Roberto Rossellini Research Articles

A cinema of poetry: aesthetics of the Italian art film

A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression-what Pasolini called the cinema of poetry. While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film-its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art-have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably Italian?

Revolutionizing La Regenta : Parodic Transformation and Cinematic Innovation in Oviedo Express

Applying Linda Hutcheon’s concept of parody as “an integrated structural modeling process of revising, replaying, inventing, and ‘trans-contextualizing’ previous works of art,” this article explores how film director Gonzalo Suárez incorporates the following source material into his 2007 comedy Oviedo Express : Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta as well as Suárez’s own 1974 film adaptation of the novel and Fernando Méndez-Leite’s 1995 made-for-television adaptation of it; Stefan Zweig’s story “Angst” and Roberto Rossellini’s film Non credo più all’amore (La paura) based on it; and J. B. Priestley’s play Music at Night . After announcing his parodic enterprise with a quote from Priestley, Suárez skillfully intertwines the plots of Alas’s novel, Zweig’s story, and Rossellini’s film while forging intertextual and extratextual connections among the characters and real-life actors present in the previous literary, cinematic, and televised versions of La Regenta . In so doing he refashions one of the classics of nineteenth-century Spanish Realism according to his own artistic genre of acción-ficción in order to create a new type of filmmaking that challenges prevailing cinematic assumptions of quality.

Framing the Real: Lefèbvre and Neo-Realist Cinematic Space as Practice

In 1945 Roberto Rossellini’s Neo-realist Rome, Open City set in motion an approach to cinema and its representation of real life – and by extension real spaces – that was to have international significance in film theory and practice. However, the re-use of the real spaces of the city, and elsewhere, as film sets in Neo-realist film offered (and offers) more than an influential aesthetic and set of cinematic theories. Through Neo-realism, it can be argued that we gain access to a cinematic relational and multidimensional space that is not made from built sets, but by filming the built environment. On the one hand, this space allows us to “notice” the contradictions around us in our cities and, by extension, the societies that have produced those cities, while on the other, allows us to see the spatial practices operative in the production and maintenance of those contradictions. In setting out a template for understanding the spatial practices of Neo-realism through the work of Henri Lefèbvre, this paper opens its films, and those produced today in its wake, to a spatio-political reading of contemporary relevance. We will suggest that the rupturing of divisions between real spaces and the spaces of film locations, as well the blurring of the difference between real life and performed actions for the camera that underlies much of the central importance of Neo-realism, echoes the arguments of Lefèbvre with regard the social production of space. In doing so, we will suggest that film potentially had, and still has, a vital role to play in a critique of contemporary capitalist spatial practices.

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy by John Champagne (review)

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy by John Champagne Andre Furlani Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy. John Champagne. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. viii + 221. $44.95 (paper). John Champagne argues in Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy that contradictory representations of masculinity rooted in capitalism impeded the consummation of the fascist “new man” and complicate our sense of the art of that era. The triumphalist objectification of the athletic male body in anti-liberal State capitalism did not merely yield the macho kitsch of Mussolini’s megalomaniacal self-representations and the monumental nude statuary of the [End Page 860] Foro Mussolini (now Foro Italico, Stadio dei Marmi in Rome); it also altered the male from producer to consumer, a spectacle of mass consumption. In the modern period, ideals of manhood and manliness, previously grounded in physiology, become performed as masculinity; the male is now equally the object as well as the subject of desire. The male body in fascism is especially prone to this polarity: a hypervirile, disciplined, industrious subject and a coyly specular, feminized object. “As a gendered performance, masculinity threatens to reveal itself as such—a performance, a show, a voyeuristic spectacle,” Champagne states (93). Stressing the official policy of non-interference in the arts, he sees in some of the painting, music, and literature of the era a contestation of the peculiarly insecure, and indeed often homoerotic, fascist valorization of masculinity. Extending the scope of Barbara Spackman’s Fascist Virilities into representations of masculinity in the arts of fascist Italy, Champagne shows how homosocial bonding furthered patriotism, military service, and idolatry of il Duce, thus ensuring the masses’ collusion in their own domination. Rigid gender binaries, he notes, offered “enough homosociality to encourage Mussolini’s male followers to identify with, even love him, and enough homophobia to ensure that this love remains sublimated as hero worship” (136). Champagne counters the reprehensible equation of homosexuality with totalitarianism. Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia and Alberto Moravia in The Conformist, for instance, insinuate that a masochistic, repressed, homoerotic narcissism converts self-hatred into fascistic sadism. The cinematic acme of this stereotype is the viciously effeminate Nazi Kommandant in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta, wherein the Christ-like Italian partisan gets tortured to death. (Rossellini had previously been a prominent director in the fascist film industry.) Fascist discourses of masculinity manifested the contradictions of an ideology receptive to elements of modernism while remaining deeply hostile to its politically subversive cosmopolitanism. Even the Futurists received few State commissions, and members, including Filippo Marinetti himself, were often placed on the defensive and compelled to compromise. Champagne dedicates a chapter to the theater of Luigi Pirandello, wherein he finds a resolute modernist refusal of fascist ideology. Champagne argues that, however ambivalent the author’s publicly stated politics may have been, plays like Six Characters in Search of an Author offer no endorsement of fascism, regardless of their contempt (shared with Mussolini) for the bourgeois family and for liberal moral agency. The bellicose collective had no place in Pirandello’s moral code, Champagne shows. Having first called Pirandello “a deconstructionist avant la lettre,” he views Henry IV as not so much anticipating Derrida as being curiously “indebted to deconstruction” (64, 69). (It would be more plausible to simply cite Pirandello as an influence on deconstruction.) His theater, Champagne convincingly asserts, “leaves masculine subjectivity in ruins, and thus by implication constituted an open challenge to fascist discourses of the new man” (70). In a challenge to Adorno’s version of the repugnant myth of homofascism, Champagne exonerates several of the State-funded Scuola Romana artists of charges of collaboration. He detects dissent in the work of several homosexual painters, however much they may have enjoyed official patronage. He follows Marla Stone’s argument in The Patron State that, in contrast to the coercive aesthetic uniformity imposed by the Nazis, the Italian regime did not decree an exclusive fascist aesthetic, as it attempted instead to mobilize artists’ consent through reform of existing institutions (e.g. La Scala and the Uffizi Gallery) and the establishment of new ones, as well as through syndicates. Not only was no orthodoxy of style...

The Imaginary Crowd

The concept of coralità, or “chorality,” has a long history in Italian film criticism. Beginning with Carlo Trabucco's application of the term to Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (1945), it has since become prevalent in discussions of Rossellini's work (as P. Adams Sitney and Peter Bondanella point out) as well as neorealist film more generally. While commentators have tended to see such choral techniques as an unproblematic means of indexing the “common people,” this article challenges the conventional theorization of coralità by demonstrating the frequency with which choral configurations of voice are used in neorealist films not to reflect an existing social group but, rather, to construct a fantasmatic or imaginary one. By examining choral episodes in films such as De Sica's Sciuscià (1946) and De Santis's Riso amaro (1949), I argue that these directors orchestrate moments of vocal plurality to convey a sense of amplified presence, which in turn serves a range of rhetorical purposes. I conclude with analyses of several post-neorealist films in order to juxtapose their highly self-conscious mobilization of choral structures, which make explicit the ideological valence of one of neorealism's most naturalized tropes.

THE PENSIVE CITADEL

6 7 R T H E P E N S I V E C I T A D E L V I C T O R B R O M B E R T The early morning hours were the most di≈cult. Lying in bed, I would count the future sabbaticals the way some count how many springs they may still live to see. In the rented room next to the funeral parlor, I imagined the black limousines lining up in the adjacent driveway, ready to convey their co≈ned loads to the town’s periphery. Thoughts drifted. It was di≈cult enough on drizzly days, but more di≈cult still when the early rays of the sun intruded with insistent irony. Half awake, I was afraid to fall asleep again and not make it in time all the way to Phelps Hall. I had already been late several times, and as a teaching graduate student I was vulnerable to occasional inspections. Yet I enjoyed facing my students. As for sabbaticals, they were at that stage only distant mirages. At the present it was fun to make my freshmen repeat ‘‘C’est rond, c’est long, c’est bon,’’ the slightly salacious words uttered with inescapable innuendo by the fictional Mireille in the Méthode orale we used as a textbook in this intensive language course. That was more than sixty years ago. Presently, the emeritus professor seated on a bench with a missing slat in the Parc Monceau , at the edge of the 8th Arrondissement, muses on the actual 6 8 B R O M B E R T Y sabbaticals that punctuated his academic life. A film in rewind. The self takes on the features of a character in a third-person narration. He and I absorb impressions of the park: the fake ruined colonnades, the duck-filled pond, the groomed flowerbeds, the couples snuggling on nearby benches, the jocose groups munching their luncheon sandwiches on the grass, the neoclassical rotunda that was once a toll station at the entrance of Paris and now houses public toilets. On my bench, I ponder the meaning of the word sabbatical. It pleases me to think that beyond the obvious reference to an extended academic leave every seven years (with luck, more often) for the purpose of renewal and research, the word had more venerable meanings associated with the number seven: the seventh day of creation, when the Lord rested; the seventh day of the week, meant to be a day of repose, reverence, and spiritual meditation; the seventh year during which the land was to remain untilled and allowed to rest according to religious law, and all debts remitted . As for the word sabbath, it carried slightly perverse and therefore seductive undertones, referring as it does to demonic nocturnal revels. Somehow sabbatical had become for me a metaphor evoking the broader joys of life. In a sense, my academic existence began in a sabbatical mode. An entire year on a Fulbright Fellowship in Rome to finish my dissertation on Stendhal, the great lover of Italy. In that immediate post–World War II year, Rome was still awaking from nightmarish times recorded in neorealistic films such as Roberto Rossellini ’s Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves. Peace had returned, but Italians were profoundly divided as the new Cold War intensified. Riot squads in jeeps – the celere created by the minister of the interior, Mario Scelba, known as the ‘‘Iron Sicilian’’ – were protecting the U.S. Embassy and suppressing left-wing manifestations as well as neofascist rallies. But by 1950, Rome once again began to transcend contemporary history, and the newly wed Fulbright couple, in quest of historic perspectives and poetic sensations, were discovering the legendary hills of the eternal city, but also the more popular quarters, as Bettina and I followed the footsteps of Stendhal, using his Promenades dans Rome as guide and inspiration. Our walks often led us up to the church of San Pietro in Mon- T H E P E N S I V E C I T A D E L 6 9 R torio on the Janiculum. There was...

Brutal Vision: the Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema

Set in postwar Berlin and telling the story of Edmund Koehler – a damaged German child who, under the influence of Nazi ideology, commits first patricide and then suicide – Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1948) opens with a long documentary-like prologue. A series of shaky travelling shots from a vehicle in motion takes us through heaps of rubble and semi-destroyed buildings, revealing devastation on a massive, incomprehensible scale. These shots, which conjure ideas of tourism and urban sightseeing even as they subvert and problematize them, are primarily the index of a presence. They produce the effect of a ‘being there’ that is also a ‘going there’, thus highlighting both spectatorship and the recognition of a real timespace – the impact of which for the film's first audiences, national and especially foreign, we can only imagine. A caption introducing a comment on childhood innocence becoming endangered and destroyed by corrupt ideologies is followed by a voiceover, suggestive of the attitude of both witness and philanthropist: This film, shot in Berlin in the Summer of 1947, aims only to be an objective and true portrait of this large, almost totally destroyed city, where 3.5 million people live a terrible, desperate life almost without realising it. They live as if tragedy were natural not because of strength or faith, but for tiredness. This is not an accusation or even a defence of the German people. It is an objective witnessing of facts. Yet if anyone, after watching Edmund Koeler's [sic] story, feels that something needs to be done, that German children need to relearn to love life, then the efforts of those who made this film will be greatly rewarded.

Defining Italian Neorealism: A Compulsory Movement

Being one of the most influential cinematic movements in film history, Italian neorealism has not been very easy to define. Although one can easily recognize a neorealist film, not all neorealist films share the exact same characteristics. In this paper, four films that have often been labeled as neorealist will be discussed in light of their makers’ views on neorealism and the general characteristics of neorealism as a movement. These films are Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (1948), Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948) and Umberto D. (1952), and lastly Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954).

Resistance, Charity, and Rebirth in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City

With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City founded the movement known as “Italian Neo-Realism.” The film vividly presents the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics. Rossellini asserts that a Christian Europe can be reconstructed only on a foundation of charity rather than hate, vengeance, or even justified punishment for Nazi crimes. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance that Italians and Europeans can be reborn, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to “love your enemies.” European rebirth means the installation of a moral order that makes parenthood feasible and respectable. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece, I examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found.

“O Great God!” Humility and Camera Movement in Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis

“O Great God!” Humility and Camera Movement in Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis

Bellissima dir. by Luchino Visconti (review)

Reviewed by: Bellissima dir. by Luchino Visconti Peter Kravanja Bellissima. Luchino Visconti, dir. Starring Anna Magnani. Eureka!, 2007 (1951). 1 DVD + 32-page booklet. $49.98. Italian neorealism emerged with Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), Luchino Visconti's first feature film, and gained international recognition with Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) by Roberto Rossellini. Unlike Ossessione and Visconti's following film, La terra trema (1948), however, Bellissima (1951) is a comedy, and it marks a transition from neorealism to post-neorealism. The film belongs even more specifically to neorealism rosa (pink neorealism), a subgenre that (surprisingly) has its roots in the prewar, light comedies of the fascist period. Both types of films, despite their obvious political and aesthetic differences, shared a similar social message: one should maintain the status quo and forget about social mobility and the idea of an egalitarian society. That message, combined with the fact that pink-neorealist films developed the use of highly eroticized stars (in this case, Anna Magnani), meant that they were rather more successful than genuine neorealist films in creating a wide audience for Italian cinema. Visconti's changed approach reflects major changes within Italy. During the three years between the release of La terra trema and that of Bellissima, Italy had undergone significant political change that strongly affected the cultural policy behind the production of Bellissima; after the Christian Democrats won the 1948 elections, neorealist films pur sang, like all films with left-wing social agendas, lacked government support and were deemed very risky investments. Viewed in this light, Bellissima can be interpreted as an indirect, political response to this changed political environment, particularly with regard to its choice of subgenre. Hollywood's rapidly increasing domination posed another key problem for the Italian film industry as a whole, and given this wider context, Bellissima can also be read as a critique of cinema as an institution. Much of this social critique takes place at the narrative level. The film tells the story of Maddalena Cecconi, an untiring, working-class woman (Anna Magnani), and of her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli) and [End Page 419] their young daughter Maria (Tina Apicella). The family is poor and struggles to make ends meet, so when Maddalena hears that the film director Alessandro Blasetti (played by himself) is looking for the prettiest young girl in Rome to star in his new film, Maddalena takes Maria to Italy's dream factory Cinecittà to join the crowd of middle-class mothers and daughters energetically trying to get an audition. When Maria is chosen as a finalist, Maddalena sacrifices everything to train Maria for the audition. She pays for acting lessons, ballet classes, an expensive dress, a haircut, and a glamorous photograph, and she even hands a large sum of money to Alberto Annovazzi (Walter Chiari), a go-between who promises to bribe key people at the film studio but buys himself a scooter instead. Maddalena's desperation is a source of income for many, and although she knows very well that she is being taken advantage of, she seems to think that no sacrifice is too big if it might help to ensure a better future for her little girl. No sacrifice, that is, but one: Alberto longs to have an affair with Maddalena, but she keeps turning him down. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Still from Bellissima directed by Luchino Visconti (1951). Maddalena is blind, however, to the fact that her daughter has none of the requisite talents, and her blindness reveals the desperation of the poor. The scene in which Maria is obliged to take a ballet class is instructive in this respect. As it turns out, Maria is only five years old, whereas the casting call was aimed at girls between seven and eight. The age difference between Maria and the other girls is made obvious by the corresponding size difference, and her tiny figure becomes the subject of a heated discussion between Maddalena and the ballet teacher as well as a visual trope throughout the film, emphasizing the impossibility of Maddalena's ambitions. That impossibility is further highlighted by the contrast between Maddalena and the fashionably dressed, middle-class mothers (who...

My path to Italian cinema

Peter Bondanella is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Film Studies, and Italian at Indiana University. Among his publications are several studies of Federico Fellini, and Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (Continuum International, 1982 and two subsequent enlarged and revised editions in 1990 and 2001), The Films of Roberto Rossellini (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Umberto Eco and the Open Text (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and A History of Italian Cinema (Continuum International, 2009).

Tra cielo e vulcano: sui confini tematici e stilistici in Stromboli di Roberto Rossellini

This article is focused on a film by Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli (1949) whose title comes from the island, off the northwest coasts of Sicily, on which the film is set. Given the thematic relevance of borders in the post‐war drama of a foreign refugee who moves to the unknown island with a husband met through the barbed wire of the camp, the article analyzes to what extent this theme is rebounded in the unstable genre of the film. In Stromboli a coexistence of tropoi belonging to different traditions of melodrama can be spotted, tracing back to the theatrical origins of the genre, as detailed in Jean‐Marie Tommaseau´s recent study. But one must take into account, nevertheless, the documentary‐drive that inspires the film, linking it to Rossellini´s approach to the new unmapped reality of the Italian landscape, recently discussed by Angelo Restivo in his essay on Italian cinema during the economic boom. The interplay of these theoretical references in Stromboli can bring to the fore the theme of space and time borders as more relevant than the traditional critical filing of the film as a study of loneliness, together with the other four features made with actress Ingrid Bergman. The compounded analysis results in a melodramatic re‐vision of the film, that can entail the ending shift towards the holy and the sacred often dismissed as improper. The article comments on the film conveying melodrama into a field supposedly outside of its genre concerns.

Rossellini's Pictorial Histories

A survey of Roberto Rossellini's filmmaking career with particular emphasis on the continuities and differences between the World War II films of his early career and the later dramatization of an older scientific, religious, and political history.

Introduction

Portuguese Studies vol. 27 no. 1 (2011), 5–7© Modern Humanities Research Association 2011 Introduction Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke The Brazilian Ambassador in London, His Excellency Carlos Augusto SantosNeves , had the excellent idea of holding a ‘Gilberto Freyre week’ in November 2009, along the lines of an earlier ‘Guimarães Rosa week’. The event took place partly in the Embassy and partly in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London. It is scarcely necessary to remind readers of this journal of the central importance of Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) in twentieth-century Brazilian culture. He has a good claim to be regarded not only as a leading social thinker and historian but also as the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Brazil. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a cultural critic, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. Like Lewis Mumford, whose work he admired, he was a ‘generalist’ rather than a specialist. Freyre’scareer,whichwasrichincomplexityandcontroversies,canbedescribed as oscillating over the decades between ‘canonization’ and ‘excommunication’. His achievements have been assessed in very different ways, including praises and criticisms that often tend to simplify and ignore his many paradoxes and ambiguities. Freyre is best known as the author of Casa-grande e senzala (1933), a study of the patriarchal family in the colonial period, especially on the sugar plantations of the Northeast. This highly original contribution to social history helped Brazilians to define their identity by emphasizing the importance of both miscegenation and cultural mixing in their past. Casa-grande also enjoyed a popular success that few history books can match. Besides more than forty editions in Portuguese and translations into nine other languages, this study has been ‘translated’ into a comic book and a television mini-series, while two directors (one of them Roberto Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Freyre’s many books — two of which will be discussed in some detail below — include a pioneering study of environmental history (Nordeste, 1937); an unorthodox textbook of sociology (Sociologia, 1945), in which he suggested that the most important contributions to the subject had been produced by great novelists such as Proust; and a history of late nineteenth-century Brazil (Ordem e Progresso, 1959), based in part on the replies to a questionnaire he sent to a thousand Brazilians born between 1850 and 1900. Freyre’s contributions to social theory include the idea of ‘Lusotropicalism’ (discussed by Bethencourt below), arguing that the sixteenth-century Portuguese were unusually well fitted for the task of colonization, whether in Africa, Asia or Brazil, thanks to their unusual adaptability to different climates and cultures. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke 6 More relevant to today’s problems, however, are his ideas about miscegenation and hybridity. Whether or not we support quotas for ‘blacks’ in Brazilian universities, whether or not we think that ‘mixed-race’ should be or become an official category, Freyre remains a reference point in the debate. Looking beyond Brazil, in an age of racist revival and racist violence, it appears that the world still has something to learn from Gilberto Freyre’s ‘mixophilia’ and his encouragement of harmony and fraternity. The programme for the Gilberto Freyre week, appropriately enough in the case of homage to a ‘generalist’, drew on scholars from three different disciplines: history, literature and anthropology. It included three lectures, by Professor Jeffrey Needell, University of Florida; Professor Ricardo Benzaquen, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro: and Dr Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. Needell’s general survey of Freyre’s life and work, which serves as an introduction to the collection, stresses what he calls the ‘profoundly reactionary’ side of Freyre. By contrast, Pallares-Burke, focusing on a single book by Freyre, the important if neglected study Ingleses no Brasil, emphasizes its innovative features, while Benzaquen draws attention to Freyre’s literary art in an analysis of his collection of ghost stories, Assombrações do Recife Velho. In order to consider Freyre’s continuing relevance in the twenty-first century, a round table was devoted to the subject of cultural hybridity, a theme close to Freyre...

DVD Chronicle

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Desert Victory (Roy Boulting and David Macdonald, directors, 1943), Koch Vision; Open City (Roberto Rossellini, director, 1945), Image Entertainment; Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, director, 1946), in the Vittorio De Sica Collection Three, Dawoori Entertainment; The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, director, 1945), Warner Home Video; Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, director, 1947), Turner Home Entertainment; Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, director, 1947), Fox Home Video. In my last Chronicle I followed Graham Greene's lead to films that he reviewed in the 1930s and that still seem worth watching today. Here, I'll do the same with Greene's American counterpart, James Agee, who did his reviewing in the 1940s for The Nation and Time. Agee the film critic could be tersely dismissive when confronted with out-and-out trash. In a 1948 review for The Nation ("Midwinter Clearance"), he cleared one silly musical away simply by listing its title and adding four words: "You Were Meant for Me. That's what you think." For that matter, he could be terse when dealing with a flawed masterpiece like Odd Man Out (1947). Carol Reed's film could scarcely be better described than in Agee's summations "a series of passive elegiac tableaux," "uses allegory wrong end to." But the essential Agee was expansive, not terse. The Nation indulged him with a lot of column inches; his mind worked in a naturally allusive way ("as nihilistic as Céline," "as deeply humane as Dickens," he wrote of Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek); he was greatly in love with words and their effects. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is for Agee not just gay, but "inviolably, genuinely, and intelligently gay." The twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet is not just beautiful, but "rapturously beautiful" ("if I may resort to conservative statement," he added). Prose pours out of him, on occasion prose as finicking and alliterative as Henry James's (Lewis Allen's 1945 haunted house melodrama The Unseen "generates sporadic wincing qualms of excitement without ordering them into anything constant and cumulative") or, at other moments, as comically inventive as the orotundity of W. C. Fields, one of his onscreen heroes. Listen to Agee on Till the Clouds Roll By, for instance. This 1946 biopic about Jerome Kern is a little like sitting down to a soda-fountain de luxe atomic special of maple walnut on vanilla on burnt almond on strawberry on [End Page 108] butter pecan on coffee on raspberry sherbet on tutti frutti with hot fudge, butterscotch, marshmallow, filberts, pistachios, shredded pineapple, and rainbow sprills on top, go double on the whipped cream. Some of the nuts, it turns out, are a little stale, and wandering throughout the confection is a long bleached-golden hair, probably all right in its place but, here, just a little more than you can swallow. After this colossal simile the reviewer pulls himself together to find the single word that is unexpected but exactly right for Kern's music in the movie: "nacreous." Whether playing for laughs or writing in deadly seriousness, and whether an enthusiastic approver of some film or a diehard naysayer, Agee brings to his movie reviews the passionate eloquence which fills the pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his great documentary report (with Walker Evans photographs) on the lives of dirt-poor cotton sharecroppers at the end of the Depression. Bourbon-soaked eloquence, one is sometimes tempted to say about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: language toppling over itself or being heaped into gargantuan lists in the effort to be loving enough to those appallingly damaged families in north Alabama. Agee the film reviewer is more controlled than Agee the documentary artist, more aware of what language can and cannot do, and more conscious of ordinary readers' needs; he was of course a little older when he wrote the reviews. Eloquence in his film criticism is usually unforced, and arises from both attention to detail and an awareness of what the art of the cinema might actually be expected to accomplish. The creative imagination, he commented in one review, is "merely an intensification of good sense to the point...

Remapping the Neorealist Nation: Il cammino della speranza and the Rhetorics of the Road to Realism

Based on the hypothesis that realism in narrative cinema is the result of a set of rhetorical strategies that operate at the indexical, representational, communicative and social levels, and at the same time merging a poststructuralist and a cultural studies methodology, this essay compares three post-war films which share the ambition of embracing the entire peninsula: Roberto Rossellini's Paisà (1946), Pietro Francisci's Natale al Campo 119 (1948) and Piero Germi's Il cammino della speranza (1950). Arguing for postwar cinema's need to replace Fascist geopolitics with a novel mapping of the nation based on a realistic impulse, and proposing that road narratives promised the successful negotiation of realism and ideology, this article discusses the position of Il cammino della speranza in particular and examines its rhetorical strategies vis-à-vis those of Rossellini's canonical neorealism and of Francisci's popular cinema.

Italian Neorealist Cinema: an Aesthetic Approach

The mammoth size of this book is all the more striking due to the fact that it is, ultimately, a discussion of just three neorealist films, Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). These films, which form the core of the neorealist corpus, have been the subject of endless critical attention since their release, and continue to attract new work of all sorts, both within and outside Italy.1 Neorealist cinema has constituted for many years the foundational story of Italian cinema, to which critics inevitably, and at times obsessively, return. Identified many years ago by Steve Neale as ‘the very paradigm of art cinema’,2 the prestige of neorealism has been constructed partly through its moral weight in documenting the Nazi occupation, the Resistance and the reconstruction of Italy, partly through its success internationally, and partly through its critical idealization by André Bazin and, later, Gilles Deleuze.

Vittorio Mussolini, Hollywood and neorealism

In the 1930s, Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce's eldest son, did not dedicate himself to politics. Instead he choose to follow is passion for movies and he began a career as a producer that took him to Hollywood. After trying in vain to collaborate with Hollywood's major film studios, the Duce's son assumed the role of editor of the review Cinema, a publication that forged the post-war neorealism. Then, in 1939, he brought Jean Renoir to Italy to shoot the film Tosca. Finally, in 1941, Vittorio contributed to the formation of Roberto Rossellini producing his aviation film, Un pilota ritorna. Paradoxically, in the shadow of the Duce himself and of his son, there was development of a ‘space of freedom’ that allowed the subversive movement of neorealism to be born within the context of a totalitarian regime. This apparent contradiction was the product of the totalitarian capacity of fascism to establish a hegemonic control over culture to encourage the participation of a heterogeneous group of intellectuals.

Genealogy ofThe Golden Coach

Why was it that the first film Jean Renoir made in Europe after WWII – a French-Italian co-production – was shot in Italy and not in France? We think of The Golden Coach as director Jean Renoir’s film, but an interview with the film’s producer, Prince Francesco Alliata, coordinated with documents from Renoir’s archives at UCLA and in Paris, and with French bank records for international co-productions, opens new vistas. The essay examines the involvement of Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani and Luchino Visconti; the creative implementation of regulations for French-Italian co-productions in the post-WWII era; the complications of mounting a Technicolor production far from the nearest Technicolor lab; and the visionary financial planning that kept the production financially viable by making two sure-fire swashbucklers with the same sets and crew.