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Italian directors start out like Rossellini and
end up as Visconti. Even Rossellini and Visconti did. Both
began in the so-called neo-realist mode and ended up doing
lavish historical dramas. In this, they also reflect the
lineage of Italian directors to follow. Pasolini, who was also
gay, learned a great deal from both ends of Visconti's career,
and in turn his disciple, Bernardo Bertolucci, whose films are
definitely bi, has also followed suit.
But what is it
to say that someone began as a neo-realist? What was, and
where was, the "old" realism that Italian films of the war and
post-war year's are the "neo" versions of? The plays of Ibsen,
perhaps, dating back to the 1800s?
It's perplexing,
because there was never really much of a "realist" movement in
cinema to begin with. Also, neo-realism is as hard to define
as film noir. Unlike some of the genres developed in
America, such as the western, neo-realism was a national
movement with a tight focus and a political bent, a "genre"
that defined recent events for people during tumultuous times.
A cross between a newsreel and an improv, a neo-realist film
broadcast bulletins about the state of Italian life and
culture.
That being said, it's hard to fine a pure
neo-realist film, outside of Rossellini's two most famous
examples, Rome, Open City and Paisan. Like last
week's newspaper, they were designed to be consumed and then
thrown away rapidly. That many of the early neo-realist films
have lasted is testimony to the staying power of film as an
art form rather than the meaning of the neo-realist films
themselves. Some of the most famous so-called neo-realist
films, such as De Sica's Bicycle Thief, are about as
realistic as a Charles Busch play.
Like
Rossellini,
Visconti's first two films?I>Ossessione and La Terra
Trema梐re seemingly realistic accounts of passion and
political protest amid the working classes. But both films,
now released on DVD in the U.S. by Image Entertainment, defy
the vision of neo-realism many of us have in our
heads.
At first it comes as a surprise that Visconti
worked under Jean Renoir for many years. Like Satyajit Ray,
who also worked for Renoir, Visconti later went on to define a
national cinema. But Renoir's realistic method, which was to
influence both neo-realism and the French new wave, was still
rooted in theatrical melodrama and comedy. And in fact,
Ossessione, Visconti's first feature, is on the surface
a melodrama. As is well known, it is based on James M. Cain's
crime thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice, which
has been filmed many times, once in France in 1939 by Pierre
Chenal as Le Dernier Tournant, twice in Hollywood,
first by Tay Garnett in 1946, then with Jessica Lange and Jack
Nicholson years later. There is even a Hungarian version in
1998 (and by the way many of Polanski's films seem to be
unofficial remakes or variations on Postman).
Visconti's film is famously an unauthorized adaptation, and
came between the French version and Garnett's. Various
censorship and political problems plagued the film in its
homeland, and like many masterpieces its restoration history
is convoluted. Visconti's version didn't enjoy release in
American until 1976. (Another unofficial variation may be
Siberian Lady Macbeth.)
The film sure starts
like something out of neo-realism. Yet also like something out
of Fellini. There are long dusty roads and decrepit trucks
used for multiple purposes, hustlers doing odd shows in town
squares, and drifters and sweat and men who are used to
traveling.
The story is the same as in all the other
versions. A drifter named Gino (Massimo Girotti) ends up in a
small way station, a lonely diner and gas station in the
middle of nowhere. It is run by an unnamed stolid older man
(Juan de Landa) and his wife Giovanna (Clara Calamai), who in
the past may have been a prostitute. Gino stays on, has an
affair, runs away with another fellow (in a barely disguised
gay subplot that in fact has tangible links to Cain's work),
participates in the murder of the husband and so
on.
But though the film begins in a "neo-realist" mode,
it becomes more phantasmagoric or stylish as it progresses.
While staying much more "realistic" than the Hollywood
versions, it also presents the characters less reprehensibly.
And like the French new wave films to follow, the film
embraces, but not without alteration, film noir and its
sources in American popular literature.
Visconti's
second feature, released in Italy in 1947, shows roots that go
back even further in cinema history, to Robert Flaherty and
Sergei Eisenstein. La Terra Trema began as a
prospective first panel in a triptych on the class struggle,
not unlike Orson Welles's unfinished It's All True or
Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico. It still bears the
subtitle "Episode of the Sea," to match the other "episodes."
Like Man of Aran, it is about the struggle against
nature and the sea, but Visconti brings a Marxist
interpretation of the struggle, setting it in the context of
who owns the ships the men work on (much like, to a lesser
degree, the filmed version of The Shipping News does).
Like Eisenstein and Welles's films, Trema is about the
people, ordinary men (played by non-professionals) in a story
that is both narrated like a documentary and beautifully
photographed, like an art film.
La Terra Trema
is about the Valastro family, long time fishermen in an
isolated Sicilian village called Acitrezza. 'Ntoni Valastro
wants to go into business for himself, and mortgages the
beloved family house to buy their own boat. Unfortunately,
like something out of a Hemmingway novel, a storm destroys
their boat; their budding romances are wrecked, and they are
reduced to crawling back to the same merchants they were
trying to get away from in the first place.
Though the
film has been touted by some critics as inherently optimistic,
to the average viewer it may well come across as one of the
most depressing, hopeless films ever made. It's not subtle. In
the end, 'Ntoni speaks almost right to the camera, giving the
films message of collective action, in dialog directly
recorded, unusual in Italian films of any era. Like Visconti's
later Rocco and His Brothers, Trema is about the
destruction of a family in the face of hardening economic and
social pressure, where an idealized past or wish for the
future clashes with the realities of the new Italy. Still, it
is one of the great films of national cinema, and for some
time has deserved careful, and responsible release on Region 1
DVD.