During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Italian film industry fared much better than the French. Higher ticket prices offset the decline in attendance, American imports were decreasing, and Italian films were gaining a large share of domestic revenues. The international market proved accessible to horror films, comedies like Divorce Italian Style (1961), and revived “mythological” epics like Hercules Unchained (1959). U. S. and European firms continued to seek Italian coproductions. Cinecitta churned out films, and in 1962 Dino De Laurentiis built a huge studio outside Rome. By the early 1960s, Italy had become western Europe’s most powerful production center.
The most visible directors were Fellini and Antonioni, whose early 1960s films solidified their reputations as auteurs (see Chapter 19). Expansion in the industry also enabled dozens of new directors to embark on careers. Most went immediately into the popular genres, but a few became more celebrated and influential. As we might expect, they were often characterized in relation to the Neorealist tradition.
A straightforward updating of Neorealism occurred in the work of Ermanno Olmi. From the first scene, which shows a young man waking up while his parents
20.34 II Posto: an older employee’s death allows the protagonist to move into the office amid a scramble for the slightly better empty desk at the front of the row.
Prepare breakfast, H Posta (“The Job,” aka The Sound of Trumpets, 1961) seems to continue the patient observation of daily life conducted in Umberto D. (p. 364). H Posta is also characteristic of international Young Cinema in the way it loosens its narrative beyond the Neorealist norm. The young man’s application for a civil service job, the petty office routines, and the melancholy lives of the clerks are presented in an anecdotal, digressive fashion (20.34). The romance plot line remains
20.35 Salvatore Giuliani: soldiers line a street in a village that has aided the hero.
20.36 Hand-held shots give a sense of war reportage as the camera follows soldiers invading an apartment block in Battle of Algiers.
Unfulfilled. Olmi’s alternation of satiric touches with quiet sympathy resembles the attitude of young Czech filmmakers like Jiff Menzel.
Neorealism’s socially critical impulse was intensified by new filmmakers identified with the left. Perhaps closest to the Neorealist source was the work of the Taviani brothers, Vittorio and Paolo, who would gain international prominence in the 1970s. Francesco Rosi, who had assisted Visconti on La Terra trema, merged a semidocumentary inquiry into a Sicilian bandit’s death with nonchronological flashbacks in Salvatore Giuliano (1961). Avoiding a concentration on its protagonist, the film explores the Mafia and government forces that defeat the populist rebel (20.35). Marco Bellocchio brought a New Left critique of orthodox communism to the screen with Fists in the Pockets (1966) and China Is Near (1967). Gillo Pontecorvo, older than these filmmakers, made one of the most important contributions to the trend in Battle of Algiers (1966). This restaged semidocumentary drew upon the conventions of cinema verite to render the immediacy of the Algerian war for independence (20.36); but, in using a complex flashback construction, Pontecorvo, like Rosi, showed the influence of Resnais and other experimenters.
The Neorealist impulse also encountered a radical modernism in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. An unorthodox Marxist, a homosexual, and a nonbeliever steeped in Catholicism, Pasolini generated a furor in Italian culture. He was already famous as a poet and novelist when he entered filmmaking. He worked on several scripts, notably for Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, and he cast his own films on a principle that Vittorio De Sica could have accepted: “I choose actors for what they are and not for what they pretend to be.”4 Yet Pasolini claimed to take from Charles Chaplin, Carl Dreyer, and Kenji Mizoguchi the idea that the filmmaker could reveal the epic and mythic dimensions of the world.
The bleak examination of urban poverty in Accatone (1961) and Mama Roma (1962) was hailed as a return to Neorealism. Yet Pasolini’s treatment of the milieu seems to owe more to Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, not only in the scenes of savage violence but in the disturbing dream imagery. Pasolini criticized Neorealism as being too tied to Resistance politics and too attached to a surface veracity. “In neorealism things are described with a certain detachment, with human warmth mixed with irony—characteristics which I do not have.”5
Pasolini’s first films also display what he called pas-ticchio, the “jumbling together” of a wide range of aural and visual materials. In compositions reminiscent of Renaissance paintings, characters spew forth vulgar language. Cinema-verite street scenes are accompanied by Bach or Mozart. Pasolini explained these disparities of technique by claiming that the peasantry and the lowest reaches of the urban working class retained a tie to preindustrial mythology, which his citation of great artworks of the past was meant to evoke.
The tactic of stylistic “contamination,” as Pasolini called it, was perhaps least disturbing to audiences in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which—unlike his previous writings and films—won praise from the Church. The biblical tale was presented with greater realism than would be found in Hollywood or Cinecitta epics. Pasolini made Jesus a fierce, often impatient, preacher, and he dwelt on the characters’ gnarled features, wrinkled skin, and broken teeth. The Gospel, however, is not simply a Neorealist scripture. Techniques are jumbled together. Bach and Prokofiev vie with the African Missa Luba on the sound track. Faces out of Renaissance paintings are filmed in abrupt zoom shots. Jesus’ trial before Pilate is viewed by a hand-held camera within a crowd of onlookers, as if a news reporter could not get closer (20.37).
20.37 The Gospel According to St. Matthew: from Judas’s point of view, we glimpse the trial past the heads of other onlookers.
Pasolini, the experimental writer turned filmmaker, somewhat resembles Alain Robbe-Grillet, while Bernardo Bertolucci represents an Italian parallel to the directors of the Nouvelle Vague. At age nineteen Bertolucci was assistant director on Accatone, and Pasolini supplied the script for his first film, La Commare secca (“The Grim Reaper,” 1962). A devoted cinephile, he spent his teenage vacations watching movies at the Cinematheque Fran<;aise. Although Bertolucci identified strongly with the New Wave filmmakers, the careful construction and technical elegance of his films put them closer to the world of older modernists like Resnais. In La Commare secca, offscreen detectives interrogate murder suspects, and flashbacks supply each suspect’s version of events.
This familiar modernist device, exploited in Citizen Kane and Rashomon, is here applied to a classic Neorealist situation—a purse theft that recalls both The Bicycle Thief and Nights of Cabiria.
Bertolucci’s most celebrated film of the era was the autobiographical Before the Revolution (1964). A tale of a young man who falls in love with his aunt, it parades references to Cahiers du cinema and Hollywood directors and displays the director’s mastery of art-cinema procedures of disorientation (20.38-20.42). Avoiding the radical disjunctions of Godard, Bertolucci made mildly modernist films of great technical polish, a quality that he would exploit in his successes of the 1970s and 1980s.
The industry’s prosperity allowed Olmi, Pasolini, Bertolucci, and many other directors to enter filmmaking. As in France, however, the period of opportunity was rather brief. A crisis emerged during 1963 and 1964, when the costume epic fell out of favor and major companies suffered from expensive failures, principally Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) and Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah (1963). In 1965, the government intervened and offered an aid policy resembling that of France: prizes for quality efforts, guaranteed bank loans, credits from special funds.
While this policy led to a new filmmaking boom, producers turned to low-budget production in new genres, such as sex films and James Bond imitations. Mario Bava introduced new eroticism, baroque set designs, and bizarre camera movements into fantasy-based thrillers
20.38 Disorienting time juggling in Before the Revolution: the aunt sorts photographs from her life on her bed.
20.39 After a close-up of some of the pictures. . .
20.40 . . . Bertolucci cuts to the bed,
Empty, and tracks in; she comes into the room in the background.
20.41, left Then Bertolucci resumes showing pictures, again spread on the bed. . .
20.42, right. . . before the aunt slowly turns the pictures over one by one. The shot of the empty bed presents an ambiguity of time: Is the shot out of order, or does it mark a new occasion on which the aunt returned to the bed and laid out the photos once again?
(Black Sabbath, 1963; Blood and Black Lace, 1964). The most internationally successful Italian genre was the spaghetti Western, as it came to be known in English, and its most successful practitioner was Sergio Leone.
A fan of American comic strips and films noirs, Leone was as dedicated a film fan as were the New Wave directors. He worked as assistant director for his father, Roberto Roberti, for De Sica (on The Bicycle Thief) and for American directors on runaway productions. After directing two costume epics, Leone moved to the genre that producers hoped would restabilize the industry.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966) became the prototypical spaghetti Westerns. Laconic, stubble-jawed Clint Eastwood saunters through a world of grotesque absurdity modeled on Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films. Leone’s Westerns have a harsh realism— seedy towns, grubby ponchos, and violence more gruesome than most audiences had ever seen. But they also display an almost operatic splendor. Vast landscapes (filmed cheaply in Spain) are juxtaposed with widescreen close-ups of eyes or hands. Wide-angle lenses distort depth (Color Plate 20.2). Leone’s flamboyant visual style pushes the Western conventions to the level of formal ceremony, so a face-off in a bar becomes as prolonged and stylized as a confrontation in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Yet Leone often deflates his supercharged scenes with grimly ironic humor.
In each film, Ennio Morricone’s musical score hero-icizes the action with soaring strings or mocks it with an abrupt whistle or a twang. Leone called Morricone his “scriptwriter” because the composer could replace a line of dialogue with a sudden expressive chord.6 Morricone also helped Leone magnify the thematic implications of a film, as when, at the end of For a Few Dollars More, the parallel between a gunfight and a bullfight emerges not only from the corrida-shaped arena but also from throbbing Mexican brass on the sound track.
The huge success of the Dollars trilogy spurred the production of spaghetti Westerns and made Leone, Morricone, and Eastwood world famous. Although Leone worked in a popular genre, his florid, highly personal reinterpretation of its conventions proved as significant as the efforts of those art-cinema directors who revised and challenged the Neorealist tradition.
World History
