Fantasia
Sottomarina
Fight of the
octopus and the moray eel, all the fish join in, it ends with an ancient
proverb of the sea.
Adroitly filmed
and edited with aquarium specimens.
La Nave Bianca
Action aboard an Italian
navy battleship, the wounded are transferred to a hospital ship for treatment.
A sailor who has missed a date with a madrina di guerra finds she’s a nurse, duty restrains her.
Un Pilota Ritorna
In the Italian
campaign against Greece, a flier is shot down and captured by the British.
He meets a nurse
born in Athens of Italian parents.
He escapes during
an air raid and flies a British fighter back to Italy, where he is informed
that Greece has fallen.
L’Uomo dalla Croce
An Italian army
chaplain with the tank corps on the Russian Front, left behind with a gravely
wounded soldier, captured, besieged in a Russian village under attack, dead of
his wounds while the village is overrun.
Roma
città aperta
A recollection of
the war pieced up immediately after, about a Rome divided into “labor
zones” where partisans are hunted, expectant mothers are shot in the
street, the theatrical element is a drug-besotted Judas, children play with
bombs, and the local boss is a fairy with big ideas and no compunction about
killing priests—“a paradise for microbes.”
Desiderio
Puttana di Roma,
rustication under a horticulturist’s influence.
Down on the farm,
brother-in-law and sister, tragic ending previsaged
in the city, fifth-floor suicide.
Dropped in
mid-production, owing to the fact that the place serving as location received
Allied bombs to the point of extinction, resumed on other premises and
concluded by Marcello Pagliero, with another actress
and another title.
The essence
of this is the screenplay, and the sum of that is the image. First, it’s
the Italian girl lying dead after being cursed by the Americans and killed by
the Germans. Then it’s a pit or quarry filled with scavenging children.
Next, it’s a Roman prostitute six months after the Liberation. Next, it’s
a Partisan leader who fights and dies unseen in Florence. Then it’s the
one about the three Army chaplains, a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew, who go
to the Italian monastery. Finally, it’s a detached unit of OSS and
Partisans cut off, surrounded, captured, and executed.
And that’s it, the other side of the Army war documentaries. The score by
Renzo Rossellini exactly mirrors the delicate line of
Roberto Rossellini’s caméra-stylo.
l’Amore
Measure the
critic’s falsity. Rossellini’s daughter of Zion and his Madonna,
the one a gift of Cocteau and all the art at the director’s disposal, the
rest by way of Fellini and Pinelli and Magnani.
Germania anno zero
The zero point at
which Nazi kultur
is initiated and runs its course in a symbolic representation filmed amid the
ruins of Berlin in 1947.
A young boy
influenced by a Uranist pedagogue kills his ailing
father to reduce household expenditures.
Hitchcock’s
Rope and J. Lee Thompson’s The Yellow Balloon have odd
similarities, and Truffaut avouches an influence on Les Quatre cent coups.
“The last
few seconds of Fascist joy may be seen through the bewildered smile of a small
boy (Germany Year Zero)”,
Godard writes in Gazette du Cinéma.
Stromboli
So many films
went into it, from Bird of Paradise to Captains Courageous, so
many films came out of it, from Teorema to The
Ballad of Cable Hogue, you may well ask yourself what Bosley Crowther meant in the New York Times by describing
it as “incredibly feeble, inarticulate, uninspiring and painfully
banal,” but he saw a cut version.
The dead are so
many stars in heaven, to one who has been long in city pent.
Variety likewise, “so many morally-questionable
scenes”, etc.
The beautiful
English dub has Bergman and no subtitles, one of the greatest performances ever
in the cinema.
Francesco
giullare di Dio
St. Francis,
Brother Juniper, expounding several mysteries of faith including why there are
film critics, lest the seeker should be wanting in “perfect
happiness”.
L’Envie
Les Sept péchés capitaux
Vermeer, Manet, Bonnard (the cat). The painter has a young bride, she knows
nothing, he is a sovereign man of the world, anyway he knows cats and models
and talented people of all kinds, she doesn’t even like the cat, it falls six floors and bounces off an awning, pushed off
their balcony.
He carries it up,
caresses it, notes the bump on its head. He reasons
out what has happened, realizes his mistake, she envies gifts received by
others. The camera stands still, no longer moving about the apartment, as she
walks toward it into an extreme close-up.
Rossellini at the
top of his form in naturalism and precision, the “peinture
de l’empêchement” put down to mésalliance.
La Macchina Ammazzacattivi
The Villainkilling Machine will do for nasty people in the town, it’s a camera that snaps
a picture of a picture of a crook or a fink and fixes him dead in the pose.
A hilly fishing
town, lots of jokes, the leading citizens go, the Americans are back to build a
resort hotel where they landed, a substantial Government sum has to be fought
over, separating the wheat from the chaff becomes a tiring occupation for the
photographer, a pious man with a gift from God, as he thinks.
A Rossellini
comedy, among the most brilliant and satisfying in the Italian cinema, which is
to say any.
Tom Milne (Time
Out Film Guide) sniffed at it as “minor but mildly pleasing”,
Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) says it’s “a remarkably
suggestive fable”.
Europe ‘51
A society woman
loses her young son and her mind, wanders the slums of Rome succoring the
needy, and is placed in a mental hospital by her family.
Crowther tells us that this English-dubbed version was
first released in the U.S. as No Greater Love, and that “the transfer
of Ingrid Bergman to the realm of Italian films has obviously not resulted in
an advancement in her acting career.”
This shows
Rossellini as very close to Renoir, whose Rules of the Game is
practically named toward the end, in a satire that cuts both ways, all ways,
every way, and still is quite serious.
And perhaps the
ending, after so many farcical and fantastic events, associates the director
with De Sica in Miracolo a Milano.
As a technique of
perception, Rossellini’s art is instantaneous and flawless. Critics have
tended to take the film at face value, which is how Bergman says it was
conceived, and then judge accordingly yea or nay.
Dov’è La Libertà...?
A man imprisoned
for defending the honor of his Fascist bimbo wife belongs there, as he finds
out when he’s paroled.
The dance
marathon (he pays), the running of the bulls (he flees), extinction of the Jews
or nearly (he’s supposed to finish the job, at the behest of her family).
No, better back
inside, the film represents his trial for breaking and entering.
Siamo donne
“Ingrid
Bergman”, her neighbor lady’s chicken destroys the actress’s
“very very rare” roses, not the children,
nor the dog nor the pony. The dog, who prefers garbage, is called indoors where
Bergman has trapped the “diabolical” chicken, no dice. Guests arrive, she conceals the chicken in a cabinet. The neighbor lady storms in and calls her a chicken thief.
A silly story,
Bergman tells the camera.
Viaggio in Italia
The romance of
Italy, the Italy of romance, how these extremes meet.
The subtale of a vanished poet recurs in John Huston’s The Dead, Rossellini’s English couple
are named Joyce.
Naples, Capri, Pompeii, il miracolo della Vergine.
Uncle Homer,
“not a normal person”, is Uncle Ez the
Italian expatriate.
A complete vacation.
Bored, he tries a
mistress but she’s married, a sorrowing whore besieges him. Reminiscent,
she visits the museum, accepts the flattery of princes, sees
the ancient places.
They meet at a
festival in the streets.
Non credo più all’amore
La paura
It takes place in
Germany, of course, Signora Wagner has a lover, she’s
pestered by fear and a blackmailer, set on by her husband, a medical
researcher.
One of
Godard’s Ten Best Films that year, with Welles, Renoir, Hitchcock, Logan,
Dwan, Sternberg, Bresson, Cukor, and Quine
(“whereas Paisà, not so very long
ago,” he later wrote, “was the rage of the Cannes Festival, Fear
came out last year in a seedy second-run cinema”).
Rossellini
interviewed by Godard (tr. Tom Milne), “do you remember the doctor in Fear
who treats his wife like the guinea-pigs he uses for his experiments? For in
the final analysis intelligence, too, is a convention; and behind the
intelligence I seek to show not only how it works but why it works in this way.
I would like to show the animal side of intelligence, just as in India 58
I showed the intelligence in animal behaviour.”
Giovanna d’Arco al rogo
Honegger’s music, Claudel’s
dramatic poetry, Bergman, Rossellini, Teatro di S. Carlo (Napoli).
Out of this world
of plaster saints Joan ascends to Fra Domenico, they discourse in the starry heavens and view her
trial. Tiger, Fox and Serpent refuse, Porcus (Cauchon) heads the tribunal of Sheep, the recorder is an
Ass. The dark demon is Cauchon’s aim, the one
binding her. “They believe in the Devil,” Fra
Domenico explains, “not God”. Court cards
dance four-handed, “I lose! I mean I win.”
The bells sound,
Catherine and Marguerite. “I led his horse, my King.” The bread and
wine of France are not to be torn asunder. The King enters his gate.
Fra Domenico understands
much but not Joan’s sword of Domremy, a gift of St. Michael. Two soldiers put her to the stake,
her shackles fall.
Bergman has the
speaking part of Joan in fluent Italian with a slight, distinctive accent. Tullio Carminati is the Lear to
her Cordelia, observing out of time.
At the very
height of Rossellini’s technical prowess as an artist of the Neo-Realist
school (his contribution to The Seven Deadly Sins is as detailed as Manet’s Portrait of Zola) this sudden look
toward Augustine and Pascal.
India
Matri Bhumi
India
“Mother Earth”, full of crowds in Bombay, elephants and tigers and
monkeys in the countryside, great dams and the weddings and partings of which
this film is made.
Il generale della
Rovere
The chevalier d’industrie who knows all and sees all for salami
and gambling money is caught and has to play a dead hero in prison to unmask,
as it turns out, the chief of the partisans.
One mistake by
the Obersturmbannführer, who puts him in a
holding tank with prisoners about to be executed and doesn’t tell him,
spoils everything.
Now he knows,
knows absolutely, what that is. And he becomes a hero of sorts as well.
Golden Lion in
Venice.
Era notte a Roma
It combines Roma,
città aperta and Paisà for a tale of the city in the form of a joke,
Allied prisoners of war escape, a Russian, an Englishman, and an American.
This is
Rossellini’s last word on the subject, the three hole up in Rome, the
American makes for Anzio, the Russian is killed by
the Germans, the Englishman sees the Allies arrive.
Their hostess is
a De Sica type, the ciociara and the seller of
black market cigarettes in Ieri Oggi Domani, and the entire
point.
It wasn’t
shown in New York for twenty years, then Canby
dismissed it as melodrama (Godard, Ten Best Films of 1961, after Ford, Rouch, Renoir, Chabrol, Rivette, Visconti, Preminger, Demy,
and before Lang).
Viva L’Italia
Omaggio a Garibaldi.
Rossellini has
the immediate example of the Allied campaign, also beginning in Sicily (and
halted for a time north of Naples).
Renoir’s La
Marseillaise is a notable precedent tacitly acknowledged.
The centennial of
Italian unification celebrated by a masterpiece re-creating the battles fought
from Calatafimi to the Volturno.
Vanina Vanini
Daughter of a Roman prince and practically “vanity of vanities”.
Death of Pius VII. Arrival of a carbonaro from the provinces, assassination of a traitor,
arrest, escape from the Castel Sant’Angelo,
wounded, concealed in the attic of the palazzo...
“Eh, prophecies! Same old tune! Fall of Babylon! Day of Judgement! Same old
song! My friend, to speak truth, Babylon’s doing fine, she’s an old
whore with a tough hide.” The very beautiful, refined technique is
especially evident in, for example, the lovers’ farewell at the castle, a
long mobile take with the actors brought to varying degrees of closeup by means of their own movement through the scene,
generally the action of the style (in comparison with, say, Visconti’s Il Gattopardo)
is an ironic reduction of these events to the stuff of romantic fiction, the
extraordinary to the commonplace, adding a certain strain of Romeo and Juliet ahead of Zeffirelli, after Castellani.
Ironic, by dint of the pains taken to realize the early nineteenth century, and
because the charcoal burner is a firebrand with a penetrating view of Europe
after Napoleon. “After so much blood, the
Congress of Vienna met and the question of long pants or short took precedence
over the problems of Prussia, Spain, the whole Continent. The
Holy Alliance, born of this Congress, gave the police supreme authority.”
The distance from that day to this is real and illusory, measured in certain
strides, a tale that is told...
The Inquisition,
revived. The play of fact and romance, a tale of our forefathers. The score suggests Tosca
in the end, the film’s structure rather inclines toward John Ford’s
The Plough and the Stars in the
terrible dilemma, on a presumable basis of Samson
and Delilah (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, but cf. Marcello Baldi’s
I Grandi condottieri).
Vincent Canby of
the New York Times, “never
quite that simple or simple-minded.” Film4, “minor Rossellini.”
Jean-Luc Godard (Cahiers du Cinéma), Ten Best Films released in France that
year, with Hawks, Bergman, Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard, Dovzhenko,
Richard Brooks, Claude de Givray, and Peckinpah.
Anima nera
The Roman car dealer, a swindler from way back when.
That is the joke construction, he’s old as history and the latest
thing, add to that a memory of the war...
Play by Griffi, Deodato is an assistant,
jazz score by Piccioni (“Over the
Rainbow” for trumpet on the turntable).
“The more
you spit on people, the more they love you. Adore you, even.”
The answer is
from Lubitsch, That Lady in Ermine.
Laviamoci il cervello
Rogopag
The American is a
TV executive selling I Love Lucy, Perry Mason and The Perry
Como Show in Bangkok, “all this Oriental philosophy is driving me
crazy,” he’s on Alitalia’s polar
route, the stewardess could be the next Rheingold girl, he falls in love with
her.
Her boyfriend
back home gets her home movies, his mentor sizes up the Yank, “a
psychopath with an Oedipus complex”. Her natural beauty and illibatezza excite him, let her curtail them.
She looks like a
Roman whore next time they meet, the American is appalled. The boyfriend too,
viewing her latest home movie. The Yank tries to embrace his home movie of her
as she was.
Over the heads of
critics it went, and on to Godard, Pasolini, Gregoretti.
La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis
XIV
Death of Cardinal
Mazarin. Arrest of Fouquet. The Sun King.
His fantastic
ordination of a country entirely devoted to himself for reasons of State, and
with an eye to progress as well as the peasantry, subdues the nobles by
entraining them in a fantastic German fashion that costs a yearly income for a
single suit of clothes, as he observes, and the Crown pays all expenses at
court.
Atti degli apostoli
Paul, the Jew who
went to Rome with side-curls amid the vestiges of Greece, the Roman citizen
preaching “scandal to the Hebrews, folly to the Gentiles” (Quinta Parte).
He walks with a
stick or staff on the stone roads of Agostino, all
the labor involved is evident, and the Middle Sea voyage in a light vessel...
Socrate
William K.
Howard’s Burleigh (Morton Selten) in Fire
Over England is to Elizabeth as Socrates to Athena, there is nothing to be
done.
Rossellini’s
bag of tricks encompasses the city walls and the Acropolis, he gives the fair
approximation that delivers the goods, the movie set
is avouched to be his language.
The painter David’s
hero is eschewed, the citizenry are downbeat, heroic
sculptures mind the latter end.
The
prestidigitation peculiar to Rossellini includes nothing up any sleeve, amid a
panoply of simulacra.
Blaise Pascal
His legs will
barely hold him up, he treats them with brandy, later
an ointment of puppies and worms is prescribed.
Russell’s The
Devils is closely akin, the portrait of a devout believer and a leading
scientist in the time of witch trials.
He meets
Descartes, they disagree amicably, Richelieu and Mazarin
and Louis are offscreen characters.
It is
sufficiently ordered as a Nō play to call
in question the very idea of biography, the presence of the subject is evoked
(as in Klaus Kirschner’s Mozart: A Childhood
Chronicle and Horst Seemann’s Beethoven—Tage aus einem
Leben), he ruminates and calculates in his room,
expires in a long take that dispenses with drum and flute.
Agostino d’Ippona
The African
bishop, dealing with primitives, the Donatists, and
the argument of Empire.
His flock is
attacked, Alaricus pillages Rome, the cry is against
the Christians, he preaches faithfully the corruption of Roman virtue as the
real cause, and the Celestial City that is Jerusalem.
Rossellini makes
his own certain discoveries of Irving Pichel (Martin Luther, Day of Triumph)
by the main device of dragging the camera among the footstones of the way.
The saint
addresses the world by means of the camera like Jesus or Luther or Chaplin.
Cartesius
All the folly of
Europe is only a distraction, wars (he enters one for the experience),
religious disputes (he is a Catholic), the tulip mania, and there is plague.
He has a pellucid
understanding of his dreams, superstition and folly make for error, he is at pains to form useful thoughts on the matter of
existence.
An interesting
parallel to Losey’s Galileo (Descartes visits Huyghens
and has a look at the Pleiades).
A successful,
modest man, seeking quietude for thought, neither a skeptic nor an innovator,
one who sees the scientific knowledge of his age to be inadequate, a modern
scientist dealing rationally and dispassionately with various threats and
temptations.
The actor
presents a considerable likeness, the period is well-evoked.