A scene from Fellini's '8 1/2', part of Scorsese's look into Italian filmmaking
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...for all the right reasons. The films' craft meets their fervor. Their righteousness still allows for unexpected blasts of dark wit and the occasional moral shading. And though many of the actors may have been amateurs, the screenwriters weren't. The names of men like Fellini, Sergio Amidei, Cesare Zavattini — and a woman like Suso Cecchi d'Amico (who, at 85, got a co-script credit on Scorsese's "Voyage") — appear again and again on the crucial films of the 40s and beyond.
Eventually the country rebounded from economic despair. Directors got richer and artistically restless. Moviegoers grew tired of watching misery on their movie screens. So neorealism went the way of other isms; it became an isn't. But it traveled, in the 60s, to Czechoslovakia and Brazil, energizing those nascent cinemas. And it emerged, a decade or so ago, in the humanist-naturalist gems of filmmakers in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is truly a world of wonders.
I MAESTRI DI MARTY
At the beginning of any artistic "movement," the most prominent perps sit for a class portrait. Dressed in their new uniforms, they reveal to us only their resemblances, similarities, common goals. But as the classmates grow up and older, they inevitably grow apart. We see that the movement was a series of perhaps coordinated, perhaps coincidental baby steps that, for each participant, leads in a different direction.
Thus it was with the main men of neorealism. They gradually revealed their true selves, their obstinate individualities. Visconti went to the opera, Fellini to the carnival. Rossellini achieved a kind of "scientific" austerity. De Sica returned to his old, brawny comedy style. For all of them, neorealism had become so... 40s. They wanted to tell stories about themselves and their divinely decadent friends. And in doing, they equaled or surpassed their neorealist efforts.
Rossellini was the first to break away, and some would suggest he did it for love. For his 1948 "Stromboli," the renowned Italian art-film director was to have as his leading lady Ingrid Bergman, from Sweden via American stardom. Both married, they had an affair and a child. The scandal trashed Bergman's Hollywood career; and Howard Hughes' RKO, which had financed "Stromboli," shaved 20 mins. off it. They stayed together and made six films, all ignored or reviled. Scorsese considers some of them — "Stromboli," "Europa 51," "Voyage to Italy" — among the most sublime and troubling works of their time. "What mystery! What beauty!" exclaims Bergman when she reaches the Stromboli peak; Scorsese feels that way about these astringent, volcanic films.
As for Fellini, he found apt subjects for big canvases, pulling off the cool tandem of "La Dolce Vita" (gossip journalism raised to invigorating art) and "8-1/2" (the director's film about his inability to make a film). The first was the most financially successful foreign movie ever released in the U.S., the second surely the most entertaining art film of all time. They also canonized Marcello Mastroianni as the dominant European star of the 20th century's second, pooped half. Handsome, effortlessly macho yet spiritually impotent, he elevated emotional passivity to a metaphysic and a fashion statement.
Visconti, reputedly the heir of a noble family that traced its lineage back to Charlemagne's right-hand man, had won his neorealist props with "La Terra Trema," about poor fishermen whose pay is so poor they cannot afford to buy their own boat. In 1992, Lizzani asked: "Was Visconti's point of view the same as that of his heroes, or was it that of a great Renaissance nobleman bending down to watch humble people with the attention but also the detachment of an entomologist?" For many, the first "genuine" Visconti masterwork is the 1954 "Senso," a romantic tragedy set in the 19th century and reaching the level of operatic delirium that Visconti would pursue for the rest of his long career. This sumptuous color film finds its turbulent focus, and so much of its visual rapture, in the lead performance by the neck-swivelingly beautiful Alida Valli, who similarly illuminated films by Antonioni, Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento.
But the signal auteur of the Italian 60s was Antonioni, the grand, glum mystifier. He was a late starter: 47 when "L'Avventura" won a second prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival (the Palme d'Or that year went to "La Dolce Vita"). This "adventure," in which the woman who seems to be the lead character disappears and is never found, was just the thing at a time when movies had morphed into films; folks on the worldwide intellectual cocktail-party circuit loved to argue over a puzzle that had no resolution. "L'Avventura" was the first in Antonioni's trilogy of existential blahs, followed by "La Notte" and "Eclipse." Not all the critics cottoned to the languid voluptuousness of his film style; Andrew Sarris labeled it "Antoniennui," and Pauline Kael spanked it as "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party." But it was as influential on European filmmakers as neorealism had been. And any moviegoer with patience had to admit: the films were beautiful.
In Antonioni's new, blue Italy, the moneyed class is mired in depression (the poor can't afford it, or don't have time for it). In his later films, this indulgence turned into an addiction. Antonioni's creatures seemed doomed not to hope, but they were gorgeous people — Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Jeanne Moreau, Lea Massari and the director's blond Muse, Monica Vitti — wandering in a wasteland caught in some of the most elegant, pristine images ever recorded. Sometimes, the landscape became the movie. In "Eclipse," which, Scorsese says, "felt less like a story and more like a poem," Delon and Vitti agree to meet, but neither one shows up at the appointed spot. So, for the film's final seven minutes, the camera lingers on apartment houses, street corners, all the places the lovers could have been but weren't. There are no people, only buildings. "Eclipse" is a cinematic neutron bomb, and a wondrous experiment that enthralls as it enervates.
If you didn't care for Antoniennui (I did), no matter. It was just one dish in an endlessly nourishing smorgasbord of movie attitudes and styles available then — from Italy, but also France, Sweden, Japan, India, Britain. the U.S. The whole joint was jumpin'. Scorsese, just entering his 20s, was a prime gourmand of this banquet. Now he is one of the few directors from whom one still expects a feast. And the graybeards among us have to declare that the 60s was the last great decade for grown-up movies.
At the end of "Voyage," he offers this cinematic prayer: "I wish that every young person with an interest in film could have had the same experience that I had back in those days: to be young, open to everything, and to walk into a theater and have your expectations not just met but surpassed, time and time again." I wish so too. Actually, I hope against hope. This could be cranky middle age talking, but I wonder if today's kids will be able to look back, 50 years from now, and say what Scorsese and I can say: that the films we saw in our youth were terrific — mind- and medium-expanding works of great seriousness and power, whose profound artistry and progressive eloquence not only influenced filmmakers and filmgoers, but made them better.
IL VIAGGIO PICCOLO DI RICARDO
Martin Scorsese has a couple years on me, so his movie age of reason would naturally precede mine. Also, there was no foreign-movie TV show in Philadelphia, where I grew up. And I can't pretend that as a boy I had his prodigious familiarity with Italian cinema. (Well, I can pretend, but then what's the point of this column?) Anyway, what the Child Corliss remembers of Italian cinema was three things: broad comedy, wan spectacle and beautiful women.