Società italiana del cinematografo del punto di Adams
Other times, other
places
I remain moderately disheartened at the state of
the commonweal—the old North American Republic appears as though it will
be content to die in its sleep—and find myself responding by means of a
gradual withdrawal of my attention from public issues. The morning newspaper,
over which I used to pore with coffee and unfiltered cigarettes to sharpen my
attention, is now just skimmed most mornings and sometimes skipped altogether
(of course, the Hearst-owned San Francisco
Chronicle
has become progressively thinner gruel over the years, and I no longer smoke),
newsweeklies receive scarcely more attention and even NPR, my principal window
on the world these two decades past, is losing its earshare to my iPod.
Accordingly this household has launched, if for no other reason than to take our
minds off this country and this age, an
Italian film
series.
I
have long been fond on principle of European art films produced within ten years
or so either side of 1960 (you could put
Last Year at
Marienbad chronologically and stylistically at
ground zero here, although I recognize that what I find hypnotic other people
may find soporific), and in recent years I have set about gratifying this
tropism by accumulating representative titles on DVD for the permanent
collection. I'm not certain why the notion of an Italian-themed series seemed
appealing, except that I had a slight plurality of these titles at the outset;
that a Swedish series would necessarily have been dominated by the
oeuvre
of Ingmar Bergman, and hence not, ah, entirely conducive to the festive spirit
of the evening parties to which I propose to attach the screenings; that
Japanese flicks are not to everyone's taste; that a selection of French flicks
would be stylistically too
diffuse...
Anyway, Italian it is. We
announced the series via snailmail to selected Bay Area chums last month, and
drew a modest response, with some falling off of promised attendees for the
first selection, Fellini
Satyricon. I should perhaps mention that we
decided to arrange the films not in order of production date but rather by
historical period, which should give us some interesting abrupt shifts in
cinematic sensibilities now and again. I had seen
Satyricon
as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, and had carried to the present date only
the impressions that the film was long on spectacle but short on narrative
coherence. I was prepared to discount a portion of the latter impression on the
assumption that one or another of the exotic alkaloids then circulating might
have contributed to that memory of discontinuity, but this time around, impaired
by no more than three goblets of chianti over the course of, it must be said, a
not-tightly edited flick, I am prepared to report that it is on visual spectacle
very nearly alone that the flick's reputation must rest. Yes, Federico, the
privileged classes of Tiberius' Rome were vain, gluttonous and cruel: tell us
something we didn't know. What we didn't appreciate, lulled as we were by the
drawing room dramedies such as I,
Claudius, was how remote and foreign and
un-English things were at the center of what then passed as Western Civilization
two millennia ago, and there Fellini has done a stellar job. You'll need all
your patience to sit through this, but it's a remarkable accomplishment, and I
can't think offhand of a film I've seen recently that has approached the job
this one has done of a total immersion in an alien
culture.
The remaining titles, subject
to additions and substitutions,
are:
The
Leopard
Death in
Venice
Garden of the
Finzi-Continis
Seven
Beauties
Night of the Shooting
Stars
Open
City
The Bicycle
Thief
Umberto
D
Roman
Holiday (not really an Italian film, I know,
but after two bleak neorealist classics I suspect people will be wanting a
break)
Variety
Lights
The White
Sheik
I
Vitelloni
Terminal
Station (I haven't made up my mind on this
one, which is something of a bastard production, but its credentials are at
least sounder than Wyler's Roman
Holiday)
La
Strada
Nights of
Cabiria
Big Deal on Madonna
Street
La Dolce
Vita
Il Posto
(not to be confused with 1994's
Il
Postino, although I may add that one to the
list before we get to chronological
1953)
I
Fidanzati
La Commare
Secca
L’Avventura
La
Notte
L’eclisse
8
1/2
Juliet of the
Spirits
Roma
A
Brief Vacation
Swept
Away
The stretch I'm personally
looking forward to is the one comprised by films made from 1945 to
1964—represented above approximately by
Open
City through
L'eclisse—which
have the characteristics I
really
associate with Italian cinema. I'm rather hoping that by the time we reach its
place in the sequence Bertolucci's
Before the
Revolution will have made it onto DVD and may
be added to the bill. It remains to be seen whether interest can be maintained
in our circle over the course of the year or more it will require, at the
projected intervals of two to four weeks, to run through the roster. I will in
any event be posting reviews here as each title is screened.
Posted: Fri - February 4, 2005 at 07:00 PM