Italian




"Back then it was inconceivable to film in a real location, to shoot in a passageway, to bring cameras into stairwells.  Shooting in the streets was unheard of.  ROMA, CITTA APERTA represents something new because I tried to make a film the way it should be done, accessible to everyone, outside the control of the big studio system and all the slavery that entails." -- Roberto Rossellini 

Despite their "Pact of Steel" and heads-of-state handshakes for the newsreels, the Italians and Germans had a long history of hating one another both before and during the Second World War. Behind their chest-beating about the founding of a new Roman Empire, the Italians always seemed only marginally interested in what was going on. It took them five years to defeat Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), this stalemate broken only when they violated the Geneva Conventions by using poison gas. Their 1940 invasion of neighboring Greece, intended as a display of machismo to Hitler, turned into a fiasco from which they needed a full-scale German military bailout. On the Germans' end, Italians were incompetent buffoons and they didn't even bother to tell them what they were doing most of the time. Mussolini read about the outbreak of war with Poland after the fact, and that lack of communication, and underlying distrust, would be repeated again and again. Germans were Nordic supermen who fought to the end, Italians were lazy Mediterraneans prone to surrender: so goes the logic even today among many military historians. To their credit, most Italians, apart from ardent fascists and anti-Semitic contingents within the Vatican, saw the biological superiority aspect of Nazism for what it was: an empty ideological tool used to justify domination. Although he did pass racial decrees in 1938, Mussolini dragged his feet on any broader Italian participation in the "Jewish question" for a long time, although more out of fear of civil backlash than any humanitarian concerns. As Germany exerted more influence over the nation's affairs, over 7,000 Italian Jews would be deported and executed by war's end (see De Sica's The Garden of Finzi-Continis for one narrative on this). 

Everything collapsed in late-1943/early-1944, the setting for Rossellini's film. American and UK Commonwealth forces landed in Sicily in the summer of 1943 and began moving north. Italy surrendered immediately and was split into a Fascist north, run by an exiled Mussolini and occupied by the German army, and a south that was cooperating with the Allied occupation. A slow grind through the mountainous regions south of Rome commenced. How to handle the city was a touchy situation. No one wanted to be held responsible for its destruction, particularly the Allies, who were taking heat for their highly-publicized flattening of the ancient monastery atop Monte Cassino, mistakenly labeling it as an outpost for German artillery spotters. As they lost control of Cassino, the Germans declared Rome an 'Open City', a military term for a city left undefended in hopes of not having it destroyed by invading forces. Rossellini's love for dark comic irony is on display here, as we quickly come to see within the first five minutes that Rome is not quite as "open" as its title implies, as German SS, fascist police, and "Communist" (often anarchists or apolitical working-class, to be more precise) partisans fight for control. As in most German-held territories, the partisan movement gained steam as liberation drew nearer and suppression efforts intensified, with roundups of suspects and 5:00 PM curfews becoming the norm.

Although often overlooked when discussing the film, its shocking pivotal moment has foundation in fact. On March 3 1944, Teresa Gullace was in downtown Rome with scores of others whose relatives had just been detained due to suspicious activities. As she cried out for her husband and fought to get past the German blockade to pass bread and clothing through the bars of his cell, a German soldier withdrew his pistol and shot her in the neck. Six months pregnant with her fifth child, she bled to death in front of the horrified crowd, including her husband. The killing of Gullace and her unborn child incensed Italians and became a galvanizing focal point for Roman resistance. Sadly, it was only the beginning. (See my next blog on De Sica's Two Women for more discussion on the resistance movement.) Fabrizi's Don Pietro is an amalgamation of two priests, Giuseppe Morosini and Pietro Pappagallo, both of whom provided assistance to the underground against the wishes of the Vatican, and were summarily executed by the Germans. This spirit of cooperation and mutual respect between clergy and "godless" communists would quickly unravel after the war but it does show some measure of help coming from rebellious elements within the Holy See, who we now know, at its higher levels, secured secret passage for numerous wanted Nazis via their so-called "ratline" to South America.





Despite the occasional lapses, there is no disputing that Rossellini's Rome, Open City stands as a seminal moment in the new post-fascist Italian cinema that came to be known as "Neorealism": it was shot on low quality black-market film stock; the German army shown are actual surrendered P.O.W. Germans; portions of the city were still being fought for as filming began; and bombed out locations were just that. To put it mildly, the chaos and discombobulation of the city provided the perfect backdrop that needed little assistance from art design. Such gritty realism was eons away from the escapist "telefoni bianchi" films of the Fascist years, as they were derisively labeled, where Roman mistresses in opulent penthouses called their rich industrialist lovers on large white telephones.

There are, however, clear signs of melodrama and Hollywood artifice, from the swelling score, to the subjective point-of-view camera shots. Rossellini did take some flak from his hardcore Neorealist peers for hiring Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi in the title roles, both of whom were well-known comedic actors of the day that began their careers in vaudeville. The interior sets, such as the Nazi headquarters, were built in the basements of buildings in downtown Rome, and it is here that artificial lighting and more conventional studio set-ups come into play. The Nazis themselves are what you would expect, i.e. 2D stereotypes of evil incarnate, with the notable exception of the Austrian defector from Monte Cassino. Modern viewers might also notice the effeminate nature of lead Nazi officer Bergmann, paired with his lesbian femme fatale informant. Even at this early stage, homosexual "deviance," sadomasochism, and Nazism were being merged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways for popular consumption.

By all accounts, director Rossellini and co-scriptwriter Fellini shared a love for dark humor and irony that is evident in several scenes, particularly involving children. Children were of vital importance in Italian culture of the day, and they figure prominently in much Neorealist cinema; here, they are small adult partisans, taking comic beatings from their parents for staying out past curfew, when in reality they are not playing bocce but setting explosives. From Rome, Open City to The Bicycle Thief to The Children Are Watching Us, they come to embody rebirth, hope, and the potential for progress and modernity.

Overall, Rossellini is pretty easy on the Italians for their part in the war. This can be annoying, especially given his three preceding propaganda films, with their heroic pro-war message, albeit a state-mandated heroic message. And while that can be understood, although not justified perhaps, under the watchful eye of Vittorio Mussolini, Benito's son and head of the fascist film industry, the same cannot be said of Rossellini's independent postwar efforts, when he had full freedom to explore civilian complicity in war aggression. To his credit, in his subsequent film, Paisan, Rossellini does delve into more murky moral territory, criticizing both occupiers and liberators. By war's end, Italian crimes in Abyssinia and Greece were pretty low down on the atrocity list, and self reflection didn't really pull in returns at the box office. Rome, Open City, with its tragic humanism and empathy, was a huge success for Rossellini and opened countless inroads for Italian cinema abroad. His refugee cohort from the fascist film industry, including Antonioni, Fellini, De Sica, and Visconti, would all have new opportunities as Italy reconstructed itself and Cinecitta studios became one of the prime movers on the European film scene.  

As for the lasting impact of Rome, Open City almost seventy years on, I find it fascinating that Anna Magnani's tragic scene seems to have become so interwoven with Italian popular consciousness that its  narrative inventions appear even on a postage stamp commemorating Gullace, as the latter watches the truck driving away with her husband, thus mirroring the film, not the reality. I can think of no more fitting tribute to this humanistic work's influence and ongoing legacy.

James Bunnelle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
Lewis & Clark College

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(Note About Version: Only available domestically in poor quality "budget" editions, many of which are dubbed, the copy of La ciociara/Two Women being presented is the recently released, definitive European version restored by Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinemawith English subtitles transposed and synched.)

Although Italy did have a nascent film industry in the silent era--its most significant contribution being Cabiria, which influenced segments of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance--it never achieved the heights of other nations. Its mediocrity was further cemented by the Fascists' 1922 "March on Rome" and their assumption of power.  From then on, artists and intellectuals were subject to suspicion.  Some, like politician Giacomo Matteotti and Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, were assassinated or imprisoned until death; others, like writer Alberto Moravia, author of the 1957 novel on which Vittorio de Sica's film is based, were luckier.

While his peer Italo Calvino is probably more familiar today in the U.S., Alberto Moravia was one of the most widely read and translated Italian writers from the 1950s-1960s.  Barely into his twenties, he self-published his first novel, Gli indifferenti (The Indifferent Ones/Time of Indifference) in 1929, setting off a literary firestorm in Italy.  The darkly comic, bleak novel of a corrupt and crumbling bourgeois family earned Moravia a coveted spot on the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of banned books maintained by the Vatican.  Politically, the Fascist state saw Moravia as a bit of a dilettante with leftist leanings; that is, a corrupting influence on Italian culture, to be sure, but not really worth their time otherwise, and certainly not a threat to match that posed by their Marxist opponents.

Because of this, Moravia wouldn't really hit his creative stride until after the war, when most of his greatest works were written--La ciociara (Two Women), Il conformista (The Conformist), La noia (Boredom), Il disprezzo (Contempt)--most of which were transformed into classics of European cinema during the 60s and early 70s.  La ciociara (literally The Woman From Ciociaria but released in the U.S. as Two Women) was the first adaptation to be filmed.  It was based on the experiences of Moravia and his wife, writer Elsa Morante, as they took refuge from the war in the countryside east of Rome, in the hills of Ciociaria.  There, the couple slept in barns and lived off the hospitality of the rural village communities, Elsa Morante working on the initial framework of what would become her great first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars).  The awful events in Ciociaria that followed provided Moravia with his own inspiration.


(Elsa Morante, early 1940s)
(Alberto Moravia, 1943)



On the night of May 19th, 1944, as the hills and valleys around Ciociaria were liberated by the Allies, Moroccan colonial troops of the French Expeditionary Corps went on a celebration spree to commemorate their victory over the Germans.  The numbers are still contested, but it's estimated that between 1,500-2,500 Italian women, including children and the elderly, were raped in the region.  Estimates of the murdered go as high as 800, some of these the raped themselves but the majority being family members who tried to intervene.  Eventually, 15 Moroccans were court-martialed and shot for their participation, with scores of others sentenced to hard labor.  In Italy, the raped came to be known as "marocchinate", or roughly "those who've been 'Moroccaned'."  Concerned about the brewing public relations firestorm, it is rumored that the Allies clandestinely arranged for women from North Africa to be brought in and serve in the expeditionary corps' camp as "volunteers" in hopes of preventing future incidents.  The "marocchinate" later received compensatory pensions from the Italian government for their suffering.  Moravia shows the origins of this suffering for what it is: random, indifferent, "liberating."  Obviously a film from 1960 cannot push the same boundaries as its fiction counterparts, but de Sica's naturalistic approach to the material does justice to the indictments in Moravia's source text.

In a genre dominated by plots about Roman males, La ciociara stands apart from other neorealist films through its emphasis on women protagonists and provincial Italians, and also through its relative absence of children as a driving motif.  Cesira and Rosetta drift from place to place, directionless and in survival mode, wanting only to exist and be left alone.  The character of Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is the conflicted, schooled voice of intellectual conscience, embodying elements of both priest and partisan, ready to assume his measure of guilt for twenty years of his nation's destructive apathy.  His gentleness, inner conflict and existential hopelessness is a far different amalgamation from the black-and-white, good vs. evil stereotypes so prevalent in earlier war films, like Rossellini's Rome Open City; to some degree, this shift reflects a greater willingness for Italians to question their own complicity ten years after the fact. 

Since the script sticks closely to the novel's narrative, it can be argued that La ciociara owes more to the combination of Sophia Loren and Alberto Moravia than to director Vittorio de Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.  While the latter can be felt as the driving creative force behind their early collaborations Umberto D. and Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), the strengths of La ciociara really lie elsewhere, which is probably why it is the most overlooked film of de Sica's career.  When Anna Magnani turned down the role due to other obligations, it was she that suggested Sophia Loren to de Sica.  The director took a lot of heat for her casting, both because of her young age and her attractiveness, which critics saw as a softening of the novel's hard edge.  But after seeing her, it's hard to imagine anyone else commanding the role of Cesira with such power and strength.  At the 1960 Academy Awards, Loren achieved the unimaginable feat of taking Best Actress for her performance, the first ever given to a non-English language role and a huge coup for the Italian film industry (the fully-fluent Loren did her own English dubbing for the film, which no doubt carried much weight in this decision.)

La ciociara was Loren's big break and sparked a creative resurgence in de Sica as well, as he entered the last decade of his career.  Over the next four years, he would complete two more outstanding films with Loren--Oggi, ieri, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) and Matrimonio all'italiana (Marriage Italian-Style)--making her an international sensation on par with Marcello Mastroianni, with whom she often starred.

James Bunnelle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
Lewis & Clark College

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It's a bit ironic that one of the finest film indictments against Western colonialism sounds like the title of a bad History Channel documentary.  Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, released in 1966, is infinitely more complex and fascinating than its title lets on.  It stands, along with Costa Gavras's Z, as one of the few truly essential political films to come out of Europe in the 1960s and, even today, still holds great relevance to the current political situation in North Africa and the Middle East.

As World War II ground down, one overarching concern began to preoccupy London and Washington: there were tens of thousands of liberated partisans across Europe, and most of them were still armed.  Almost all had suffered greatly under the occupation, where they cut communication lines and staged quick attacks.  In short, they had done their bit, and they all now wanted some say in how the governments returning from exile patched up their nations.  Support for former leaders, while easy to keep congealed during the Axis occupations, started to dissolve rather quickly as the parades ended.  In Italy, this took the form of increased radicalization away from the right wing, with Communists, Socialists, and to a lesser extent Anarchists, all making giant political headway.  In 1946, the Italian Communist Party and the Socialist Party took the majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly, the provisional body in charge of drafting a new constitution for Italy, which meant that the Christian Democrats were now the minority clerical party.  This was totally unheard of and reflected an increasing public hostility towards Catholicism and its complicity in the dissemination of Fascist doctrine.  U.S. policy makers were terrified by this power shift and now saw a legitimate Communist victory in the 1948 electoral process--not a Bolshevik-style coup--as a real possibility.  To compromise and control these free elections, U.S. funneled huge amounts of money into a propaganda campaign and used Italy as the first testing ground for its newly-formed National Security Council, which was created to advise the President on matters of foreign policy.  That crucial counterinsurgency operation is beyond the scope of this blog but does make for enlightening reading of declassified government documents; suffice it to say, the Fascists would have been proud, particularly since many of them were elected back into the posts from which they had only recently been displaced.  This became the pilot project for subsequent CIA-backed attacks throughout Latin America, where the violence and atrocities mounted tenfold.

For North Africa, the rotating door of European imperialists fighting self-serving wars on the backs of their colonial subjects meant the arrival of an unexpected power vacuum.  The same occurred in southeast Asia, where the Japanese occupiers vacated parts of French Indochina (Vietnam).  The U.S. shrewdly put the final nail in Britain's colonial coffin by stipulating, in the terms of its Anglo-American Loan of 1945, that the U.K. first liquidate its overseas assets in the Commonwealth, thereby ensuring American global dominance for decades to come.  Britain would be paying annually on that bill until 2006.  As for France, I'm not sure of the whys behind its staunch determination to stay in the colonial game when it was so clearly outclassed by the new heavies, but they went at the task with considerable enthusiasm and arrogance.  Vietnam's war of independence against France and the U.S. is well documented, although you're supposed to call it something else I think.  The last-minute cancelling of the North/South unifying elections due to fear of Communist victory, just as in Italy, says all you need to know about the U.S./French dedication to democracy abroad.  In Algeria, France also had, well, some trouble letting go.

Gillo Pontecorvo is perhaps the best directorial example of the swing towards radicalism in Italy during the 1950-60s.  His output next to his peers is minuscule, with primarily just The Battle of Algiers and Quiemada (a.k.a. Burn! in the U.S.) commonly discussed today in film circles.  It was Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci who first coined the term subaltern, which advocated that indigenous histories be told from the perspective of the colonized rather than the colonizers; and although Algiers cannot be said to be a true subaltern film due to Pontecorvo's direction and Italian financing, it nevertheless reflects a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of oppression and dominance, and their impact on human rights.  More importantly, the idea for the film originated with the Algerians themselves.  It was Salash Baazi, a former member of the FLN (the Algerian freedom fighters, by then victorious) that first approached Italian producers with the idea of filming the memoirs of Saadi Yacef, the FLN commander imprisoned by the French and later freed to become a long-standing member of the Algerian government.  The first draft, done by an Italian screenwriter before Pontecorvo's  involvement, reflected the angle still so prevalent today, that is, the narrative vis-a-vis the conscience-stricken imperialist soldier who uncovers the "truth" about his nation's actions.  Thankfully the FLN rejected this idea and a second draft was produced that provided a more balanced approach.  This persistence of the FLN, that their story be told with some modicum of fairness, is a very important point to keep in mind since it is this exact fairness to which Pontecorvo respectfully adheres when coming on board.  Indeed, Pontecorvo went to great lengths to include the past participants, including the casting of Yacef himself as the FLN leader.  The secular, politically-driven FLN were as ruthless and tenacious as their French occupiers; in that sense, it mirrors almost exactly Israel's ongoing dominance of the Palestinians through their illegal occupation of the West Bank, with the endless checkpoints, harassment, torture, and indiscriminate bombings.

Pontecorvo admired and loved early Rossellini, particularly Paisan and Rome Open City, citing the latter, which he called the best Italian film of all time, as his main artistic inspiration for filmmaking.  In Algiers, the gritty realism and sense of immediacy is to such a degree that the original marketing materials assured audiences that no newsreel footage was used in its production.  In another nod to the man that he felt to be his mentor, the only professional actor in the film is Jean Martin, the French paratrooper colonel.  In this sense, Algiers is both a refinement of an older neorealist aesthetic and a segue into the 1960s "direct cinema" documentary movement best exemplified in the D.I.Y. works of Frederick Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles Brothers.

In 2003, as Iraq spiraled into chaos, the Pentagon held a special internal screening of The Battle of Algiers.  Staff invitations read:

"How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.  Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor.  Sound familiar? The French have a plan.  It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically.  To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film."

Old wine, new checkpoints.

James Bunnelle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
Lewis & Clark College

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By the early 1960s, Neorealism had run its course.  The scars of war and the abysmal social conditions that gave rise to the movement were finally receding into the past.  More importantly, Italy was embarking upon an age of intense industrialization and progress, and their cinema reflected this desire for modernity.  Much of this was driven by an energetic youth culture, not unlike that found in France, Britain, and the U.S., where the pop markets became dominated by a new demographic.  Italian composers Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota were redefining the role of the film score by using unconventional approaches to sound and questioning the rules of what constituted "acceptable" instrumentation, adding anvils, whistling, manual typewriters and dissonant harmonicas to the mix.  Sergio Leone "out-westerned" the Western with Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistfull of Dollars) and Il buono il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), creating an odd international hybrid of the classic American genre which came to be known as the "spaghetti western."  On the "artsier" side, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni were redefining modern narrative and pushing the boundaries of linear storytelling.

Like so many others, Federico Fellini started his career during the war years, at first as a screenwriter, and then moving on to camera work in 1943; never one to feign intellectualism, he acknowledged later that this was to avoid conscription and not from some deep innate love of cinema art.  Nevertheless, he found that he enjoyed his work and quickly developed a knack for organizing cast and crew.  His first major artistic contribution of the postwar period was acting as co-screenwriter on Rossellini's Rome Open City, and several of the film's moments of dark comic humor are undoubtedly his.  Despite the film's anti-fascist views, Fellini was notoriously apolitical for the entirety of his career and admitted this openly, a position for which he often caught flak from Italian progressives.   By 1963, he had already achieved international recognition with La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955) and Le notti di Cabiria (1957) to his credit.  But it was 1962's scandalous La dolce vita, starring Anita Ekberg and then-unknown Marcello Mastroianni, that had him proclaimed a "public sinner" by the Pope, a title Fellini no doubt wore with great pride.

History shows that the biggest success can segue into the biggest paralysis.  So it was with tentatively-titled "La bella confusione" (The Beautiful Confusion), the project following La dolce vita.  Fellini later described this terrifying moment of paralysis with an affinity that seemed to reflect its central importance to his creative maturation.  By his own account, he unexpectedly hit the creative doldrums for what was to be his eighth feature film (the "1/2" is for an earlier co-credit).  Things became so dire that both friends and financial backers began to question his ability to get things going again, with the project stopping and starting several times over the course of the year.  His initial idea was to have Marcello Mastroianni play a disillusioned writer, not realizing that Mastroianni had just done the disillusioned writer bit in Antonioni's La notte.  Fellini found his sole idea dead in the water.  Then, the what-seems-altogether-obvious-now dawned on him: why not make him a disillusioned filmmaker instead?  The elimination of this barrier between himself and his protagonist was a bold and risky autobiographical move but one that ultimately paid off.  After that switch, the problems in the creative process evaporated and things fell into place rather quickly.

One cannot really talk about the transition between "neorealist" Fellini and "oneiric" Fellini without acknowledging the revolutionary impact of psychology on his narrative and visual style.  To treat the sudden onset of acute depression, he began psychoanalysis in the early 1960s and became an ardent admirer of Jungian thought, of Jung's theories of anima/animus and subconscious archetypes.  Seeds planted in La dolce vita came to fruition by 8 1/2, with its meandering and self-reflexive narrative.  Fellini later talked at length about his supervised experiments with LSD during this time period, and it is clear that this drug had some impact upon his fractured approach to narrative, the merger of plausible and impossible, the solid with the symbolic.  From this point onward, and for the next twenty years, "Felliniesque" would gain cultural ground on "Kafkaesque," eventually becoming the de facto shorthand for all situations surreal, circuitous, or dreamlike.  And it is this odd intangibility that makes 8 1/2 still so engaging today.

James Bunnelle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
Lewis & Clark College

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"Modern man lives in a world without the moral tools necessary to match his technological skill. He is incapable of authentic relationships with his environment, his fellows, or even the objects which surround him because he carries with him a fossilized value system out of step with modern times."
                                                                                       -- Michelangelo Antonioni, Cannes, 1960.

If Federico Fellini was the flamboyant, self-reflexive modernist of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni was his brooding, existential twin, a sort of shadow self.  Both directors, along with Jean-Luc Godard in France, essentially reinvented cinematic narrative over the course of the decade.  After starting off  rather conventionally, Antonioni embarked on a unique trajectory with L'avventura in 1960, with its unresolved central conflict, creeping slowness, and sparse, almost non-existent dialogue.  Its Cannes premiere caused boos and catcalls from the crowd, with star Monica Vitti and Antonioni fleeing the theater, or so goes the legend.  L'avventura became one of the most polarizing and debated works in the history of Italian film.  The two films that followed--La notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962)--moved along similar thematic lines, with all three loosely called a trilogy by film scholars today.

Although it was De Sica who initially filmed La ciociara (see blog entry below), Antonioni is really the artistic spiritual kin of existentialist writer Alberto Moravia, who was at the very forefront of Italian literature throughout the 1950s-1960s.  La notte, in particular, bares more than a passing resemblance to Moravia's seminal 1954 novel Il disprezzo (Contempt), which Godard later filmed in 1963.  Above all, Antonioni and Moravia are equally obsessed with the inability of human beings to interconnect in a real and genuine manner, to get beyond the facades of the everyday.  Their protagonists are often embedded in inner conflict, stranded in situations of social and psychological alienation that are as self-perpetuating as they are unavoidable.  And it was Antonioni who codified this shared vision of modernist isolation for the cinema, perhaps none more successfully than Il deserto rosso (Red Desert), from 1964.

Red Desert is Antonioni's finest moment, combining his earlier stark visions and narrative ideas with a full Technicolor palette (all films prior were black-and-white).  Admittedly obsessed with cinematography (he was an avid artist growing up), every frame of the film is a tightly composed work of art.  Antonioni has often commented on how Red Desert is often misinterpreted as his "anti-industrialism" film, with its spewing nuclear reactors and factory landscape.  In fact, his intent was quite the opposite and reflected popular Italian attitudes of the day: these were symbols of civic progress, of modernity, of entering a new era in Italian history.  Environmentalism was not on the radar, as there was still an "away" for Italians to throw things to in 1964.  Watching the film today can leave quite a different impression.  Shot during the winter months, the landscape still lacked the bleakness Antonioni required, so, in an inspired fit, he had the ground and foliage covered in a dust of grey paint in order to accentuate the colors he had carefully selected as the psychological focal points for certain scenes.

Antonioni's following three films were done in English for MGM, including the immensely popular Blowup (1966) and the counter-culture manifesto Zabriskie Point (1970); Antonioni's failed attempt to get 10,000 extras for a lovemaking scene in the California desert should clue you in about the latter.  The director was frustrated by Hollywood interference and, after The Passenger with Jack Nicholson, he returned to Italy.  Although finishing several other projects, his legacy today rests on his hypnotically spartan early-1960s output, which revolutionized modern film narrative.

James Bunnelle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
Lewis & Clark College

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"In Italy, the family is an almost holy institution, a pillar of society, and to criticize it is considered outrageous."  -- Marco Bellocchio

In many ways, the Spirit of 1968 started three years earlier in Italy, thanks to Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca), released in the relative calm of October 1965.  The incendiary film sent shock-waves through Italian culture and was vilified for its irreverent and irresponsible attitude towards traditional Italian family values and Catholicism.

At a mere 26, Bellocchio is the first director in our Italian film series that comes from the babyboom, a generation of bourgeois-bred, highly-educated children rebelling against the conventions of their parents.  "Disrespectful" mouthy kids with attitudes was nothing new, of course, but the 1960s crop held considerable cultural clout due to the massive shift in postwar demographics.  And they weren't just pissed off about the usuals, like not having access to a car and unrealistic curfews.  They were pissed off about war, about church, about sex, about inequality, and, above all, about traditional family structures that they considered oppressive and outdated.  In Italian life, the sacrosanct nature of the core family was something always held in high regard: in Rossellini's Rome Open City, the family structure is disrupted and ultimately destroyed by outside forces, the Nazis and Mussolini's fascists; in De Sica's Two Women, mother and daughter struggle united against all obstacles to survive; and in virtually all Italian neorealist cinema, children embody the hope of the future, doing their bit dutifully in the reconstruction of their nation, never questioning the sanctity of the church or the supreme wisdom of their elders.  Even the modernists to follow toed this line: Fellini's closing shot for 8 1/2 is of his boy alter ego, his anima/animus; and Antonioni's familial bond between mother and son in Red Desert is unquestioned, if a tad destabilized.

So, given its predecessors, Bellocchio's anti-family, anti-hope, anti-everything manifesto was the molotov cocktail of Italian modernism, intended to burn both Pope and parents.  Aesthetically, it was a return to extreme minimalism, far away from the increasingly baroque works of Fellini and Rossellini, both of which Bellocchio disregarded as has-been, sell-outs; he particularly loathed Fellini's conflicted hand-wringing over Catholicism.  But this wasn't strictly an issue of young turk vs. his elders, as Bellocchio admitted his admiration for the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel, a man with a penchant for mocking religion and societal hypocrisy.  Indeed, ideologically-speaking, Bellocchio shares more with Buñuel than with any of his Italian counterparts, the notable exception being Marco Ferreri and his caustically satirical "western" Don't Touch the White Woman!

As always, the reality of Bellocchio's vision is somewhere in the middle.  He openly admits the film is not autobiographical in any way.  His parents helped to finance the film, and it was shot at his mother's country villa, so not quite the sea of bourgeois discontent he belittles so mercilessly on the screen.  Still, Bellocchio's bleak vision is the first taste of what would quickly balloon into a full-scale international counterculture in a few year's time, with riots in the streets of Paris, the "levitating" of the Pentagon in the U.S., and Baader-Ensslin's "Red Army Faction" carrying out terrorist attacks on the Springer Press corporate headquarters in Hamburg.

James Bunnelle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
Lewis & Clark College



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