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L'Avventura (Antonioni Michaelangelo - 1960)
Getting to like Michaelangelo Antonioni films is a major hurdle to the average cinema goer. His films are so far removed from what most people have come to expect from a movie that they can leave you bewildered or frustrated after watching them, maybe even annoyed because sometimes it seems as if Antonioni is being purposely obtuse in his dealings with the audience. Take L'Avventura for example. On the surface it's about a group of people going on a pleasure cruise who stop off at a small island for a spot of exploring, when one of them goes missing. Very intriguing you might think, and it is. Where could she have gone? And why can nobody find any sign of her? For a while the film concerns itself with these questions, then gradually moves away from the issue of resolving the mystery and focusses on other, more trivial things, never to return to it. This is jarring for most people; it's like someone telling you they have a secret to tell you then saying, 'oh never mind'. This film is not about the search for the missing person on the island but the missing people in all of us. The most disturbing thing about the disappearance is the swiftness with which these noveau riche characters forget about their missing companion. It's as if she never really mattered to them. In fact, it becomes clear that nothing much really matters to them. They have money, they're free from responsibilities, they have no need to work. Life has become a series of empty entertainments devoid of passion. They're just marking time. And that is the genius of Antonioni - to show the truth of human existence as being ultimately meaningless. Forcing us to face the reality of this truth through these empty, shallow, aimless people for whom life has no impact. This is a film that any thinking person will want to revisit, and more than once. An adventure indeed. |
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The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo - 1966)
If you'd never heard of this film - and many sadly haven't - and someone popped a dvd of it into your player and told you to watch it you could be forgiven for thinking that it was a documentary. At the very least you'd assume that there was a great deal of stock footage used in the telling of this story about the battle between the Algerian guerrila forces and the occupying French military. But you'd be dead wrong, as every foot of this film is original, as Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo has attested. The reason he mentions this is because the film as a whole has such a terrific air of verisimilitude about it that many wondered where he found some of the footage used in the film. This realism he captures so brilliantly is essential to any tale of war because we have to believe in the events up on the screen as the wars are real, and in the case of the Franco-Algerian war recent enough for the people watching it to remember the actual events as they saw them on television and in the papers at the time. Many filmmakers have striven to achieve this level of realism but most fall far shorter than Pontecorvo with The Battle of Algiers. This is one of the most passionate war films you're likely to see, and although Pontecorvo is on the side of the rebels it's also one of the least biased takes on a conflict - a rare thing in a war film; most have a flag to wave. This is urgent and tremendously compelling cinema that will leave all but the most jaded cinemagoers breathless. |
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Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio DeSica - 1948)
A simple, but devastatingly effective tale of desperation, loss and injustice. Antonio Ricci stars as Lamberto Maggiorani - a man deep in the throes of poverty, and unable to feed his family. He's offered a job that requires a bicycle so he pawns everything he has and buys one and heads off to his new job. Unfortunately his bicycle is almost immediately stolen and the rest of the film chronicles his desperate attempts to track down who stole it and retrieve it from him, so that he can keep his job, and regain his self-respect . This is the pinnacle of the Italian neo-realist movement, featuring authentic location shooting, wonderfully naturalistic performances - especially from young Enzo Staiola as Ricci's son - and a simple story which is told with such compassion, understanding and humanity that it would take a heart-hearted individual indeed to remain unmoved by the final scene. They don't make them like this anymore. |
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La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini - 1960)
This is one of those films you hear about a lot when you start getting into world cinema. It's consistently rated highly by critics and cinephiles, but it's far from an easy watch if you're used to Hollywood fare. The action, such as it is centres around Marcello - a gossip columnist who spends his time flitting between nightclubs and fancy restaurants always on the lookout for beautiful girls and a juicy story. His life is shallow and forgettable - much like the the women he usually ends up with or the gossip he spends so much of his time chasing and writing about. We follow Marcello attending his regular haunts on numerous different occasions and feel the emptiness of his existence, as he drifts through life like a ghost. Fellini captures the mood of Italy on the cusp of the swinging sixties, it's fashions and foibles extremely well - which explains why this film's stood the test of time. Notable also for adoption in real life of the word 'Paparazzi' - after Marcello's assistant Papparazzo - an over-zealous photographer keen to do whatever it takes to get the shot he's after. |
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L'Eclisse (Michaelangelo Antonioni - 1962)
The third in what has become known as the Alienation trilogy, comprising L'Avventura, La Notte, and this film. Whereas L'Avventura starts of as a mystery then goes off on a tangent, leaving some people puzzled when the film seemed to be despairing of life and everyone in it L'Eclisse gives no pretense of any conventional narrative to begin with. Rather it's simply presenting us with episodes from the life of our discontented main character, Vittoria, as she floats dreamlike through her meaningless existence. Yes, there is the whole meaningless thing again, but this time in addition to the strangely beautiful Monica Vitti, we have Alain Delon as her stockbroker boyfriend (there's a thrilling stockmarket scene midway through the film with stockbrokers dashing here and there, making urgent phone calls and everyone involved is in a panic, while Vittoria looks on in her detached way). It's a beautifully shot film, with gorgeous black and white photography, the camerawork is subtle but brilliantly inventive - even though there's no plot to follow and mostly we're just follwing Vittoria around wherever she happens to be there's a precision about the camera placement and movements that's compelling to the eye. This is the kind of film that could stand up to endless technical analysis, but for most it will just be a film they found very watchable, but would struggle to pinpoint exactly why. Oh, and the final scene is haunting. |
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Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini - 1957)
Although the most famous Fellini film (8½) features wild dream sequences, odd characters and fancy camerawork which dazzle and impress, his origins are rooted in the Italian neorealist tradition. He was an assistant to Roberto Rosselini on his famous neorealist masterpiece Rome Open City, and Nights of Cabiria is much more concerned with this neorealsim than his later, more experimental and intellectual works. For my money this is his best film, as it mixes realism with drama, and sometimes melodrama and features a great performance by Giulietta Masina, his wife at the time, and for whom the part of Cabiria was specifically written. She plays a feisty prostitute who's outlook on life - and it's a hard life - is positive. Although dumped at the beginning of the film by her boyfriend - and he literally dumps her in the river, and steals her purse - she still has a passion for living and soon gets over him. We follow her plying her trade, and hanging out wth her flat mate and meeting up with friends. She lives her life with gusto, and it's a treat to watch this brassy character interact with those around her. She bounces from one incident to the next like a pinball, and keeps coming back for more, never fully trusting real relationships until she meets a kindly accountant who eventually sweeps her off her feet. Can this be the man of her dreams, for whom she'll cash in all her savings, sell her house and ride off into the sunset? Well, for all her street smarts, Cabiria is a romatic optimist desperate for love, and we're willing it to be so, but there's something suspicious about that chap... Suffice it to say that the final ten minutes or so are pretty heartbreaking, but in the very final scene Cabiria still manages a smile. |
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Ossessione (Luchino Visconti - 1943)
This is considered by some to be the first Italian neorealist film, but at heart this is film noir, and one of the best noir, certainly outside of Hollywood where a lot of the best films noir were produced in the forties and fifties. This film is actually based on James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which has been remade five times so far, most notably in 1946 with John Garfield and Lana Turner, and then again in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. Neither is as good as this classic version although the 1946 version is by far the best English language adaptation of the tale. For me this is the best of the bunch largely because of the mixture of noir with realism, so maybe the neorealist faction have a point. Banned by the fascist authorities at the time the film was actually destroyed, and had Visconti not squirrelled away a duplicate negative we would have been deprived a great classic of Italian films. The story concerns a homeless wanderer who has an affair with the wife of a restaurant owner, whom she's grown to despise. The two conspire to murder the husband and find happiness together with the restaurant and his insurance money. As is the way with noir things don't go quite according to plan. While Visconti's style is very structured, and technically excellent what makes Ossessione so compelling is the fact that it's a great story well told, and it reveals much about human nature and indeed obsession, but it's the realism that infuses the whole production that carries the day. |
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Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi - 1961)
Not to be confused with Michael Radford's 1995 film Il Postino about an old postman played by Phillipe Noiret, this is a much more down to earth affair. One of the best examples of Italian neo-realism Il Posto shows Domenico, a young man on his search for employment having just left school prematurely to help with his family's financial woes and with not much in the way of academic qualifications. We follow him to his first job interview at a large nameless corporation where he has to sit an exam, pass a medical, and do a lot of nervous waiting around. During all this he meets a young woman also applying for a job in the same company and the two start a hesitant relationship. This is realist filmmaking at its best. We can all relate to the young man's plight, as he starts off on his journey into the unknown world of earning a living, and when he gets the job (actually a different job from the one he applied for - on a whim of one of the company directors) although we're happy for him that he's got his feet on the first rung of the employment ladder, and will be able to keep his family afloat, it's sad to see how his hopes and dreams are slowly being eroded away and we know the longer he stays there - and by necessity that may be his whole career - the more the corporation will swallow him up to become another tiny cog in the machine. It won't be long until he'll be like the other workers in his office, whose highest aspiration is to get a desk nearer the window. |
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