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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Here on entitled opinions, we can't give you anything, but food for thought, cake for the soul, poetry for the heart, and conversations for the ages.
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Looks so good, it looks so cool. You plan to live in to the poor, but don't give me a piece of money.
Another form our love takes on this show is heating our listeners' suggestions for show topics whenever we can.
Several of you have put in requests for a show on the topic of film media and the history of cinema.
So here you go, we have a show for you today on the history of Italian cinema.
It's the first time we're doing something on cinema, believe it or not.
That must have something to do with the fact that personally I'm not a big movie buff.
I hardly ever watch the Oscars, and I walk out of more movies and I sit through all the way to the end.
But as they say in Hollywood, everybody loves the movies, and since it's all about love around here,
here we go with the show about Italian movies.
The guest who joins me in the studio today is Sarah Carey.
She was an Italian major here at Stanford as an undergraduate a few years back before going on to pursue graduate studies in Italian film and literature at UCLA.
She received her PhD degree just over a year ago, and presently she's in her second year as a post-doc humanities melon fellow here at Stanford.
And I know for my own sources at UCLA that Sarah has listened regularly to entitled opinion since the show first started up in 2005, and that in itself is a very high recommendation around here, and I look forward to having her share with us her special expertise today.
She takes us through the main chapters in the story of Italian cinema and what makes that story so distinctive Sarah.
Welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me Robert.
So while preparing for today's show, I read the Wikipedia entry for Italian cinema.
Glad you admitted that.
Yeah, yeah.
I have no problems using that resource whenever I can.
I use them very often actually.
If you look at that entry, it begins with the following statement.
Quote, "The history of Italian cinema began just a few months after the Lumiere brothers had patented their cinémato graph
When Pope Leo XIII was filmed for a few seconds in the act of blessing the camera."
Now the Lumiere brothers I also learned by clicking on the link were among the earliest filmmakers in history.
But in any case, there's something about that gesture of a late 19th century Italian pope blessing the movie camera that I find very appealing if only symbolically.
So the first question I'm tempted to ask you is whether you believe that the tradition of Italian cinema has somehow been blessed.
Is there something about it that's been touched by a special grace metaphorically speaking?
Yes, I do. I think in a number of ways actually.
One way we can think of Italian cinema is to really look at it as one of the most important cultural phenomenon that happens after unification.
So we're celebrating, as you know, this year, the 150th anniversary of the founding of this country of Italy that we now know.
And in the past, in a sense, its inception really cinema has been a way for Italians to envision Italy and envision what Italian-ness really is.
This happened a lot right after the fascist era, and this is what I'm going to talk about.
I mean, part of the program I'll talk about.
New realism was this attempt to salvage a vision of Italy that had been gripped with under fascism essentially.
But even before that, I want to mention that Italian-silence cinema had an influence all over the world.
In some ways, American-silence cinema was modeled on some of the innovations that happened in Italy.
One of the most important films from the silent eras is 1914 film by Giovanni Pastroni called "Cabedia."
And it was important for two reasons. Number one, it was the first instance of using a tracking shot in a film.
So a tracking shot is where you would mount a camera on a dolly, and the movement of the camera would follow the movement of the action.
So we have this new way of capturing action on film, which we don't have, let's say, with photographs.
And so this was an innovation that came about through an Italian movie.
The other interesting thing to note about this film was that Gabriela de Nutsio wrote the famous Italian author of this time period, wrote the intertitles.
And so there was immediately this influence of Italian literature with the new medium.
So those two things have had repercussions for many, many decades.
I might point out that Italy has more film festivals than any other country in the world.
So we know that Italians still value film, not only their own, but cinema in general.
And maybe the third thing I would mention is that it has had an influence on specific artistic movements.
And I'm mentioning here mostly the New Vell Vogue in France, but also American directors, such as Martin Scorsese, who produced a very lengthy documentary about a time film and talking about how a time film influenced him, especially Robert de Rossellini.
And this was someone like Quentin Tarantino who claims that his favorite film is the good, the band, the ugly, and he loves spaghetti westerns.
He recently made some very disparaging comments about the time cinema.
I read about those.
But he's still talking about it.
So in some ways, this is still part of the dialogue that we have even in the United States.
And the fourth real blessing that we get with Italian cinema is its history of music, music, soundtracks.
And so we have Enio Modicone, who we're going to hear some of his work later in the program, but he scored something like 500 films and television shows.
We also have Nino Rolta, who's usually associated with the Phileanese films, but he also wrote the music for the first two godfather films, for example.
So, so Italian cinema is still relevant and it has been for many, many decades.
Yeah, in fact, you mentioned about the unification of Italy.
It's a very young nation.
It's actually a younger nation than the United States people.
People will find that quite shocking because I think it goes all the way back to the Roman Empire.
But as a nation state, it's a very young one.
Yes.
I'm persuaded by what you say about the Italian cinema being one of the most important cultural events in the history of this young nation.
And I also was reading, "My Be the Same Source," Sarah.
But there was a little mention of these futurist films, which have been largely lost.
They haven't come down to us, but apparently there was some really interesting stuff that was taking place there and like to run the 1913 and stuff.
Now, in the quote that I read to you about from the Leo the Thirteenth blessing, the camera, now Leo the Thirteenth dies in 1903.
And therefore, we're not going to try to reconstruct the story of Italian cinema from 1903.
You gave a very nice summary in preparation for what you take to be the most important moment in this history, which is the rise of the neo-realist Italian film, right?
Yes.
So can you tell us what is neo-realism?
Is it a category that applies to a particular aesthetic or does it apply to a group of directors or to a historical moment?
Momentur.
I would say all of those things, and it's a little bit hard to talk about neo-realism as a movement per se, because it was not something that was theorized beforehand.
And this is what distinguishes it, for example, from the French filmmakers, the new wave filmmakers in the '50s and '60s.
The theories of neo-realism came after the fact.
There was before the war ended, and so under fascism, a group of writers and filmmakers and thinkers at this magazine called 'Chinima', and it included directors like Antonioni Michelangelo and Antonioni as well as Lucino, this contee, and theorists such as Chezetes Avatini, who was a screenwriter.
And the problem with this publication was that it was owned by Vittorio Mussolini, which is Benito Mussolini's son.
And so this group could not specifically write about anything political per se.
And the way that they were able to, very subtly, I would say, insert any sort of dissent was to criticize films.
And the films that were coming out during this period, during the '30s and early '40s were very stylized, idealized visions of Italy that were not what was really going on.
There was a heavy influence of Hollywood films.
And so we consider that in 1932 something like 85% of all the films that were seen in Italy were actually from the United States.
And Mussolini began to be a little bit concerned with this.
And so he wanted to find a way to use cinema as a weapon.
And he quotes Lenin by saying, "Lada may puforte, the most powerful weapon is cinema."
And the ironic thing, he didn't try to control content.
He tried to control production, the types of movies that were coming in from the United States.
And he had to be dubbed into standard Italian. And this was a way to standardize language at the time.
And dubbing is actually something that's still, we see today in Italy.
If you go and want to see an American movie, you're going to find Robert De Niro's voice substituted by an Italian dubber.
It's amazing because it goes back to this industry that took root in the fascist era about dubbing.
And there's no way that that union is going to give up their jobs.
And have subtitles going on, so you're right.
And when you say that Mussolini was interested in controlling production more than content,
he built this huge city called Cinecita, right outside of Rome,
where it was really very forward-looking kind of vision that he had in so far as he had huge theaters and sets and possibilities
for recreating Cinecita. And many movies were shot entirely within this device city.
Yeah.
And this was also a way to, in some ways, did control the content, but maybe in sort of a circuitous way.
Because the government also funded, they allowed imports of films, but they also funded what they deemed purely Italian films.
And there were certain criteria that you had to meet. You had to have the screenplay had to have been written by an Italian.
The crew had to be entirely Italian, and it had to be shot entirely in Italy.
So this limited what you could do.
And despite Cinecita being a very productive place for filmmakers to work,
the system of film financing was not as developed as it was in Hollywood.
And so big budget films became much more difficult to produce. And so as a result, and Cinecita allowed this,
you would be able to produce these films that were largely set indoors, or if they were set outdoors,
you'd have to use a set that had already been built. And so it did limit what you could produce during the time.
Now, I have a sequence of chapters that we're going to go through, but as usual on entitled opinions, I get tempted by opening a parentheses.
This idea of limited budgets, not like the Hollywood big budget movies, do you think in the larger picture that sometimes that has served to enhance the quality of certain Italian films,
and so far as it obliges the director to delve deeper into something like character or the psychological situation,
and rather than rely on special effects or things that would have been possible.
I'm thinking, for example, of Fiddlini, who I believe some of his best movies was before he got these big budgets,
and that when he got big budgets, he goes overboard and becomes too much.
And this is essentially what the neo-realists are working with, because after the war, because of the destruction, the political climate,
they were really left with much to work with as far as budgets.
Robert de Rosanini's famous film, "Romeo Chita Patat," the Rome Open City, was shot entirely on location amidst the ruins of Rome.
And so there is this movement, especially after the war, to examine these smaller, more intimate subjects.
And I think actually that your comment actually speaks to the state of Italian film today, in that there are a lot of big budget films that have come out in the past few years.
And they're not as good as the ones that are smaller and really delve into the workings of the family that even deal with politics in a much more familiar way rather than a sensational way.
So I think that you're right about that.
Good. Well, let's go back here. I'm looking at something that you had given me beforehand.
And you said, I've seen here this very intriguing rubric of fascism, white telephone film.
So before we speak about the neo-realists, can you just tell our listeners what were the white telephone films?
Yeah, so this was a particular genre that only occurs between 1936 and '43 precisely.
And the white telephone refers to the practice of seeing within the course of sort of bourgeois drama or bourgeois romance story, one or two of the characters would have a white telephone in their house rather than a black one, which was the most common type of telephone have if you had a telephone even.
And so the symbol of the white telephone was a symbol of class. And so these type of dramas were, they were mostly upper middle class characters.
But even in these films, what I think is interesting is the portrayal, when they do portray the lower classes, for example, chauffeurs and servants, even those people have pretty decent lives.
We don't get any sort of gritty view of the lower classes at all. It's all very stylized. So that's what the white telephone films were. And they were pretty lambasted by critics after the fact.
But wildly popular. These were diversions. And that's what the Italian populace in some ways wanted during this time.
No reason, are there any that would be worth revisiting? Well, there are a couple films and I don't know if they technically classify as white telephone films because they happen at the beginning of the '30s.
There are several films that feature the most important actor during the fascist period, which ironically is Victoria D'Sica, who is one of the great neo-realist directors.
But he had starred in many, many films during the 1930s that are fantastic. They really rival a lot of the Hollywood productions.
One is called a well-meaning "Mascalsani," a men what scoundrels, or what scoundrels men are.
And that's from '32 and directed by Madio Camarini. And Camarini was one of the most important directors during this time period.
Also, Alessandro Blessed D, who did more historical works. But these works by Camarini are very fun. They're very light-hearted.
Another one with the Vittoria D'Sica is called Datto Unmilione. And so I'd recommend those for viewing. And they should be pretty available, actually.
Who are the main neo-realist directors?
So three are the big guns, as we say. Robert de Rossellini, who I mentioned earlier, Victoria the same actor, Vittoria D'Sica, and Lucino Visconti are considered the three most important, although there are others that could be entirely different show.
But I wanted to talk about the most canonical. And Robert de Rossellini is considered somewhat Catholic director.
A lot of his films have this underlying Christian humanism that stems from the notion that religion at its most basic is about human suffering and the understanding of that amongst people.
And so those come across in a lot of his films, especially Rome Open City, Roma Chita Patrethan. This is from 1945. So this is immediately after the war.
And I'll preface what I'm about to say by mentioning that directors such as Rossellini had to adapt to an entirely new political situation once fascism ended.
And one of the things that had to happen in film was that some of the conventions from filmmaking under the fascist period necessarily carried over to near-realist films. It just happened that way.
And so as a result, we do have melodrama. We do have editing, and we do have lighting. We do have stage stages. Those are all things that happened under the fascist period.
But when we talk about what characterizes neo-realist films, we often talk about non-professional actors, the use of dialect, on location shooting, all of these things.
And political message.
And a political message implied or more overt. There is usually social critique.
But what we see with Roma Chita Patrethan is this really hybrid hybridization of these two types of filmmaking.
And so yes, we have non-professional actors, but we also have very famous actors.
We have Al-Dumet Adafabrizzi, a very famous comic actor who plays the priest. And we have Anamanyani, who was a fairly famous cabaret singer and theater actress before she starred in this film.
And a very serious role. So what's interesting is that both she and Al-Dofabrizzi being more comic actors before actually are involved in this very, very serious movie.
So there are comic elements in it. So as I said coming back, it's a hybrid type of movie. And because of that, I think it was the only one to have commercial success. Ordinary Italians loved this film. And that is not the case with the other neo-realist films.
What's the story about?
So the story takes place in Rome during the German occupation. And we have one storyline which revolves around Pina.
The character played by Anamanyani. And she is the typical Pope Belana, the woman of the people. And we have Pina Herfianse Francesco, who works for an underground newspaper.
So more on the side of the resistance. And these two are on the eve of their wedding. They're supposed to get married in the morning, which we're looking at the day before.
She also has a son from what we gathered to be a previous marriage. And then there's the priest, the parish priest. And that's the one played by Faberzi.
And he is trying to help out the Italian resistance movement. So we have that storyline. And then we have a second storyline which revolves around Marina, who is a showgirl.
And she comes from humble origins, but she's trying to move up the ranks and shows, so she's in cahoots with the Nazis. And she's actually informing the Nazis of the whereabouts of her former lover called Manfredi.
And Manfredi and Francesco, the fiancé of Pina are friends, or they're both in the resistance. And so those are the, that's how they link up these two storylines.
And so essentially we have this sort of interweaving of the two stories. We have the resistance on the one hand. We have the collusion with the Nazis with Marina.
And we have sort of a panorama of the types of people that would have been in Rome at this time. We not only have the good guys, but we have the bad guys as well.
And we have these people who are somewhere in between like Marina. And the most iconic image of that movie and people's minds who have seen it and who have seen posters of it, which gets we produce a lot is that of Anamanyani running down a street in Rome.
Yes. And it's an interesting scene because it happens right in the middle of the movie. And we're led up the first part of the film to think that, okay, Pina is our protagonist that we're going to follow her through the whole story.
And, but she dies in the right in the middle, which is the scene that you're referencing. So I know we have a clip from the film. I'm not sure if we're going to have time to hear it.
Yeah, let's have a listen. So this is, isn't it weird though before we just do it that such a climactic moment comes right in the middle of the movie?
It is. And so it really divides it into two. And I would say that it divides it into two as far as tone goes because up until this point we've seen these comic, some of the comic elements with Aldo Parese is the priest.
Even Anamanyani has some quips that are very funny. And once this happens, Pina dies, there's this real sense of loss, there's real sense of desperation on the on the characters. And it actually helps, does help move forward the action in some ways.
Okay.
She sees that he's being taken away by the Nazis. And they're trying to hold her back.
And then you hear her son run up to her and say, "Mom, mom, mom, mom."
We just have mostly just names being shouted back and forth between each other. Francesco is in the truck and he is trying to tell the people hold her back. Don't let her run after me in other words because he knows what's going to happen.
So this is one of the most enduring images from the film. It's the most tragic right after this, actually the priest played by Fabrizi goes up and holds Anamanyani in his arms and mimics the Pieta basically, and very striking image.
And the saddest thing about this is that is actually the scene that happens right after, which is that as the truck goes away with Francesco in it, they are able to escape from the captors. And so Francesco is the one that survived. So really her running after him had been in vain.
And then she was a reversal in recognition as Aristotle called, inducing pity and terror. Anamanyani, I think, got an Oscar. I don't know if you...
Not for this film, maybe for something else. But anyway, yeah. So this Romachita, Beth, a Rome Open City is part of, I guess, a trilogy of Romachita, that includes two other movies, Paisanne, Jermana, Anotz, or Germany.
And he's a year zero. And of course, we don't have time to go through all these great movies. Unfortunately, we have to move forward.
Sure. Can we talk a little bit about Vittorio de Sica and his role, he's kind of real classic neo-realism.
Absolutely. And he, I would say, has less of an ideological axe to grind in comparison, especially to this Comte, who I maybe talk about a little bit after this.
But he was really interested in the idea of human solidarity and maybe not in a Christian way that Rosalini would have been interested in. But human solidarity, solidarity, human suffering, the common man and his most famous film, which many of your listeners have probably seen is called, the La Trede Beachi Clette, or the Bicycle Thief in English.
And that's from 1948. And this is a story basically about a man and his son. That's essentially what it's about. And the father is out of work. He's looking for a job. He finally finds a job hanging posters.
Ironically, for the types of films that we're not watching when we see the Bicycle Thief, the Hollywood type movies.
One of the requirements for having this job, though, is that he have a bicycle. And he doesn't have one. So they, the whole family, pawns a lot of their goods to go buy this bicycle.
And then, of course, he's very happy about it on the first day of work, hanging while hanging a poster, distracted. His bike gets stolen.
And the rest of the plot is essentially Antonia is the father's name and his son going around the city looking for this bike. And there's a real reversal in roles that happens because there's sort of maturing of the son and almost an infantilizing of the father because he's become so desperate by the end of the film. He resorts to theft himself.
It's amazing how many Italian movies are about the theme of growing up. And I think that's what Tarantino criticized about. He said, I've watched all these movies. Every one of them says, I either about a boy growing up or a girl growing up or something like that.
So I guess when it works well, it works very well. But I guess when it's overdone in the postmodern kind of a citation mode where you keep reproducing that formula, it doesn't work that well.
Right.
So that, that Laidri Di Beach Ecleta is really a classic. And we can mention also Umberto D, which 1952 is maybe another hugely important movie of De Sique as.
It is important. It was not a commercial success. This one, a bicycle thief would have been more of a commercial success. But that was written by Umberto D was also written with this theorist, Chezzare Zavatini, who in some ways his ideal of the perfect neo-realist film was 90 minutes in a man's life in which nothing happens.
And one critique of Umberto D could be the exact that he achieved that in that film, that idea that it's just this normal person and it's a very simple story. And it feels these, the takes, the takes are long. We have less editing.
So in that film in particular, I feel like the collaboration between de Sique and Zavatini is really aiming towards achieving this. The neo-realist aesthetic as its theorized after the fact.
Do you like that movie?
It's not one of my favorites. But I do like it in an academic way.
Yeah, and of course the academics, the Woody Allen's always have to refer, you know, pieously to the neo-realist Italian directors now.
Right.
Lucille, Lucille Visconti, another interesting guy. I made a few neo-realist movies obviously. What his career was by no means limited to that.
Right.
Yes, and I'll jump back in time a little bit because his film from 1943 called Lucisione obsession is really seen as the or one of the pre-cursors to neo-realism.
But before the end of fascism essentially.
And it features the thing that makes it neo-realist among other things is that it features an adulterous relationship between a woman, a younger woman who's married to an old man, and she is essentially his servant.
And she carries on this adulterous relationship with a drifter who shows up, this guy, Gina.
And one scene in particular that comes to mind, thinking about this film is after dinner, I think, Javanas, the protagonist name is sitting around in the kitchen.
They're piles of dirty plates around her and she picks up a bowl with some soup in it and just starts sort of shoveling it into her mouth very slowly but very slovenly.
And she's not sitting upright, she looks very downtrodden, and this is not the image of the perfect fascist woman that Mussolini would have wanted to see in 1943.
This is really the antithesis.
And visconte's camera lingers on this scene for much longer than we would expect it to, in other words.
So it's really as seen as a precursor to some of what's going on in the neo-realist films after the war.
The other film that he made during this period, during the neo-realist period in 1948 is Latatrema, which is the Earth Trumbles.
And this was based, loosely based on a book by Giovanni Vergá from 1881 and takes place in a Sicilian fishing village.
This is a very long film. It adheres to a lot of the tenets of neo-realism in the sense that it's all non-professional actors.
They all speak in the local dialect to the extent that when this movie was released they had to put in Italian subtitles for the dialect because the normal public would not have been able to understand them.
But what's most shocking about the film in a sense is that visconte was able to adapt a story from Vergá from 1881 to a storyline that takes place in about 1947.
In other words, not much has changed there. And that's what differentiates I think this film from something like Rómachita Pérstá, where in visconte's film it seems like this land is stuck in time, essentially.
Well, there's at least two other directors that we should mention. And one is Phileini and the other is Antonioni. I always thought Antonioni was kind of part of the neo-realist crowd.
But I guess you convinced me otherwise. He kind of stands apart.
He was part of the neo-realist crowd. I would say that he's more famous for his later films, but he has some wonderful films, especially I would recommend a Croenica d'Uinamore, a story of a love affair, and that's in 1950.
And it combines elements, though, of neo-realist filmmaking along with sort of film noir.
So it's in some ways a much more accessible film than others, but he did get a start during the 40s, but he mainly made documentaries, for example.
And a very existentialist, very lingering, slow camera work and an opacity.
And so you're always asking, what have I really just seen?
Right. Yeah, and I guess you're referring more so to his films from the early 60s, the Laventura, the Adventure.
Love, exactly.
La Nault des Enlé Clise, from '60, '61 and '62. And yeah, I would agree.
It seems that what is at the heart of the plot is left out of the frame.
And what I think he's trying to get at is the essence of the emotion is what's visually central.
And so this is what's frustrating for many filmgoers because we walk out of the theater thinking, well, I don't even know what that was about.
What was that film really about?
But I think in some ways the frustration that the viewer feels when watching Antonio Nio Nio film might mimic the sort of existential problems of the characters within.
That sense of frustration of not knowing what's going on, what's happening I think is what Antonio Nio is trying to portray.
Yeah, he does it brilliantly.
Yes. And beautifully.
And there's one movie that I don't believe a lot of Americans know about that features Jack Nicholson, you know, as the actor is called the passenger.
Yes, the passenger from 1975.
For a long time it wasn't available, apparently because Nicholson, it was available here in America, VHS or DVD because he had problems.
For some reason he didn't want that movie available in the United States.
Yes, well, there's some nude scenes.
Is that why he is?
One of the reasons, or maybe this is just the lore surrounding the film.
Yeah, and I take it that that movie has the longest continuous shot in the history of something like that.
I think so.
Or if not the longest it's something that actually it looks like it goes right through the window.
It's over seven minutes. It's a continuous take and one of the most fantastic things about this was the construction of the app.
The construction of the apparatus that had to accompany this shot, which, and this is the penultimate shot of the film.
So not the last one, but the second to last shot in which the camera starts on the inside of a hotel room where Jack Nicholson is lying on the bed.
And he, the camera moves past his body very, very slowly.
In fact, you can't even tell that the camera's moving at first.
So there's this very, very slow progression towards the window and outside the window has bars on it.
So you would think, okay, the camera can't go through these bars. Well, it does.
And there's, it was an elaborate setup that allowed the bars to actually open up and the camera goes out into the piazza outside this hotel and makes the 360 degree turn.
Again, very, very, very slowly takes in the whole piazza and turns to look back into the room where Jack Nicholson is lying on the bed.
Well, let's not give away the slower line because this movie now is available on DVD and it's a great, I think it's a terrific movie.
Maybe our listeners will go and want to watch it.
But we do have a clip from this dialogue between Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, who is the actress that will give a flavor of the,
of what you can expect from that movie. Should I play that?
Yeah, I'll just, I want to set it up a little bit because the,
I mean, should I, should I set up actually the beginning of the, what the movie is about at all or,
well, just briefly that Jack Nicholson plays a reporter and he's an Africa, making a documentary.
He, for friends, this man who dies in the hotel room next to him and Jack Nicholson uses this as an opportunity to basically take this man's identity.
He switches their passport photos, he takes his belongings.
He comes to find out that the, the identity he's now assumed is that of a gun runner who's involved in this civil war in, in Africa.
And so he has now left Africa and now he's in Spain, he's in Barcelona and he's adopted this new, this new identity.
And he is following the itinerary of this gun runner around Europe.
So he ends up in Barcelona and here he is, he walks into one of the famous Gaudí buildings there and runs into the girl.
And she's never named in the film in the credits is the girl is played by Maria Schneider.
And, and since Missionator passed away recently, this will be sort of homage to her as well.
So we can go ahead and play.
Excuse me, I was trying to remember something.
Is it important?
What is it you know? I came in by accident.
The man who built it was in the bed, does.
Who was it?
Gaudí.
Come.
You're pretty sad, it's called a Royman effector.
Is it you this one for conscience?
Varno.
Do you think he was crazy?
I couldn't come in here by accident.
I was escaping.
Oh, I'm not.
Well, I thought someone might be following me.
Somebody who might recognize me.
Why?
I don't know.
Well, I've come with a narrative.
Who are you?
I used to be somebody else, but I traded him in.
What about you?
Well, I'm in Barcelona.
I'm talking to someone who might be someone else.
I wasn't those people, but I think I'm going to see the other girl who thinks alone.
All of them.
They all go in for hiding in.
Depends on how much time you've got.
I have to leave today this afternoon.
I hope you make it.
People is a peer reader.
Every time they leave the room.
Goodbye.
I have to say that's one of my favorite lines.
That's great, isn't it?
People disappear every day.
Yeah, every time they leave the room.
How true that is.
Terrific.
Moving on, unfortunately, we have a fillini.
We do.
What kind of grand moment in this story would be following now?
Yeah.
Well, and I think that when one thinks of a time,
and perhaps a movie that might come to mind is Lettl G.V.
from 1960, sort of an iconic movie starring one of the most iconic actors,
Martillo Mastreani, and eight and a half as well from '62,
which is a story of a frustrated film director,
much like the Lini himself at the time.
So, Felini for many years would claim that his films were not autobiographical,
but there are so many elements that coincide, that we can't help but read into them.
That way.
Yeah.
One of, I should mention two of the other films,
so from the '50s, that star female protagonist,
and those star his wife, Juliette Mazena.
One is Las Stada, and also starring Anthony Quinn.
And it's essentially a road movie.
And Juliette Mazena plays a very interesting female character
who's brought in by Anthony Quinn's zampano circus act,
and she goes on the road with him.
And one of the great things about this film is the soundtrack,
and this is where we have an example of Nirot Daz music,
and the attention that Felini really pays on character.
Sometimes it's the exclusion of plot and story,
but the attention on character I think is really mimicked by what Nirot Daz
with the theme from this film.
So if we can maybe just play the beginning of the clip from Las Stada.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So this theme would appear not only with the character of Joseph Nina,
but also in her absence.
There's a way to evoke her.
And I won't get into this sort of plot of the film,
but in a very evocative sort of music that comes into play here
in the '50s, and Felini will collaborate with Nirot Daz on most of his other films,
culminating in the film such as Lédolce Vita.
Like, I'm at Kord, for example, which has a great soundtrack.
And so this collaboration proved to be very fruitful and gives us a good idea,
I think, of the richness of Italian music as well as its interaction with Sinoan.
Oh, absolutely.
And Nirot Daz is a genius of a composer in his own right.
Yes.
He's associated with the movies, but he also, musicologists take him extremely seriously,
just as a composer in that.
Yes.
But when you said I like Ammar Kord, does that mean that you don't like Ammar?
No, I do.
I think I tend to like these earlier films.
Also, Ivetelani from the '50s as well as a great one.
Yeah.
But...
Well, what I love about Felini is that middle period, I guess,
he has some kind of balance between a minimum sort of concession to realism,
but at the same time, a demand for the freedom of the imagination.
And a fantasy, and this magic world of his lost past and childhood and so forth.
And Ammar Kord is just so beautiful in that regard for me.
Yeah.
And I think probably stylistically the film that I most attracted to is eight and a half,
just because this idea, this sort of ownuric quality or this attention on the unconscious,
is really played up with the relationship to the viewer.
We are really invited in that movie to inhabit the point of view of Guido, the movie director.
We see things through his eyes.
We experience his dreams, his fantasies.
And so it's a very intimate sort of experience.
I think that's why I like that film so much.
Sarah, do you want to say a word about Pezoleini before we move on?
I do. I think I have to.
And I hate to sort of gloss over him with this sort of time constraints.
But Pezoleini is also operating during the same time period and produced some really great films that are on the sort of on the cuss,
on the end of the neo-realist trend and on the cuss of something new.
And those are Akatone and Mamad alma.
And Mamad alma is an interesting example because it stars Anamanyani again.
So the sort of reincarnation of Pina, but she plays the sort of good prostitute.
A prostitute is trying to start a new life for herself and her son.
And this is actually a trope that sort of occurs during this time period.
This idea of the good prostitute.
In fact, Felini makes a movie again with Julia Tamazina called Lin-Aute Di Capilleria, evoking also the silent film era while he's at it.
But Pezoleini is a very important filmmaker but also brighter and thinker during this, during the same time.
And I'll mention also really briefly, Bernardo Bertolucci who got his start actually working with Pezoleini.
And if there's time, I'll talk a little bit more about Bertolucci at the end of the program.
But definitely check out Pezoleini's films as well.
Yeah. I'm not going to let us get to the end of our without mentioning my favorite.
I know.
I mean, I think Senator Leon is an underestimated Italian director because he's associated with the spaghetti western, which is probably, he had some gems of movies.
He's also one of the most popular, I guess, commercially in the United States with his trilogy of the dollar trilogy as it's called, I guess, a fistful of dollars.
What's the other one?
If you'd like to put a spoon in the middle of the day, I don't know.
I mean where you have Clint Eastwood and Kaim Montgomery and Eli Wallach in this cemetery.
That is like where you have all these dead people who seem to be like the spectators on a, and they're in the middle of almost like on a stage.
And you have this brilliant camera work where they go from face to face and again, it gets closer and closer and closer.
In the original day, I think was the master of the close-up.
Finally, you just have their eyes, you know, with a very nervous looking each one in both directions.
One of the interesting things too is that in comparison to sort of American westerns, that Leonie was able to show sort of the sweat and the ugliness almost of these characters.
They're not idealized in any way. They're very gritty.
And I think that in how the West was won, it begins with that, you have this face, sweaty face, you know, it's kind of unshaven and it's right.
It fills the camera and all of a sudden it falls dead and you have this wide open blue sky in the horizon.
And I remember, I said, "Well, Leonie, I'm mentioning something in an interview about how the difference between him and American directors of the West turns is that in an American western, when the hero opens his
his chutters in the hotel room, he looks at his wide open horizon, he's filled with hope and optimism and positive feelings, whereas his characters never go near a window because they're afraid of getting a bullet right through their fort.
Right.
So, it's a cetro deeon.
He did other movies that were actually not spaghetti westerns.
Right.
One great movie, once upon a time in the, what's it called?
In America?
In America, it's a West.
Once upon a time, yeah, or once upon a time in America, which we could call a spaghetti eastern because it's all about takes place in New York.
Right.
A guy, kind of not my fault, per se, but a criminal gang.
Yeah.
Absolutely epic.
Absolutely.
Which was cut down in the American version by 30%.
You can see, you can get the full version pretty readily now though.
You can.
So, it's actually better to see the stick it out for the longer version.
Oh, it's beautiful.
Yeah, I think it's Robert DeNiro, if I'm not mistaken.
And some other really good act.
Yeah, a lot of people work on that.
Yeah, thanks for bringing that soundtrack in.
Sure.
So, a few words here now at the end, Sarah, about what's happened to Talion Cinema in the more recent decades.
Yeah, and I think the easiest way to try to encapsulate this is to talk about certain genres.
So, we just talked about the spaghetti western, but there's what we might turn to,
I think, that's what we're talking about.
And I think that's what we're talking about.
And that is about terrorism in the '70s
in the kidnapping of Aldo Mora.
Aldo Moro.
And during this time period, we also have Elio Petri, who
did this really great film called Investigation of a Citizen
Above Suspicion.
And this stars most of Petri's films star a sort of an overlooked
actor, John Maria Volante, who should
be one of more famous than he is, I guess.
And so even this legacy of Chinamad in pain
is still going on today.
We have directors such as Daniel Elucette, Marco
Tulio Giordana, who produced and directed one of--
what I think is one of the best films of the past few decades,
although it was actually produced for television.
And that's La Melio Jobin II, the best of youth, which
it's about six or seven hours long.
And it's fantastic.
And it's a story that starts even before 1968,
but also follows sort of a family for many, many decades.
And if you sit down and watch it and think of it as a serial TV
show, then it's easier to digest than a seven hour movie.
So I'll try to package it that way.
But also someone like Nanimoretti made a film recently
called Ithaimano, which was about Berlusconi.
So there are still filmmakers today
that are making engaged films, even someone like Paulo
Sorrentino and El Divo, which came out very, very recently.
That's also about Italian politics, especially
Giulio and Reil T.
But of course, the engaged film is not the most popular
in America as the genre, because if you really
want to break into the American market,
seems like the Italian director has to conform to a paradigm
that was set, I believe, by Chino Mappadadizo,
is that correct?
I would say--
Yeah, I think.
I need to postino.
I don't know which one comes first.
Chino Mappadadizo came first, but certainly,
American audiences are drawn to a certain type of film
that I think is sort of idealizes Italy, in a way,
and doesn't get at the heart of what's going on.
But nonetheless, these films were very popular.
I mean, even--
They're popular because they're very sentimental,
and they're tiered jerkers in some ways.
They really are.
With that, really hurting.
Like, like, but all much you thought they had to.
Exactly.
But even, I think, a more successful film
to talk about, which many, many people have seen
as La Vite Bala by Roberto Benini, which has serious subject
matter, but it's also part comedy, which is--
In some ways, comedy is a better, more efficacious way
of doing social critique.
And so that's--
It is, but I have to say this, Sarah.
I was thinking about this in terms of the tradition
of Italian comic movies-- or movies, let's say,
there are comedies.
And that nothing is more local than humor.
And it doesn't translate well.
So Toto, who is one of the great heroes of the nation of Italy,
is the funniest person you can imagine.
If you know something about the Neapolitan culture
and the Toto, it will not translate for an American audience,
because the humor is just too bound to its own place and time
and mentality, whereas tragedy has a more universal appeal
and no matter where it takes place.
So I think there's a whole strain of great Italian comedies
that are unfortunately going to be lost to a foreign public.
And she joined Gatshi--
I mean, who were those two geniuses that one really tall guy
and one short guy?
Chichuig, someone else anyway.
Toto, Alberto, so--
How dare that?
What a beautiful--
What a genius of also a comic actor.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I will recommend one film starring Toto and Vittoro Gasman
and Marcello Mastriani.
That's a comedy.
And that's Isolity in Yoti.
And that's sort of a crime.
What's that English?
It's called Big Deal on Madonna Street.
Big Geometry, yeah.
But it's a crime film/comity.
And it is, I think, more accessible
because it doesn't necessarily play into that sort of regionalism
that I think that you mentioned.
I think that you're right to some extent.
Now, we haven't mentioned some of the women directors.
Nor have we mentioned some of the great icons among the actresses.
But there are two women directors that are, I think,
outstanding.
Do you want to say a word about that?
Yes.
There's so Lena Vertemüller is a fantastic director.
Swift Away.
Swept Away, also.
I'll point out love and anarchy.
But also one of the great films, I think, Pasqualeno
Sétte Bilette, or Seven Beauty.
Seven Beauty, yeah.
From 1975, again, a treatment of the Holocaust,
but through comedy.
And so very-- in some ways, very irreverent,
but also very poignant in that sense,
that strange sort of combination.
And who's the actor she uses a lot, the Giancado Janini?
Giancado Janini, right?
Yes.
And he stars in many of her films.
The other female director is Liliana Cavani,
and she's most famous for the Night Porter from '74.
Terrific.
But this is not an exhaustive list.
They have many, many more films that are worth seeing.
I also believe the conformist is one of the great Italian movies.
It is.
And this is coming back to Bertolucci,
who he's becoming less and less of an Italian director,
or so people say.
But the conformist from 1970 is about the fascist past.
And it takes place partially and Italy and partly in France.
But certainly one of the great masterpieces, yes.
Well, Sarah and your host, Robert Harris,
and want to apologize to all the actors or directors
and maybe musical composers in the history of Italian cinema
that we haven't had a chance to mention or discuss in depth today
because the hour goes by very quickly.
But we've been speaking here with Sarah Carey,
who's a Mellon postdoc fellow here at Stanford,
coming to us from UCLA, where she got her PhD a year and a half ago.
And this is Robert Harris, and for entitled opinions.
So Sarah, you gave me a choice of exit music.
And of course, I have three or four choices here.
But I'm going to go with annual Modi Kona
to get me back to that spirit of the spaghetti western, if you don't mind.
That caught a dog.
Thanks for coming on.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(Music)
Wait, then, why?
in practice.
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