ITALY

The middle section of Antonioni's trilogy on bourgeois alienation, La Notte covers twenty-four hours in the breakdown of a 'typical' middle class marriage. The husband (Mastroianni) is a novelist with a block, spineless, out of touch with his own instincts; the wife (Moreau) is a bored socialite who understands her own predicament but doesn't know how to get past it. Scene after scene is introduced solely to make laboured points about their emotional/ social/philosophical problems; Antonioni's intimations of a broader political context are startlingly shallow. It's impossible to discern the relevance of this kind of film-making, which is doubtless why nobody (including Antonioni) practises it any more.

Italian legend with paparazzis.

Sources the film's title to Emily Dickinson's poem "Good Morning Midnight."

Good morning midnight
I'm coming home
Day got tired of me
How could I of him?

Vanessa Redgrave - Jane
Sarah Miles - Patricia
Jane Birkin - The Blonde
John Castle - Bill
Peter Bowles - Ron Plot Synopsis
Leading Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, attempted to capture London during the swinging sixties in his first British film, Blow-Up. The central character, a young, rich, petulant photographer played by David Hemmings, was himself very much a symbol of the period, and is established at the start, having slept in a dosshouse so that he can gain photo-reportage material for a book, driving away in a Rolls Royce. While photographing in a London park he sees a man and a woman embracing. The woman runs over to stop him taking pictures but he returns to his studio. The woman appears, demanding the negatives, and he gives her a substitute roll. On developing his picture he is startled to find what appears to be a man with a gun in the bushes and, in a later shot, a body. Rushing back to the park in the middle of the night he finds the body, but on his return to the studio all his pictures have disappeared. When he returns to the park in the morning the body, too, has gone.

It all might never have happened. And to emphasise the thinness of the gulf between illusion and reality the photographer, leaving the park, takes part with some students in an imaginary tennis match, without a ball or racquet, yet with the sounds of a game being heard on the soundtrack. It is a study of the fallibility of modern communication, the obscuring of truth by modern iconography. The world beyond the trendy fashion photographer's ambience ceases to have permanence or meaning.

As an attempt at a thriller style, the film was less successful than it might have been, lacking the precise cutting of a Hitchcock or the unambiguous symbolism of a Lang. But Antonioni attempted merely to work within the genre, finding it a convenient means of establishing his point. David Hemmings succeeded in a long and difficult role, as the photographer, but for Vanessa Redgrave the task of providing a semblance of plausibility for the actions of the woman proved beyond her capabilities. Blow-Up, while an interesting work and a fine debut in an alien tongue, is by no means the most successful of Antonioni's works.

http://library.thinkquest.org/28490/data/inglese/film/terratrema.htm

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5956452918854271460

http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/visconti/

http://www.luchinovisconti.net/

Rocco and His Brothers chronicles the life of the Parondi family from the perspective of the five brothers as they seek a better life in the industrial city of Milan: Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), Simone (Renato Salvatoi), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), a proud, possessive widow, has decided to uproot her family from the rural village of Lucania in Southern Italy to spare her children from the fruitless toil of the family farm that consumed her husband's life. The eldest son, Vincenzo, has been sent ahead in order to arrange housing and employment for the older children, but he has been distracted from his familial obligations by his developing relationship with the beautiful Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), whose family has hospitably provided him with food and lodging. The Parondi family unexpectedly arrives at Vincenzo and Ginetta's engagement party, and Rosaria quickly antagonizes Ginetta's family by presumptuously invoking Vincenzo' s duties to the Parondi family over Ginetta's happiness. Driven away from Ginetta's family home, a friend advises Vincenzo to follow in the footsteps of other Southern migrants: to rent a room for the family until the money runs out, and allow themselves to be evicted in order to qualify for council housing. Unable to find proper employment, the older brothers accept odd jobs to make ends meet. Simone is recruited by a renowned boxing trainer who believes that he demonstrates potential as a prize fighter, and finds early success in the boxing ring. However, his focus is tested when he meets wanton, emotionally unavailable woman named Nadia (Annie Girardot), and becomes obsessed with her. Rocco finds work in a laundromat, where his shyness and gentle demeanor has endeared him to the proprietress. However, his employment is jeopardized when Simone exploits Rocco's trustworthiness in order to steal from the proprietress and impress Nadia. Ciro resumes his studies in order to become an auto mechanic, and has isolated himself from the affairs of his brothers. Despite the Parondi family's adjustment to their new life in the city, Rocco continues to hold out hope of someday returning to their beloved village. However, as Simone's decadent and self-destructive lifestyle continues to erode the family's happiness and unity, Rocco's idealistic dream proves to be increasingly distant.

Luchino Visconti provides a visually adept, insightful, and harshly realistic social commentary in Rocco and His Brothers. Using perspective shifts among members of the Parondi family, Visconti symbolizes the passing of the elusive, unattainable dream: Rosaria's wish for a reunited family; Vincenzo's struggle to distance himself from his manipulative mother; Simone's continued attempts to reconcile with the inaccessible Nadia; Rocco's dreams of returning to Lucania; Ciro's desire to assimilate with the modern, industrialized culture of Milan. Inevitably, the personal pursuit of dreams proves to be the unraveling of the family's unity, as individual needs conflict with familial responsibility. As the saintly Rocco misguidedly sacrifices his own happiness to save the undisciplined Simone, he finds himself sinking further into moral complicity and unredeemable guilt. The final scene shows young Luca visiting Ciro at the assembly plant. It is a realization of his own hopes apart from his mother's wishes - a resigned acceptance that the Parondi dream and bond of family are forever lost.

http://library.thinkquest.org/28490/data/inglese/film/ossessione.htm

http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Ve-Y/Visconti-Luchino.html

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/18/visconti.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/28490/data/inglese/film/senso.htm

http://library.thinkquest.org/28490/data/inglese/film/bellissima.htm

http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/?p=230

Writer-director Emanuele Crialese (Respiro (2002), Once We Were Strangers (1997)) sets his tale of immigrants' dreams in Sicily at the beginning of the 20th century - the (at times brutal) immigrant experience is portrayed, stretching from Salvatore's dirt-poor Sicilian hamlet to Ellis Island, the 'Golden Door' to the United States.

Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato), an illiterate and very poor widower-farmer, believes the pictures he has seen, depicting America as the land of milk and honey, where money grows on trees and fruits/vegetables/animals grow to an enormous size.

Salvatore sells his land, his home and his livestock and sets off for America with his two sons (one a deaf mute), daughters (who were locked into arranged marriages) and his cantankerous old mother.

During the shenanigans and corruption of the boarding process (with a four-week voyage in steerage ahead of them), Salvatore meets Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a mysterious Englishwoman who seems incongruous among the Italian bumpkins.

Once on-board ship, the women and men are split up and forced to sleep head to toe in iron cots, as the rusting, dangerous hulk of a ship rolls makes its slow, painful progress towards New York and whatever dreams may come...

Though it's clear that Nuovomondo was shot on a limited budget, Crialese's skillful direction, coupled with clever cinematography from Agnès Godard, convey the immigrant ordeal in often harrowing, disturbing detail, but lifted by the sense of hope that is the voyagers' only solace - as in the key scene where Salvatore describes the towering skyscrapers of New York to his awe-struck fellow travellers.

The only false note is sounded in the surreal 'visions' experienced by Salvatore as he dreams of America - an approach that seems distinctly at odds with the gritty realism that is to follow. Nevertheless, a moving and enjoyable look at the lengths people are/were prepared to go to in order to follow their dreams.

One of BB.'s best works. Quite long.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,,398504,00.html

Eating, eating, eating. Then dying.

Normally, comparing a film to a television program's intended as a slight, a knock against a film that didn't have the sweep and scope you'd expect to witness on the big screen, but when I compare director Matteo Garrone's Gomorra to The Wire, I hope you'll recognize I mean it as a compliment. Set in the provinces around Naples, where the crime organization known as the Camorra is not parallel to the everyday workings of society but instead is the everyday workings of society, Gomorra's a sweeping, stirring film that has the shoot-and-loot tension of the best crime cinema but also has the scope and serious intent of great drama.

Based on the novel by Roberto Saviano, Gomorra follows five separate stories through the slums and streets in the provinces near Naples. Don Ciro is the local clan bagman, dispensing payouts to families affiliated with the clan. He's a civilized criminal, and the uncivilized times are beginning to wear on him. Marco and Ciro are young, dumb and eager to be independent criminals, heads full of dreams of glory and quotes from Scarface. Roberto finds a patronage position assisting Franco in toxic waste disposal, a lucrative business for the Camorra, especially as it involves poisoning the province's wide-open spaces and passing the savings on to their customers. Totò is 13, and eager to take part in the community and opportunities offered by low-level drug dealing work. Pasquale works as a tailor, helping Camorra-linked businesses make couture knockoffs, and he's offered an opportunity that may leave him set for life or marked for death.


Director Garrone (The Embalmer, First Love) manages to put the camera to work in a way that feels both observational and artful; some of the film's silences and spaces evoke the classic films of Antonioni, while some more surreal moments bring to mind the playful perversity of Fellini. (A scene where Marco and Ciro wander through a wetlands marsh clad in just their underwear trying out a stolen cache of high-powered firearms is beautiful, goofy and terrifying all at once, for example.) And while Gomorrah offers shootings and suspense, it also offers a grim view of modern European life, demonstrating the logical-yet-illogical extension of free-market capitalism from mergers and policy to murders and poisoning. Franco asks Roberto "Do you know how many workers I've helped by saving their companies money?" The Camorra isn't the alternative to the way things are; the Camorra is the way things are.

Garrone works with a cast that includes professionals and new faces, and has the urban rubble of modern Italy as his backdrop. Much of the film revolves around a housing development that's almost another character in the film -- huge and sprawling, vital and ruined. But there are real human moments from the characters as well, like when Pasquale sincerely instructs an apprentice knockoffs tailor that the work must be done "with love and feeling," or Don Ciro's confusion at the way the world is changing around him and the old ways are pushed aside by greed and violence.

Favors and intimidation; threats and excuses; this, in Gomorra, is how the world works, and you'd be a fool to argue with it. Gomorra has plenty of virtues to help recommend its broad-canvas portrait of vice; it's vulgar and vital, human and horrifying, and you sincerely care about what happens to these people and you recognize that you're getting a glimpse into a very specific part of the world while also witnessing a series of stories that could be playing out almost anywhere in the modern world. It's hard to imagine Gomorra attracting an audience on American art-house screens -- where "Foreign Cinema" mostly means fun and frivolity among the well-to-do for an older, well-to-do audience -- but moviegoers who aren't afraid of the rough, real raw stuff in modern moviemaking should seek out Gomorra's bleak beauty and cruel clarity by any means necessary.

one of the greatests of Neo Realism.

You just know you're in for a weird ride with any movie opening up with Gerard Depardieu being consensually raped by a militant feminist theatrical troupe led by Italian cinema starlets Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Autopsy) and Stefania Casini (Suspiria, Andy Warhol's Dracula). Sure enough, this is one hour and a half guaranteed to leave most viewers speechless, either in awe or horror.

The Italian cinema has lost one of its most original artists, one of its most personal authors (...) No one was more demanding nor more allegorical than he in showing the state of crisis of contemporary man.
Gilles Jacob, Artistic Director of the Cannes Film Festival, upon Ferreri's death.

2nd one from Italy. Marie Schneider-Jack Nicholson-Michelangelo Antonioni-1975.

Its final, famed seven-minute shot remains a delight to behold.

2 masterpieces from Italy. Maria Schneider-Marlon Brando-Bernardo Bertolucci-1972.

"eventual monstrous obesity seemed a clear sign of his hatred for Hollywood," as Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the best of the Brando obituaries.