Text | magasa
There is a very interesting topic in the online fan circle, many people think that 1994 is the most exciting year in the history of world cinema, because this year gave birth to "Pulp Fiction", "Forrest Gump", "This Killer Is Not Too Cold", "Shawshank Redemption" and other excellent movies.
I've written several articles about this phenomenon, explaining why those films were produced in 1994.
In fact, in my eyes, there are many glorious years in the history of world cinema, and the strongest year should be less than 1994. For example, in the years when classical Hollywood was at its peak, from 1939 to 1942, a large number of classic movies were born every year.
Another example is Europe in 1960, or italy alone, this year has been a landmark turning point in classical cinema and modern cinema, dividing the entire history of world cinema in two.
Let's talk about the Italian film of 1960.
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In September 1959, Italian filmmakers felt they had recovered from the weakness of the past few years, thanks to roberto Rossellini's "General della Rovere" and Mario Monicelli's "The Great War" at that year's Venice Film Festival. Although it is an Italian local award, the native has only been involved once in the past decade with the co-production "Romeo and Juliet".
So, when the above two films about the war stood on the podium in Venice at the same time, the unexpected success made people begin to look forward to it, and a new miracle of Italian cinema was coming.
General Rovere (1959)
In the sluggish 1950s, farcical realism and populist works transformed by "white telephone films" were everywhere, such as Luigi Comencini's "Bread, Love and Dreams", on the other hand, conservative authorities severely suppressed intellectuals, tightened the atmosphere of cultural opinion, and repeatedly interfered in film creation, hindering the creators from displaying their talents.
Bread, Love and Dreams (1953)
Led by luigi Chiarini, the tough president of the festival's jury, the award was awarded to a long-lost Italian film, which is indeed a sweeping and inspiring sight. However, the two films that won the award did not represent the best efforts of Italian cinema at that time.
In fact, history proves that neither Rossellini nor Moniseli finally returned Italy to the ranks of world cinema powers in the 1960s. Their greatest credit is only to be the first to stand out in Venice and sound the clarion call of Italian cinema.
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Critics at the time commented on the status quo this way:
"In 1959, Italian filmmakers cautiously embarked on more courageous adventures – largely as an example for their French neighbours. This year, Italy began to break through the forbidden zone of two or three years ago, the fear of censorship was an outdated excuse, and films reflecting fascism finally began to emerge."
At the end of the 1950s, films about war and anti-fascism sprung up in the Italian film industry, and many directors were originally new to the film industry. Perhaps there are reasons to explain the dead wood of Italian cinema.
The elections of 1958 and 1960 shattered the wishful thinking of the right-wing Christian Democrats, and the left forces were given a larger piece of the pie, so the political atmosphere became more relaxed and the confinement of speech began to thaw. At the same time, due to the massive expansion of television in the previous decade, the number of moviegoers plummeted, and the production of films fell by half, and some of the old big companies went bankrupt.
Film practitioners began to realize that conformist films could no longer pull the audience away from the television set (although the Italian television industry was far less developed than in the United States and Britain at that time).
Like their foreign counterparts, Italian filmmakers have launched a rescue campaign against television invasions, abolishing obsolete genres (pink neorealism, popular melodrama, etc.), injecting fresh blood into the half-dead film industry, and the outbreak of the French New Wave has given hope to neighboring countries.
Of course, Italian cinema did not give birth to new stars who called for creative freedom like Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson, Carlisle Reitz, Tony Richardson, as France or Britain did, and the film world was dominated by a few old guys who had been immersed in the jianghu for many years: Antonioni, Fellini and Visconti.
The only "newcomers" who can later stand shoulder to shoulder with these three giants are the film poet Pasolini and Emano Ormi, who "strayed into the film world", who followed the path abandoned by Rossellini and followed his own way.
"General Rovere" and the next few films, in Rossellini's film career, are only inconspicuous episodes, do not occupy too prominent positions, in the director's own mind, naturally far from being comparable to the neorealist masterpieces of the 40s, or even less than the subsequent series of TELEVISION films, that is just a film genius finally trying to integrate himself into the industrial system.
The film is closer in subject matter and style to the director's most successful "Rome, Undefended City", saying that a liar swindler cheats money from a prisoner imprisoned by the Nazis, and Desica's performance adds to the charm of the film.
Rome, the Undefended City (1945)
If "General Ravire" is not the brainchild of Rossellini, then "The Great War", which is tied for the Golden Lion Award, is one of Moniseli's two or three best works, which examines The position and performance of Italy in the First World War, pointing out that the ignorant young people who rushed to the battlefield did not know why they fought, and eventually died worthlessly, revealing the truth that the war had nothing to do with the people.
This was criticized by some media outlets, saying that the director "insulted the 600,000 Italian heroes who died in World War I".
The Great War (1959)
Since the sensitive nerves of some people have been stirred up, why not let the breakthrough come more violently? The topic of World War I was just a small test, and the just past World War II immediately became a more popular object. The founding general Rovere did not go beyond the usual boundaries: the Germans remained the main cause of the Italian tragedy.
In 1960, the successful documentary filmmaker Florestano Vancini directed his first feature film, Long Night in 1943, confronting the massacre of innocent people by Italian fascists, and in addition to his own documentary experience, Vansini applied the far-reaching neorealism of the time.
The Long Night of 43 Years (1960)
The revival of the war theme has also rekindled the enthusiasm of the old neorealist directors, who had been honed by the declining film industry.
In 1960, Desica made TwoWomen, about how Sophia Roland's mother and her young daughter saved their lives and dignity in a brutal war. However, the biggest failure of this film is that Roland's overly outstanding star temperament is very different from the poor mother that the film needs, and even if De Sika does everything in his power, he cannot complete this transformation, which is as incompatible as if Gary Grant had actually played "The Bicycle Thief".
Sophia Roland
But the most original Italian film of that period was not a master of achievement, but a newcomer to the film industry, Emano Ormi's "Time Stood Still", which is also one of the few Italian masterpieces that can echo the booming youth film wave in Britain and France.
After the end of World War II, at the age of fifteen, he joined a company in Milan, starting as a small clerk, and later shooting many industrial documentaries for the company, which slowly fascinated him with the use of film to show the delicate relationship between people.
Emano Ormi
For example, he and Antonioni are one of the few directors who are rarely influenced by the Italian comedy film tradition, olmi's most valuable thing is that he has cultivated a unique feeling and insight into film, he has only been influenced by some Rossellini, "Time Stop" marks that he has moved away from the Italian classic film from the beginning, and embarked on a path of anti-drama with Fellini and Antonioni.
In the long run, Olmi's appearance was undoubtedly one of the most important events in the Italian film industry around 1960, but at the time, several other new directors obscured his light, especially Visconti's former assistant Francesco Rosi, whose "The Challenge" and "The Magliari" caused a great response, especially the second part, focusing on the Italian travelers who were looking for their dreams in Germany with a new perspective.
Francisco Rossi
Mauro Bolognini made his debut as luigi Zampa's assistant in the early 50s, but he didn't get more attention until the late 50s. The biggest feature of his works during this period was that almost all of them were written by Pasolini. Boronini was not an ambitious film artist, he was happy to adapt literary works, and had no intention of introducing personal understanding, even if it was enough for him to carefully interpret the original work itself.
The young poet Pasolini had nowhere to live in his hometown because of homosexuality, and was expelled from the Italian Communist Party, exiled to Rome as a school teacher, and found that helping people change the script could also make a job, thus entering the film circle.
Radical left-wing political leanings coupled with a blatantly professed homosexual identity made Pasolini always seem so maverick, and his early novels and films revolved almost exclusively around unemployed workers in Rome's shacks, rogue Ah Fei, prostitutes and robbers, and the low-level characters with whom he dealt with every day were his favorite tragic protagonists.
Pasolini gradually realized that the film should reveal the continuity of the fascist regime and the Christian Democratic regime of the fifties from two aspects, namely the forced settlement of the poor and the violence and corruption of the police. The play "Night of Kabylia" reflects Pasolini's position to a certain extent, but Fellini injects his heroine with middle-class virtues and values, which is somewhat contrary to Pasolini's original intentions.
Antonio of Ilbel (1960)
Bell' Antonio is the most successful and final collaboration between Boronini and Pasolini. Previous collaborations have paved the way for Pasolini to embark on the path of independent directing, due to the dissatisfaction of several important child actors who are dissatisfied with Pasolini as a screenwriter, so his desire to become a film director is increasingly strong, and a parting with Boronini is inevitable.
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Looking at the Italian film debut that appeared around 1960, stylistically, the influence of neorealism is everywhere, and in terms of content, the historical war theme flourished due to the delay of healing the wounds of World War II by a decade, which seems to explain why Godard and Tony Richardson were not born in Italy.
History is like a rein that restricts Italian filmmakers to a new wave of their own way, from the end of the 50s to a long period of time later, in addition to the ever-thriving comedy, many Italian films have always hovered between social history and metaphor.
La Dolce Vita (1960)
The Adventure and The Sweet Life, which came out in 1960, shook the world and the whole of Italy, with some critics complaining that Italian cinema at the time "always rejected critical realism and didn't care about the environment and current phenomena in which they lived, and Antonioni's new films (referring to "Adventures") were so popular, like "anti-fiction", there should be a term called 'anti-film', they deconstructed the characters, the story." And then there's the plot—while Chaivatini's neorealism has been done, it's a very different approach. The conflicts they care about come from within people."
The Adventure (1960)
That year, more than the success of "Adventures" and "La Dolce Vita" was Visconti's "Roccoand His Brothers" (Roccoand His Brothers).
The Roco Brothers (1960)
The love of the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga and sympathy for the life of the italian people in the south were the inspiration for many of Visconti's creations, and "Roco Brothers" is concerned with the millions of poor people in the south in the 50s who left their hometowns to find a new life in metropolises such as Milan with a yearning for the industrialized developed cities of the north, but in the end less than one percent of them could really gain a foothold.
Thus the vivid and touching story of the Rocco family became a symbol of Italian reality, and his figure seemed extremely lonely in the thriving big city, as Fellini asserted through "The Great Road": "The greatest pain of modern man is loneliness."
Entering the 60s, the sustained strong recovery has always been the main theme of the film industry, Italian cinema ushered in the third golden period in history, it is difficult to find a similar film climax in other European countries of the same era, France did not, Germany did not, Britain, Spain did not.
Rome has also once again become a bustling film hub, attracting filmmakers, directors and actors from all over the world. The time of the old generation of filmmakers is completely over, and while they are overshadowed, countless new faces, new themes, and new ideas emerge on the screen one after another.
This, of course, is inextricably linked to the take-off of the European economy. Italy's low price advantage has attracted hollywood studios to put the location on the Apennine Peninsula. Rome has been dubbed the "Hollywood on the Tiber", and the largest Cinemacitta studio and the new Dinocitta Studios by big producer Dino de Laurentis will always be bustling and crowded.
Within a few years, Italian cinema was in high spirits emerging from decline and firmly seizing the throne of the second largest cinema power in the Western world after the United States, all starting in that fantastic 1960.
This article was first published on the Iris Public Account (IrisMagazine)