's Conspiracy and Love was that it was the first politically inclined drama in Germany. The modern Russians and Norwegians who write excellent novels are all tendentious writers. "But this does not mean that the ideological inclinations of literary and artistic works can be as straightforward as political science or sociology." Tendencies should flow naturally from scenes and plots, and should not be specifically pointed out. ”
In summary, in his film career of about 30 years, Tornadore has deeply rooted his artistic tentacles in the fertile soil of Sicily, constantly exploring the film language and techniques that fuse the traditional Italian film aesthetic style with various popular elements in contemporary films, forming his unique style that is both realistic and romantic, poetic and rational, classical and modern, both artistic and commercial, and has become the most qualified and affectionate aria of Sicilian culture.
(Author: Ma Lixin, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, School of Journalism and Media, Shandong Normal University) Guangming Daily (2020.01.02 13th edition)
Editor-in-charge: Dai Yu