The Way We Were: Italian Classics

by Clarissa Clo, SDSU,Program Director SDIFF

During the months of March and April the San Diego Italian Film Festival is pleased to present a new Classics series featuring four films by some of Italy’s most representative directors: Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale Della Rovere (1959), Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto (1961), Pietro Germi’s Sedotta e abbandonata (1964), and Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). These films stage a broad spectrum of issues and concerns that characterized postwar Italy while they also introduce the audience to the peculiar cinematic styles and individual sensibilities of the single directors feature.

Il Generale della Rovere

With Il Generale della Rovere, Roberto Rossellini returned to the themes of Nazi occupation and Italian Resistance during WWII that he had treated in his war trilogy of a decade earlier with Roma Città Aperta (Open City 1945), Pasià (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1947), recently released by Criterion Collection. Despite the acclaim for Open City, which depicted the resilience of the Italian population and the partisans’ resistance in the face of a cruel and inhuman enemy, none of the other films the director made in the subsequent years enjoyed much public success. Rossellini was interested in experimenting with the cinematic medium and with the newly emerging television, an interest that brought him as far as India, and had distanced himself considerably from his earlier themes.

When he first was offered to make Il Generale della Rovere, based on a story by writer and journalist Indro Montanelli who drew it from real experience, he was initially not enthusiastic. His attraction to the project grew, when he started to consider the casting for the film and could not stop thinking of Vittorio De Sica for the role of Bardone/Grimaldi, a swindler who loves gambling too much and pretends to be a Colonel in order to ingratiate people. Also known as one of the fathers of Neorealism, having directed films of the caliber of Ladri di biciclette (1948), Miracolo a Milano (1950), and the infamous Umberto D. (1951) condemned by the then Minister of Culture, “Il Divo” Giulio Andreotti, for “slandering Italy abroad,” De Sica seemed perfect for the part. So much so that many of his fictional character’s traits were, in fact, autobiographical. An avid gambler himself, De Sica had the nonchalant attitude and poker face to play the lead role. It did not hurt that Rossellini and De Sica were friends and knew each other well. The result was very well received in Italy and abroad, also winning the Leone d’oro at the Venice film festival and an Oscar nomination.

Despite the commonalities of themes, however, Il Generale della Rovere is not Open City. Rossellini is considered a “magician of the real” for the way he makes his films seem so realistic, almost documentary-like. War-torn Rome offered the ideal set for such an endeavor, but in the late 1950s Italy had been reconstructed forcing the director to shoot all scenes set in Genoa and Milan in the studios of Cinecittà in Rome. Moreover, the springtime that was supposed to ensue from the ashes of the Resistance struggle, with a newly founded Italian Republic, did not quite materialize. Fourteen years later, Rossellini portrayed characters that were far more ambiguous and morally challenged on both side, instead of the pure good and pure evil of his earlier film. Life indeed was more complex, but the beauty of this film is that of showing how even flawed individuals can rise to the occasion when circumstances dictate it, so that when forced by the German police to pass as Generale della Rovere, to spy on partisans in the San Vittore prison in Milan, De Sica’s character faces tough but ultimately redeeming choices.

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Il posto

With Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto, the second film in our series, we remain in Milan, where Il Generale della Rovere ends. Il posto, however, opens at the outskirts of the city, where the protagonist, Domenico lives with his family, in a rural house that is still in the countryside but that we sense will soon be eaten up by the inexorable urban development of Italy’s economic boom. Il posto, though, refers not so much to a place, as to a position, a job, the in/famous “posto fisso,” or secure “job for life.” Young Domenico is headed to the city center to participate in a job selection on the part of a giant corporation with few openings available. Olmi is skilled at following his character through the labyrinthine meanders of the company with its long and anonymous corridors, and at observing the seeming senseless tasks that the candidates are required to perform, a foreshadowing of the repetitive years that lie ahead for the lucky ones who will be hired. The director’s attention to details of sight and sound, and to the movement or stillness of the environment also comes from his autobiographical experience as an industrial director. Indeed, Olmi began his career, like so many other Italian filmmakers, as a documentarian. In the 1950s he worked for Edisonvolta, a major electric corporation, as director of its on-site theatre company. It was Olmi himself to recommend to Edisonvolta that they acquire film production equipment to document their work. Il posto was shot in the real location of the company’s headquarters during the weekend, using a cast of non-professional actors. Needless to say the company had second thoughts about the film and its portrayal of the work environment once they got to see it.

In Il posto, Olmi poetically captures the epochal changes that Italy was undergoing in the early 1960s, from a mainly agrarian country, to an industrial one. As Domenico observes in wonderment the attractions of the city, its shopping windows, cafes and dance halls, he also has the time to fall in love with a co-worker – played by Olmi’s wife – during the span of a brief encounter. While Olmi details the mechanical and tedious tasks associated with a job in a giant corporation, he also pointed out that life, and not simply work, was really all conducted inside the industry, including socializing, love, entertainment, like in a big extended family. In capturing the fragments of Domenico’s job-hunting experience, Olmi is never condescending nor his cinematic style assumes that this will be the protagonist’s fate forever. Rather, the subtle gaze of Domenico, his careful observation of his co-workers and of the environment, not only testify to a veritable “poetry of life” and attention to detail, but also imply that more may be in store for him. Olmi shows us that far from being dull, ordinary lives are in many ways extraordinary. It is no wonder that his black-and-white photography was so influential on other directors, including Martin Scorsese, who quotes Il posto indirectly in Raging Bull.

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Sedotta e abbandonata

Preoccupations with the fast-paced development brought about by progress and modernity in the Italy of the postwar years were shared by many directors. While Olmi used an understated realist style, Germi adopted a baroque, purposefully excessive and hyperbolic form. In his commedie all’italiana, a genre he in many ways contributed to create along with Dino Risi, Pietro Germi chose to focus his attention particularly on moral and sexual customs. After the success of Divorzio all’italiana in 1961, Germi, born in Genova, returned to Sicily, where he had also shot his earlier, neorealist-inspired films like In nome della legge (1949) and Il cammino della speranza (1951), to make Sedotta e abbandonata in 1964. Whereas in Divorzio all’italiana, Germi exposed the absurdity of the code of honor, devised by a patriarchal society and sanctioned by the Italian penal code to control women’s sexuality, from the point of view of the inept Don Ferdinando Cefalù, played by an excellent Marcello Mastroianni, in Sedotta e abbandonata, he chose to focus primarily on the plight of the female main character, Agnese, played by a beautiful Stefania Sandrelli. In this film Agnese is violated by his sister’s fiancé, Peppino, who then refuses to marry her because she is no longer a virgin. The film exposes the double standard of a society founded on male privilege, but it does so Italian-style, with plenty of humor, perverse twists and turns and satirical overtones. When after many tribulations Agnese’s father, played by the little known Saro Urzì, winner for best male actor at Cannes, succeeds in convincing Peppino to consent to marry Agnese, it is the young woman herself who stubbornly refuses her rapist with means of her own. The film makes use of all sorts of cinematic tricks to accentuates the hypocrisy and bitter comedy, from the use zoom, perfected by Germi to emphasize the grotesque physicality of the characters, to the acceleration of the action and the manipulation of the music score. Germi’s parody of the Italian honor code becomes an effective way to use laughter to criticize unjust sexual customs and conducts that have no logical explanation except the preservation of male privilege.

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Amarcord

Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) provides the perfect segue and apt closure for this series, for his entire body of work, albeit always on the dangerous verge of misogyny, is also a constant engagement with the follies and flaws of Italian masculinities. In this provocative film, whose title means “I remember” in Fellini’s native Romagnolo dialect, which features prominently in it, the director returns to memories of his childhood during Fascist times in his birthplace, the provincial town of Rimini, on the Adriatic coast, although the entire film was shot, as usual for him, in Cinecittà. Here we get to know some of the most memorable female characters of Fellinian creation, deformed according to their most prominent physical traits: Gradisca and her behind and the tobacconist and her breasts. Written in collaboration with Tonino Guerra, Amarcord, which won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 1975, is the coming of age tale of Titta and his pals who never want to grow up, a theme Fellini had dealt with in I Vitelloni (1953) as well, but that can also be extended to 8½ (1963). The director presents a series of vignettes acting like circus’s numbers, as a critic put it, enveloped in the ever-present local fog (of memory?) capturing social life and rituals in the province: the school, the family with its set of odd members, the passeggiata along the town’s main street, the gymnastic exercises and the megalomaniac fascist parades for the arrival of Il duce, the dream-like sequences and orientalist visions in the Grand Hotel and finally the appearance of the transatlantic liner Rex, all satirized to the point of the grotesque. Nostalgia is not the mood here, rather Fellini affectionately chastises the complacency of a population that allowed the Fascist regime to stay in place for so long and does not spare gruesome anecdotes of its presence in the everyday life of the town and its people.

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All films in this series display a vast array of stylistic techniques and thematic choices on the part of very different Italian filmmakers. Despite the diversity of approach, however, these four films also were in their times, and remain today, an invitation to audiences in Italy and worldwide to reflect on individual and group responsibility in the making and shaping of one’s community.