Someone said, "Only in Italian cinema is Italy the most real, and it is an emotional reality that transcends reality." "Because no matter what era, Italian cinema vividly shows the embarrassment, anxiety, excitement, self-deprecation or ridicule of Italians, and shows deep humanistic care in a flexible way."
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > neorealism: it is life itself</h1>
The artistic temperament of Italian cinema is closely related to its geographical environment - bordering the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Ligurian Sea and the Ionian Sea, which is cold, intense, gentle and calm, and different landscape images give it different styles and spiritual temperaments. The glory of Italian cinema begins with Rome, where the Tiber River (also known as the Tevere River) was conceived.
In 1905, Italian filmmakers founded film studios in Rome, and later small film companies were established in Turin, Milan, Naples, Venice and other places to shoot films based on historical themes and literary works. During World War II, Mussolini used film as a means of propaganda and appointed his sons to run the film industry; some directors refused to make vulgar commercial films and propaganda films advocating fascist ideas, and made films that only focused on the exploration of the form of the work and were later called "calligraphy", that is, "to take the formal flow, to be exquisite".
With the fall of Mussolini in 1945, Italy, once a renaissance, is ushering in another rebirth. Hit hard by the war, Italy's post-World War II inflation, recession, unemployment is extremely high, and the people live in poverty. The film industry is even more faced with the dilemma of lack of funds, filmmakers have to carry cameras to the street to shoot live; at the same time, they are dissatisfied with reality, eager to use films to reflect the actual situation in Italy and the national tragedy caused by the war, so almost all of them intentionally or unintentionally make films that reflect the social problems of post-war Italy. Rome, the Undefended City, was released in August of that year, marking the birth of the Neorealism school and becoming an insurmountable monument in the history of Italian cinema.
Rome, the Undefended City is widely regarded as the foregone conclusion of Italian neorealist cinema
Rome, the Undefended City truly reflects the life and struggles of the Italian people during the German occupation. In this "Manifesto of a Neorealist Cinema," director Roberto Rossellini moves the camera to the streets scarred by the war, where the ruins of Rome become the film's unique backdrop. For the first time, the film epitomizes the aesthetic principles of neorealism: a historical, concrete treatment of real life, a sharp criticism of the living conditions at that time, and sincere sympathy for the suffering of ordinary people; the use of natural scenes, often played by non-professional actors, focusing on the state of workers, peasants, small citizens and urban intellectuals; mainly based on news reports, never using fictional stories.
The images of collapsed buildings, ugly huts for the poor, and secular figures in neorealist films focus on post-war social issues and expose the cruel living conditions of the people at the bottom. Its "critical humanitarian film" trend not only created a unique and distinctive film style, but also spread its influence to the world.
In 1946, Rossellini filmed Partilian, which later "captivated" his wife, Hollywood superstar Ingrid Bergman, showing a true picture of Italian life during the war years; the following year, he filmed "German Zero", which was based on the post-war encounter of 12-year-old German boy Edmund, and finally the skinny boy jumped hopelessly from a dilapidated tall building. This jump completes the most shocking scene of the film, and also completes rossellini's most profound criticism.
Life photo of Rossellini and his wife Ingrid Bergman
Stills from German Year Zero. Edmund, who poisoned his father, wandered the streets alone, and finally jumped down to say goodbye to the short life, he survived the war, but did not survive the post-war reconstruction, thereby denouncing fascism.
In 1952, Giuseppe De Santis made "Roma 11 o'Clock" based on a tragic case: after the war, a company hired a typist, hundreds of women scrambled to apply early in the morning, you pushed me, and the stairs collapsed. The film's ending is subtle and thought-provoking: after a police investigation, it is finally over, and there is still a girl waiting outside the building, hoping to get the only position.
Stills from "11 o'Clock in Rome", hundreds of women crowded the stairs to apply for a typist position, causing the stairs to collapse. The film truly reflects the social situation during the post-war Economic Recovery in Italy, exposes the serious problems of unemployment and poverty at that time, and is a masterpiece with social criticism.
Also set in Rome, a masterpiece of unemployment and hardship, it is impossible not to mention cesare Chaivatini, directed by Vittorio De Sica, and released in 1948: Richie, who had been unemployed for a long time, worked hard to get a poster job, he redeemed the bicycle he had lost to work along the street, but did not want to steal it on the first day of work. Richie and his son searched the streets of Rome without success, and finally decided to for tat, but were caught and humiliated on the spot. The camera follows The Richies through the streets of Rome: crowded job agencies, dilapidated workers' quarters, pawnshops with mountains of goods, bustling bicycle markets, churches, brothels, thieves' dens... The film is like a panoramic picture of postwar Italian reality.
De Sika speaks for actress Sophia Roland
De Sika's "The Man Who Stole the Bicycle"
"I'd rather be realistic than a romantic story, mundane than sparkling, ordinary people rather than idols", through the lens to achieve in-depth observation and meticulous analysis of various aspects of reality - neorealist films, in the view of film theorist André Bazin, are "real aesthetics". So, we see the atrocities of Nazi German soldiers in Rome, the undefended city, the embarrassment of life in The Bicycle Thief, the retired soldiers who are forced to pull a carriage for their livelihood in Two Cents of Hope, the girl who runs to her lover in the streets of Florence in the streets of Florence with bullets and bullets... Rossellini once defined the neorealist film in one sentence: "It is life itself." ”
Stills from Guerrilla. Rossellini, who filmed the film, refused to use the studio, costumes, makeup and professional actors to show the real scene of life in Italy during the war years.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > art film: a turn in aesthetic style</h1>
Similar to German Zero, De Sica's 1946 shoe shine boy is also about the lives of low-income children in post-war Europe. But de Sica, who was born in Naples by the Tyrrhenian Sea, is, as Bazin puts it, "a cinematic poet who is making films with the gentle character of the Neapolitans." And Naples, a city where northern industrial civilization and southern agricultural civilization collide, also serves as a transit point for the protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni's "Adventures", giving the film a strong symbolic significance: a man and a woman look for their missing friend Anna, the film does not show the context of Anna's disappearance, but is committed to showing the emotions between the two that are difficult to communicate. What we see is a fruitless search, an endingless disappearance. The so-called process of finding Anna actually implies that these people are on the verge of disappearing, their lives are so unreal, their relationships are so fragile, they are "moored everywhere, but they have never had the slightest connection with the story." In fact, as early as 1955, Antonioni's "Girlfriend" focused on the inner world of the characters, especially the middle and upper class, and expressed the "unintelligible nature of people's thoughts and feelings" and "the fragility of emotional relations" with existential philosophical ideas.
Antonioni (September 29, 1912 – July 30, 2007)
Antonioni's "Girlfriend" focuses on portraying the inner world of high-society characters
Intuitively, "Adventure" and "Deutsche Zero" and "Shoe Shine Boy" are not a "road number" movie at all. After the 1950s, the aesthetic style of Italian cinema began to shift from realism to mystical fantasy, symbolism and literary themes, and entered the stage of modernist film development. Many directors' works have tried to further break the narrative laws of previous films, dilute the plot and story, and express personal ideas, memories and imaginations, and incorporate irrationalism and agnosticism in Western philosophy into the film. The root of this shift is the "crisis" of neorealist cinema – the economic recovery of Italy, the rapid expansion of the middle class, and the lack of "straightforward descriptions" of neorealist films by more and more audiences, who want to express their emotions more artistically and multi-layered, and yearn to return to classical romance. As antonioni's famous work "Zoom": the photographer captures young couples in the park, and surprisingly, the woman in the photo wants to return the negative at all costs, which makes the photographer very confused, he enlarges the photo and sees a corpse and a person with a gun. The rudiments of a murder unfold in his mind, and he goes to the park to find the body, but the next day when he returns to the park, the body is gone, and only a group of people are playing a virtual tennis match, playing a non-existent tennis ball — the director uses this mysterious story to interrogate the boundary between truth and fantasy.
"Neorealism means not only social reality, but also spiritual reality, supernatural reality, and anything that might exist." Federico Fellini, who in his youth collaborated with Rossellini on Rome, the Undefended City and Partizan, like Rossellini, regarded his wife as the true soul of cinema – Giuretta Massina starred in several of his films, her face was innocent, sentimental, funny, slightly melancholy and cunning, and this special figurative temperament, like his favorite circus, gave him a rich imagination in future films. Sensitivity to color and extreme individualist style.
Stills from Fellini's wife, Giuleta Massina, in The Season of The Sale
From 1950's "Spring and Autumn of Selling Art", Fellini's works were in stark contrast to the critical consciousness and populism of neorealism orthodoxy. In Fellini's 1954 , " The Great Road " uses a journey to represent the mental journey of two people who belong to different worlds , and in Fellini 's view , " The Great Road " is an adventure that gives the self away without reservation, an adventure that values the self." For film history, "The Great Road" is a landmark film that "deviates from" the neorealist tradition, it is no longer stuck in the "restoration" of reality, but began to turn to internalization, which led to the first aesthetic debate in the post-war Italian literary and artistic circles, the materialist film theory was abandoned, and the modern sense of "art film" was born.
"The Great Road" is Fellini's transformation from neorealism to neomodernism, and In the film, Massina's interpretation of the silly woman is extremely brilliant.
In Bazin's view, in the "Lonely Trilogy" of "The Great Road", "The Liar", and "The Night of Kabylia", "The Night of Kabylia" "marks the end of the journey of neorealism": in this poignant work, the lower-class prostitute Kabilia suffers from the insults, ridicule and deception of life, and survives in the world of red and green. At the end of the film, she walks dazedly on the street, watching a group of young people who sing while walking, slowly returning from the empty state of mind to reality and smiling again. This wonderful and vague hint is meaningful.
Hinting not to be vague but equally meaningful is Fellini's 1959 La Dolce Vita. It tells the story of a lace journalist who wanders into the lives of celebrities and the rich, and witnesses the vagaries, mannerisms, and depravity of the parasites of high society. As soon as the film opens, Fellini expresses religion, classical culture and decadence, starting with sexy women, clowns full of symbolism, extravagant and lascivious scenes, bizarre scenes and irrepressible desires, he is not only completely detached from realism, but also strengthens the fantasy and even surreal treatment. The exquisite lensing, gorgeous sets, and deliberate character shapes determine the status of "La Dolce Vita" in the Italian film industry: it announces Fellini's transition from early neorealism to symbolism, and also gives a mirror to Italy, which sincerely believes in "economic miracles" and "reform and progress". Although it caused an uproar – the Vatican's opposition to this "misdemeanor" film, the anger of the right wing of society, and the criticism of the director's unclear attitude of showing decadence and detachment from the people at the bottom, it has won several awards in the international film world and is regarded by film historians as "an artistic masterpiece that can be called on the same level as Dante's Divine Comedy".
Fellini's work "La Dolce Vita" tells the story of a lace journalist who mingles with the ranks of stars and the rich, struggles in a decadent, empty life, and eventually continues to degenerate.
But Fellini has not yet reached the top. It wasn't until 1963 that he made the autobiographical film "Eight and a Half", which described "a soul in chaos": a director who lacked inspiration came to the spa sanatorium for recuperation, the producer, screenwriter, and actor endlessly urged him to start the play, his wife and lover were jealous, and the director was driven crazy. In the misfortune and pain of this ordinary person, Fellini joined the memories of childhood, the imaginary film bridge and the imagination. The plot is simple, but it successfully reflects the protagonist's mental journey, which can be called "a great attempt to explore the heart of the character with the camera". Fellini's untamed artistic endowment and strong and unique personal style led him to call the "Holy Trinity" of the world's modern art films, together with swedish director Ingmar Bergman and Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, which profoundly guided the artistic development process of post-war Italian cinema.
Fellini spoke to the actor Marcelo Mastruani on the set of "Eight and a Half Parts"
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > literature and geography: focusing on conflicting cultures</h1>
If neorealist films advocate "another perspective of filmmaking", then the Venice International Film Festival, which began in 1932, promotes more "another kind of film-watching vision", which is natural in Italy's thick historical and cultural atmosphere and Venice's gentle and romantic humanistic environment.
Venice on the Adriatic Sea is recorded in Luchino Visconti's Venice: At dusk, a white steamship sails through the Adriatic Sea shrouded in pink and golden mist, and St. Mark's Basilica flashes in front of the viewer's eyes, with solemn and dazzling beauty. "Soul Break Venice" tells the story of the German composer Eisenbach, who came to Lido earlier than the film festival, after seeing the beautiful teenager Dasio in a hotel, and then frantically pursuing the teenager, even if he had cholera and finally died on the golden beach. On the beach, Darthio and his equally youthful swimsuit-clad male companion chase and play. The last thing Eisenbach saw before his death was Dassoo's slender fingers pointing into the endless distance.
Stills of a beautiful teenager in "Soul Break Venice"
What seems to be a story of a year-old love affair with Plato shows a profound pursuit of eternal beauty—Visconti's works are always full of literature, dramatic charm and profound philosophical reflections, which stem from the respect for classical concepts and strong theater atmosphere cultivated by his aristocratic origins. Like Visconti, pier Paolo Pasolini was also keen to bring literature to the screen, showing Sophocles's Oedipus the King, Euripides's Medea, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Visconti also had innovative ideas against the blood of the nobility, and as early as the beginning of his work, he opposed dictatorship and directed films on the principle of equality. Released in 1948, "The Earth is Fluctuating" was filmed in a fishing village in Sicily, without professional actors, the scene temporarily changed the script, wrote dialogue, the whole film used the Sicilian dialect, Italians also need to cooperate with subtitles to understand - at that time, about 75% of italians used dialects, most of them were low-level people. In 1963, Sicily became the "origin" of Visconti's Leopard's story of nostalgia for the ancient traditional order.
Set in Sicily in the 1860s, Visconti's film Leopard tells the story of social change in the face of unrest, the decline of the aristocracy of the old system, and the fate of eventual replacement by a new class.
Sicily, located in the Ionian Sea, is the darling of Italian cinema. The traditional way of life, fierce gang struggle, devout religious beliefs, beautiful natural scenery, and ancient civilizational relics are also given a different charm in the film: the magnificence of "Leopard", the warmth of "Cinema Paradiso", the barbarism of "My Father and My Lord", the beauty of "The Postman", the poignancy of "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily"... This is also the filming location of "Love on the Edge of the Volcano" cooperated by Rossellini and his new wife Bergman, representing his transformation - focusing on conflicting cultures.
When it comes to Sicily, the first reaction of fans is "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily". Reynaldo, a teenager in a small Sicilian town, rides a bicycle, "stalking and voyeurizing" the style woman Marlena. Until the news of Marlena's husband's death and her father died in the war, she had to commit herself to a lustful man, including a German, in order to survive. After the Allied occupation of Sicily, she was so jealous that the red-eyed women shaved their hair, stripped naked and paraded through the streets. The ending of the film is even more ingenious: it is rumored that her husband, who has died in battle, finally takes her back to Sicily, and the townspeople accept her, but without any remorse, because at this time Marlena no longer has amazing beauty, but is just a mediocre housewife, and only in Reinaldo's heart has left a legend about beauty. Director Giuseppe Tornatore's shots of Sicilia are warm and brutal, fantasy and realistic.
In "The Beautiful Legend of Sicily", Marlena, played by Monica Bellucci, walks through the square of Syracuse Cathedral in a variety of styles, which is one of the most classic bridges in the film.
Compared with "literature and art", another significant feature that Sicily brought to Italian cinema is the mafia. In the 1960s, films such as "The Mafia Man", "The Death of the Dragon Head", and "The Mafia" all presented stories with the attitude and technique of realism rather than genre films, tending to coldly expose social and political realities. In the 1970s, Italian mafia culture injected new life into the ideal male protagonist of the already rigid gangster film. They are more masculine, directly importing the formalistic aesthetics of violence into the male image, and the protagonist becomes more ferocious and unscrupulous; at the same time, they are more "feminine" - the mafia's unique family concept and blood feelings have completely transformed the previous gangster films' disregard for family and family relations, and a man who lives alone like a beast in the urban jungle is suddenly pulled back to a more "realistic" family environment, which constitutes the main line of the gangsters' careers. Outside, the gang can be cold-blooded and fierce, but when they return to the family, they are the big parents who have children's love.
The Godfather is a classic gangster film directed by Italian-American director Coppola that depicts the rise and fall of the Corleone mafia family, and it opens up broad prospects for crime films in american film history.
The unique organizational structure and character image of the Italian mafia became the cultural pillar of Western gangster genre films after the "New Hollywood" era, and even made a group of filmmakers of Italian descent become representatives of modern gangster films: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, James Kane...
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > pluralistic change: the era that always represents it</h1>
Tornadore, who is passionate about shooting Sicily, has the naïve and enthusiastic character of a Southern Italian, and many of his works are full of attention to real problems, and in 1989 he became famous for "Cinema Paradiso", which is also regarded as the starting point for the revival of the Italian neorealist film tradition. Veteran Italian film critic Enrique Magrelli put it this way: "He is one of the few people in the world who does not catch trends and does not chase fashion to make movies. He always insisted on his way of telling stories. ”
In "Cinema Paradiso", the common love of movies and projectors makes the projectionist Alfredo and the little boy More become friends.
Also "insisting on telling his own story" is Roberto Benigni, whose masterpiece is "A Beautiful Life": The commoner Guido falls in love with the aristocratic Lady Dora, a love story that is typical of Italian comedy, while the second half of the film tells the story of the concentration camp in a tone of black humor. When he first arrived in the concentration camp, in order to prevent the war from imprinting on his son's heart, Guido stood next to the Germans pretending to be translators, pretending to be Nazi officers, but turning the rules of the concentration camp he announced into the rules of the game, which is also the core plot of the movie - treating the absurdity of life with a playful attitude and treating the ugliness of human nature with optimism.
"A Beautiful Life" uses black humor to describe the sadness and joy of guido's family in the Nazi concentration camps, showing Guido's vision of a beautiful life and the optimism that characterizes it in a cruel environment. Unlike any previous film that reflects the theme of World War II, the film is a black comedy that presents an aspect of World War II history in a fresh perspective that transcends convention. Director and lead actor Roberto Bernini gave a shot of painkiller to people injured in World War II with his own unique perspective.
Stills from "A Beautiful Life". In the inhumane concentration camp, Guido has been "deceiving" his son Joshua, telling him that this is a game in which those who follow the rules of the game can eventually get a real tank to go home. The father's selfless love for his children touches people's hearts.
"I have a strong desire to place myself, my comedy protagonist, in an extreme environment, and this most extreme environment is the concentration camp, which is almost a symbol of that cruel era, a symbol of the negative side. I use a comedic way to describe a story with blood and tears, because I don't want the audience to look for realism in my films. I think that true comedy is an extension of the threads of tragic tragedy, and the most central part of all the elements of comedy that makes people laugh is tragedy. Bernini said. This is the attitude of the Italians: the depth and optimism of the character, the banter and the helplessness, the mixture of pride and innocence.
After experiencing the glory of neorealist films, fellini, Antonioni and other famous directors inherited and carried forward, although comedy and political films also showed their own characteristics and status, italian cinema has declined since the 1970s and 1980s. The artistic dilemma brought about by the worldwide economic crisis and the increasing pressure of life have made people more inclined to watch entertainment movies and escape from reality. Italy failed to establish a system of operations in response to global competition in time, so that it ceded 60% of the domestic market to Hollywood. During this period, the deaths of Visconti, Rossellini, de Sika, Pasolini and others made the film industry even worse.
One commentator argued that "unlike in the United States, cinema in Italy is primarily considered a cultural expression rather than a commercial product." Thus the achievements of art cinema undoubtedly constitute an important sign of the rise and fall of Italian cinema. So, nearly a decade after the world's top film festival, in 2001, Italian director Nanni Moretti's film "Son's Room" won the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year, and the whole country rejoiced. Since the 21st century, Italian cinema is recovering, "Flames of the Sea", "Beautiful City", "Hungry Heart", "Rome Ring Highway", "Caesar Must Die", "My Mother", "Revenge for The Father", "Birth of the Pope"... has won many important awards in the film industry, which has attracted the attention of the industry.
In "Son's Room", Nanni Molletti changed her previous witty style and told a heavy story with warm pictures, simple dialogue and simple plot, plain and natural, but deeply moving.
Italian cinema has always represented its time, like Tornadore's epic Baalria, which spans from the 1930s to the 1960s, telling the story of the changes in the lives of three generations of a family during the two world wars and in the decades after the war.
The historical pattern and grand narrative of "Baalria" fully demonstrate the director Tornado's ambition to present the "kaleidoscope of Italian society".
The fate of ordinary people is like duckweed in the turbulent social change - this is an Italian film; and Antonioni, who has been forced to leave the studio for many years because of cerebral thrombosis, has filmed "Days on the Clouds" with the assistance of Wim Wenders, which is also an Italian film: a director wanders aimlessly 4 cities, connecting 4 independent love stories in the form of memories and meditations. Let the viewer deeply experience the confusion of the modern world and the anxiety caused by the emotional vacuum hidden behind the technological civilization. At the beginning of the film, the director's monologue may become a footnote to Italian cinema - "I am caught in deep thought and darkness, in the darkness, the clues can be lit, and in the silence the voices of the outside world gradually penetrate." I believe that there is a dynamic in all things that drives me forward, and it is the source of life, the past, and the future. ”
This article is from the August 2020 issue