After Neorealism

After Neorealism:
Italian Filmmakers and Their Films;
Essays and Interviews

Edited by

Bert Cardullo
After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews, Edited by Bert Cardullo

This book first published 2009

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2009 by Bert Cardullo and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-0358-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0358-8

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Bert Cardullo

Chapter One................................................................................................. 9
Reality, Romanticism, Eroticism . . . and the Cinema:
An Interview with Luchino Visconti
Bert Cardullo

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25

The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni
Bert Cardullo

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35

Comedy Italian Style: An Interview with Mario Monicelli
Donato Totaro

Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 51
More from Less: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni
Bert Cardullo

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65

The Cinema as Heresy, or the Passion of Pasolini:
An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini
Oswald Stack

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 91

Neorealist Art vs. Operatic Acting in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma
Bert Cardullo

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 101

Reflecting Reality—and Mystery: An Interview with Ermanno Olmi
Bert Cardullo

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 115

Married to the Job: Olmi’s Il Posto and I Fidanzati
Bert Cardullo
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 125

Beyond Neorealism, or Preserving a Cinema of Social Conscience:
An Interview with Gianni Amelio
The Editors of Cineaste

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 145

Forbidden Games: Amelio’s Stolen Children and Lamerica
Bert Cardullo

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 155

Comedy, Communism, and Pastry:
An Interview with Nanni Moretti
The Editors of Cineaste

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 167

Epiphanies: Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended and The Son’s Room
Bert Cardullo

Filmographies .......................................................................................... 179

Bibliographies.......................................................................................... 185

Index........................................................................................................ 191
 INTRODUCTION

BERT CARDULLO

The term “neorealism” was first applied by the critic Antonio

Pietrangeli to Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), and the style came to
fruition in the mid-to-late forties in such films of Roberto Rossellini,
Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica as Rome, Open City (1945), Shoeshine
(1946), Paisan (1947), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and The Earth Trembles
(1948). These pictures reacted not only against the banality that had long
been the dominant mode of Italian cinema, but also against prevailing
socio-economic conditions in Italy. With minimal resources, the
neorealist filmmakers worked in real locations using local people as well
as professional actors; they improvised their scripts, as need be, on site;
and their films conveyed a powerful sense of the plight of ordinary
individuals oppressed by political circumstances beyond their control.
Thus Italian neorealism was the first postwar cinema to liberate
filmmaking from the artificial confines of the studio and, by extension,
from the Hollywood-originated studio system. But neorealism was the
expression of an entire moral or ethical philosophy, as well, and not
simply just another new cinematic style.
Still, the post-World War II birth or creation of neorealism was
anything but a collective theoretical enterprise—the origins of Italian
neorealist cinema were far more complex than that. Generally stated, its
roots were political, in that neorealism reacted ideologically to the control
and censorship of the prewar cinema; aesthetic, for the intuitive,
imaginative response of neorealist directors coincided with the rise or
resurgence of realism in Italian literature, particularly the novels of Italo
Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, and Vasco
Pratolini (a realism that can be traced to the veristic style first cultivated in
the Italian cinema between 1913 and 1916, when films inspired by the
writings of Giovanni Verga and others dealt with human problems as well
as social themes in natural settings); and economic, in that this new
realism posed basic solutions to the lack of production funds, of
functioning studios, and of working equipment.
2 Introduction

Indeed, what is sometimes overlooked in the growth of the neorealist

movement in Italy is the fact that some of its most admired aspects sprang
from the dictates of postwar adversity: a shortage of money made shooting
in real locations an imperative choice over the use of expensive studio
sets; and against such locations any introduction of the phony or the fake
would appear glaringly obvious, whether in the appearance of the actors or
the style of the acting. It must have been paradoxically exhilarating for
neorealist filmmakers to be able to stare unflinchingly at the tragic
spectacle of a society in shambles, its values utterly shattered, after years
of making nice little movies approved by the powers that were within the
walls of Cinecittà.
In fact, it was the Fascists who, in 1937, opened Cinecittà, the largest
and best-equipped movie studio in all of Europe. Like the German Nazis
and the Russian Communists, the Italian Fascists realized the power of
cinema as a medium of propaganda, and when they came to power, they
took over the film industry. Although this meant that those who opposed
Fascism could not make movies and that foreign pictures were censored,
the Fascists helped to establish the essential requirements for a flourishing
postwar film industry. They even founded (in 1935) a film school, the
Centro Sperimentale in Rome, which was headed by Luigi Chiarini and
taught all aspects of movie production. Many important neorealist
directors attended this school, including Rossellini, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Luigi Zampa, Pietro Germi, and Giuseppe De Santis (but not
De Sica); it also produced cameramen, editors, and technicians. Moreover,
Chiarini was allowed to publish Bianco e Nero (Black and White), the film
journal that later became the official voice of neorealism. Once Mussolini
fell from power, then, the stage was set for the development of a strong
left-wing cinema.
The Axis defeat happened to transform the Italian film industry into a
close approximation of the ideal market of classical economists: a
multitude of small producers engaged in fierce competition. There were no
clearly dominant firms among Italian movie producers, and in fact the
Italian film industry as a whole exhibited considerable weakness. The very
atomization and weakness of a privately-owned and profit-oriented
motion-picture industry, however, led to a de facto tolerance toward the
left-wing ideology of neorealism. In addition, the political climate of
postwar Italy was favorable to the rise of cinematic neorealism, since this
artistic movement was initially a product of the spirit of resistance fostered
by the Partisan movement. The presence of Nenni Socialists (Pietro Nenni
was Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Communists in the Italian
government from 1945 to 1947 contributed to the governmental tolerance
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 3

of neorealism’s left-wing ideology, as did the absence of censorship

during the period from 1945 to 1949.
Rossellini’s Rome, Open City became the landmark film in the
promulgation of neorealist ideology. It so completely reflected the moral
and psychological atmosphere of its historical moment that this picture
alerted both the public and the critics—on the international level
(including the United States) as well as the national one—to a new
direction in Italian cinema. Furthermore, the conditions of this picture’s
production (relatively little shooting in the studio, film stock bought on the
black market and developed without the typical viewing of daily rushes,
post-synchronization of sound to avoid laboratory costs, limited financial
backing) did much to create many of the myths surrounding neorealism.
With a daring combination of styles and tones—from the use of
documentary footage to the deployment of the most blatant melodrama,
from the deployment of comic relief to the depiction of the most tragic
human events—Rossellini almost effortlessly captured forever the tension
and drama of the Italian experience during the German occupation and the
Partisan struggle against the Nazi invasion.
If, practically speaking, Rossellini at once introduced Italian cinematic
neorealism to the world, De Sica’s collaborator Cesare Zavattini—with
whom he forged one of the most fruitful writer-director partnerships in the
history of cinema—eventually became the theoretical spokesman for the
neorealists. By his definition, neorealism does not concern itself with
superficial themes and synthetic forms; in his famous manifesto “Some
Ideas on the Cinema” (1952), Zavattini declared that the camera has a
“hunger for reality,” and that the invention of plots to make reality
palatable or spectacular is a flight from the historical richness as well as
the political importance of actual, everyday life.
Although inconsistently or irregularly observed, the basic tenets of this
new realism were threefold: to portray real or everyday people (using non-
professional actors) in actual settings; to examine socially significant
themes (the genuine problems of living); and to promote, not the arbitrary
manipulation of events, but instead the organic development of situations
(i.e., the real flow of life, in which complications are seldom resolved by
coincidence, contrivance, or miracle). These tenets were clearly opposed
to the prewar cinematic style that used polished actors on studio sets,
conventional and even fatuous themes, and artificial, gratuitously resolved
plots—the very style, of course, that De Sica himself had employed in the
first four pictures he made, from 1940 to 1942 (Red Roses [1940],
Maddalena, Zero for Conduct [1941], Teresa Venerdì [1941], and A
Garibaldian in the Convent [1942]).
4 Introduction

Unfortunately, this was the cinematic style that the Italian public
continued to demand after the war, despite the fact that during it such
precursors of neorealism as Visconti’s Ossessione and De Sica’s own fifth
film, The Children Are Watching Us (1943), had offered a serious
alternative. Indeed, it was as early as 1942, when Ossessione and The
Children Are Watching Us were either being made or released, that the
idea of the cinema was being transformed in Italy. Around the same time,
Gianni Franciolini’s Headlights in the Fog (1941) was portraying
infidelity among truck drivers and seamstresses, while Alessandro
Blasetti’s Four Steps in the Clouds (1942) was being praised for its return
to realism in a warm-hearted story of peasant life shot in natural settings.
Influenced by French cinematic realism as well as by prevailing Italian
literary trends, Ossessione, for its part, was shot on location in the region
of Romagna; its atmosphere and plot (based on James M. Cain’s novel The
Postman Always Rings Twice [1934]), moreover, were seamy in addition
to steamy, and did not adhere to the polished, resolved structures of
conventional Italian movies. Visconti’s film was previewed in the spring
of 1943 and quickly censored, not to be appreciated until after the war.
In its thematic attempt to reveal the underside of Italy’s moral life,
shared with Ossessione, The Children Are Watching Us itself was
indicative of a rising new vision in Italian cinema. In exhibiting semi-
documentary qualities by being shot partially on location at the beaches of
Alassio and by using non-professional actors in some roles, The Children
Are Watching Us was, again along with Ossessione as well as the
aforementioned pictures by Blasetti and Franciolini, a precursor of the
neorealism that would issue forth after the liberation of occupied Rome.
De Sica’s film was not a financial success, however, and its negative
reception was in part engineered by those who saw it as an impudent
criticism of Italian morality. The unfavorable reaction to The Children Are
Watching Us was also influenced, of course, by the strictures of the past:
during the era of Mussolini’s regime and “white telephone” movies (the
term applied to trivial romantic comedies set in blatantly artificial studio
surroundings symbolized by the ever-present white telephone), an
insidious censorship had made it almost impossible for artists to deal
with—and for audiences to appreciate—the moral, social, political, and
spiritual components of actual, everyday life. After the Second World
War, a different kind of “censorship” obtained: that of the lira. For, in
1946, viewers wanted to spend their hard-earned lire on Hollywood
movies through which they could escape their everyday lives, not on films
that realistically depicted the effects of war—effects that they already
knew only too well through direct experience.
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 5

Italian audiences, it seems, were reluctant to respond without

prompting to an indigenous neorealist cinema intent on exploring the
postwar themes of rampant unemployment, inadequate housing, and
neglected children, in alternately open-ended and tragic dramatic
structures populated by mundane non-professional actors instead of
glamorous stars. (Indeed, one reason for neorealism’s ultimate decline was
that its aesthetic principle of using non-professional actors conflicted with
the economic interests of the various organizations of professional Italian
actors.) It was the unexceptional, not the extraordinary, man in which
neorealism was interested—above all in the socioeconomic interaction of
that man with his environment, not the exploration of his psychological
problems or complexities. And to pursue that interest, neorealist cinema
had to place such a man in his own straitened circumstances. Hence no
famous monument or other tourist attraction shows that the action of De
Sica’s Bicycle Thieves or Shoeshine, for example, takes place in Rome;
furthermore, instead of the city’s ancient ruins, we get contemporary ones:
drab, run-down city streets, ugly, dilapidated houses, and dusty, deserted
embankments that look out on a sluggish, dirty Tiber river.
As for the Italian government’s own response to the settings,
characters, and plots of neorealist films, in January 1952, Giulio Andreotti,
State Undersecretary and head of the Direzione Generale dello Spettacolo
(a powerful position that had direct influence on government grants as
well as censorship, and that led ultimately to the right-wing Andreotti’s
own corruption, exposure, and disgrace), published an open letter in
Libertas (a Christian-Democratic weekly) bitterly deploring the neorealist
trend in the Italian cinema and its negative image of the country—a letter
that was quickly reprinted in other journals. Andreotti took direct aim at
De Sica, who was castigated for exhibiting a subversively “pessimistic
vision” and exhorted to be more “constructively optimistic.” (De Sica later
stated that if he had had to do Umberto D. [1952], for one, over again, he
would have changed nothing except to remove the “uplifting” final shots
of children playing—precisely the kind of “positive” conclusion Andreotti
seemed to be calling for.)
It was this atmosphere of interventionist government criticism that
hampered the exportation of neorealist films during the 1950s; the
“Andreotti Law” of 1949 had established wide government control over
the financing and censorship of films, including a right to ban the export of
any Italian movie that Andreotti himself judged “might give an erroneous
view of the true nature of our country.” In November 1955 the “Manifesto
of Italian Cinema” was published in response to Andreotti’s Libertas letter
by the French journal Positif—a manifesto that spoke out against movie
6 Introduction

censorship and was signed by the leaders of Italian neorealism, with the
names of De Sica and Zavattini prominent among the signatures. By this
time, however, postwar neorealism was rapidly waning as the burning
social and political causes that had stimulated the movement were to some
extent alleviated or glossed over by increasing prosperity. In a society
becoming ever more economically as well as politically conservative,
nobody wanted to throw away his capital on yet another tale of hardship
and heartbreak on the side streets of Rome.
Although neorealism was gradually phased out of the Italian cinema in
the early 1950s as economic conditions improved and film producers
succumbed to the growing demand for escapist entertainment, the
movement’s effects have been far-reaching. One can trace neorealism’s
influence back to the entire postwar tradition of films about children, from
Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), René Clément’s Forbidden Games
(1952), and Kjell Grede’s Hugo and Josephine (1967) to Kobei Oguri’s
Muddy River (1981), Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981), and Mira Nair’s
Salaam Bombay (1988); one can also trace neorealism’s influence beyond
the twentieth century into the twenty-first, in such films as Mahamat-Saleh
Haroun’s Abouna (2002), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows (2004),
and Andrei Kravchuk’s The Italian (2005). It could even be argued that
François Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows (1959) owes as much to De
Sica’s Shoeshine as to the following films of his fellow Frenchmen: Jean
Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933), Jean Benoît-Lévy’s La Maternelle
(1932), Julien Duvivier’s Poil de carotte (1932), and Louis Daquin’s
Portrait of Innocence (1941).
Most recently, the Iranian cinema has confirmed the neorealist legacy
in such pictures (some of them also concerned with the lives of children)
as Kianoush Ayari’s The Abadanis (1993), a virtual reworking of Bicycle
Thieves in contemporary Tehran; Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy (1987-
1994) presenting a documentary-style look at mountain life in northern
Iran before and after the terrible earthquake of 1990, particularly the first
of these three films, titled Where Is the Friend’s House?; Jafar Panahi’s
The White Balloon (1995); Majid Majidi’s The Children of Heaven
(1997); and Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (1998).
Neorealism’s influence on French New Wave directors like Truffaut is
a matter of record, but its impact on the American cinema has generally
been ignored. For, in the postwar work of American moviemakers as
diverse as Nicholas Ray (They Live by Night, 1948), Elia Kazan
(Boomerang!, 1947), Jules Dassin (The Naked City, 1948), Joseph Losey
(The Lawless, 1950), Robert Rossen (Body and Soul, 1947), and Edward
Dymytryk (Crossfire, 1947), stylistic elements of neorealism can be found
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 7

together with neorealism’s thematic concern with social and political

problems. The Italian movement has even had a profound impact on
filmmakers in countries that once lacked strong national cinemas of their
own, such as India, where Satyajit Ray adopted a typically neorealist
stance in his Apu trilogy, outstanding among whose three films is Pather
Panchali (1955).
In Italy itself, neorealist principles were perpetuated first by Federico
Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. De Sica himself exerted a profound
influence on both of these directors: to wit, with its grotesque processions
of fancily as well as raggedly dressed extras against an almost abstract
horizon, Miracle in Milan (1951) is “Fellinian” two or more years before
Fellini became so; and without De Sica’s unembellished portrait of
modern-day alienation in Umberto D.—his astringent detachment and
strict avoidance of sentimentalism—a later portrait of alienation such as
Antonioni’s La notte (1960) seems almost inconceivable.
Neorealist principles were perpetuated not only by Fellini and
Antonioni but also by the first as well as the second generation of
filmmakers to succeed them. Among members of the first generation we
may count Ermanno Olmi, with his compassionate studies of working-
class life like Il posto (1961), and Francesco Rosi, with his vigorous
attacks on the abuse of power such as Salvatore Giuliano (1961). These
two directors are joined, among others, by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accattone,
1961), Vittorio De Seta (Bandits of Orgosolo, 1961), Marco Bellocchio
(Fist in His Pocket, 1965), and the Taviani brothers, Vittorio and Paolo
(Padre Padrone, 1977). And these filmmakers themselves have been
followed by Gianni Amelio (Stolen Children, 1990), Nanni Moretti (The
Mass Is Ended, 1988), Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), and
Maurizio Nichetti (The Icicle Thief, 1989), to name only the most
prominent beneficiaries of neorealism’s influence.
From this diverse group of filmmakers, After Neorealism: Italian
Filmmakers and Their Films includes interviews with, and essays about,
Olmi, Pasolini, Amelio, and Moretti, featuring pieces (essays or
interviews) as well on such seminal figures as Visconti, Fellini, Mario
Monicelli, and Antonioni. The last four interviews—those with Olmi,
Pasolini, Amelio, and Moretti—are accompanied either by an overview of
the director’s career, a piece on a particular film of his, or a series of
interconnected reviews of films by the auteur in question. My intent in
doing this, through the second half of the book, is naturally to “bounce”
my writings off a director’s own words, to juxtapose what I think of his
work against what he thinks of the same work. We don’t always agree,
but why must we?
8 Introduction

After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films is an attempt,

through these selections (which are followed by directors’ filmographies
and bibliographies), to chronicle what happened to neorealism after the
disappearance of the forces that produced it—World War II, the resistance,
and the liberation, followed by the postwar reconstruction of a once
morally, politically, and economically devastated society. Neorealism
itself, of course, did not disappear: it changed its form, depending on the
filmmaker and the film, but not its profoundly humanistic concerns.
Indeed, I think we can confidently say by now that neorealism is eternally,
as well as universally, “neo” or new.
 CHAPTER ONE

REALITY, ROMANTICISM, EROTICISM . . .

AND THE CINEMA:
AN INTERVIEW WITH LUCHINO VISCONTI

BERT CARDULLO

Born in Milan into a noble and wealthy family (one of the richest of
northern Italy), Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo
(1906-1976), was exposed at an early age to art, music, and theater.
During his youth, in fact, he mixed with such luminaries as the conductor
Toscanini, the composer Puccini, and the novelist D’Annunzio. In 1936, at
the age of thirty, he went to Paris and began his filmmaking career as third
assistant director on Jean Renoir’s Une partie de campagne (1936), thanks
to the intercession of a common friend, Coco Chanel. During this period,
Visconti, previously a Fascist, switched to Communism. After a short tour
of the United States, where he visited Hollywood, he returned to Rome to
become part of the group associated with the journal Cinema. He also
became Renoir’s assistant again, this time for La Tosca (1939), a
production that was interrupted by the war and later completed by the
German director Karl Koch.
Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the salotto of
Vittorio Mussolini (the son of Benito, and at the time the national
arbitrator for cinema and other arts) during the war years and here
presumably met Federico Fellini. With Gianni Puccini, Antonio
Pietrangeli, and Giuseppe De Santis, he wrote the screenplay for his first
film as director: Ossessione (Obsession, 1942), sometimes considered the
first neorealist movie and an adaptation of the novel The Postman Always
Rings Twice, by James M. Cain. The Italian Communist Party then
commissioned Visconti to produce a series of three films about fishermen,
miners, and the peasantry in Sicily, but only La terra trema (1948) was
 Chapter One 10

made. An exemplar of neorealism, this film was based on the novel I

Malavoglia, by Giovanni Verga.
Visconti veered away from the neorealist path in the 1950s not only
with Bellissima (1951) but also with his 1954 film, Senso, which was
filmed in Technicolor. Based on the novella by Camillo Boito, Senso is set
in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866 and in it, as in Bellissima, Visconti
combines realism and romanticism in an attempt to break away from what
he describes in my interview with him as the strictures of neorealism. He
returned to neorealism one more time in 1960 with Rocco and His
Brothers, the story of working-class southern Italians who migrate to
Milan in the hope of finding financial stability.
Throughout the 1960s, Visconti’s films became more personal.
Perhaps his best works from this period are The Leopard (1963) and Death
in Venice (1971). Visconti’s lush adaptation of The Leopard, based on
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel, chronicles the decline of
the Sicilian aristocracy during the Risorgimento, a subject close to the
director’s own family history. It starred the American actor Burt
Lancaster in the role of Prince Don Fabrizio. It was not until his 1969 film,
The Damned, that Visconti received a nomination for an Academy Award,
for “Best Screenplay,” which he nonetheless did not win. The film, one of
Visconti’s best-known works, is about a German industrialist family that
slowly begins to disintegrate during World War II. Visconti’s final film
was The Innocent (1976), which features the recurring theme in his work
of infidelity and betrayal in the persons of the lusty, sex-starved mistress
of a roadside inn, a Sicilian aristocrat at the time of Italy’s unification, and
an upper-class Roman wife who is neglected by her husband—himself a
philanderer.
Openly homosexual, Visconti featured few explicitly gay characters in
his films, although they often contain an undercurrent of homoeroticism.
He favored attractive leading men, such as Alain Delon, and his final
obsession was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, whom he directed in The
Damned, Ludwig (1972), and Conversation Piece (1974). The following
interview took place in a hotel in Munich, Germany, in early 1972, just
before Visconti began filming Ludwig. He spoke mainly in Italian, all of
which I later translated myself.

Bert Cardullo: If it’s acceptable to you, Signor Visconti, I would like

chiefly to discuss two earlier films of yours today: Bellissima and Rocco
and His Brothers, each of which, one could say, is an offshoot of postwar
neorealism. But before we do that, let’s talk a bit about two very different,
relatively recent pictures directed by you: Death in Venice and The
 An Interview with Luchino Visconti 11

Damned. Is it true that you threw a tantrum at the 1971 Cannes Festival
because Death in Venice did not win first prize, that you threatened never
to return to Cannes, and that the only way the jury managed to calm you
down was by coming up with a new prize called the “25th Anniversary
Award” for your cumulative body of work? Isn’t it possible that Death in
Venice didn’t get the top prize because of its somnambulant tempo and its
relentless scrutiny of its own opulent décor?
Luchino Visconti: Where did you hear such nonsense? The prize they
gave me at Cannes, in any event, was much more important than the one
they gave to Joseph Losey for The Go-Between. This was a special prize
for all my films, including Death in Venice, and it means a lot to me.
B.C.: Some critics and audiences feel that the love depicted in Death in
Venice is homosexual love, and that your film, even more than Thomas
Mann’s 1912 novella, is simply the study of a repressed homosexual who
is suddenly seized by an overwhelming desire for a stunningly handsome
adolescent boy.
L.V.: The love in my film is not homosexual. It is love without eroticism,
without sexuality. Love is the most important sentiment; sex is important,
too, but it is a consequence of love. The boy in the story represents the
sentiment of love. He is the symbol for beauty, and Aschenbach, pursuing
the ideal of beauty, is ecstatic once he sees that this ideal does in fact exist.
But, of course, it has its fatal aspect as well.
B.C.: In Mann’s novella, Aschenbach was a writer, but in your movie, he
is a composer. Why?
L.V.: It was easier for me to give the impression I wanted by making
Aschenbach a musician, and I also wanted to use the music of Gustav
Mahler. I believe that Thomas Mann was thinking of Mahler when he
wrote Death in Venice; there is much evidence to support this theory,
including testimony from Mann’s daughter. Mahler’s daughter, for her
part, became anxious about her father’s reputation when she learned that I
was making this film; but, after she had seen the picture, she wrote me and
said that her mind had been put completely at ease.
B.C.: There aren’t many Krupps around these days, but if there were, it’s
doubtful that their minds would have been set completely at ease by The
Damned, your bone-chilling portrait of that German industrialist family
and its role in the rise of Nazism. One scene stood out for me: the one in
which Helmut Berger, as the clan’s most enterprising pervert, brutally
rapes his otherwise murderous mother, played by Ingrid Thulin.
L.V.: Well, there are a number of scenes in the New American Cinema
that make the one between Helmut and Ingrid look tame—like a family
matter. What happened in Andy Warhol’s Trash was a little stronger than
 Chapter One 12

incest, wouldn’t you say?

B.C.: Yes, but, as far as I’m concerned, Warhol’s title describes the
quality of his film as well. Trash is beneath serious consideration, but The
Damned is not. The sea of sadism, incest, and homosexuality that surged
through your film was surely an artistic exaggeration, was it not?
L.V.: There is invention in The Damned, to be sure, but the invention is in
the direction of reality. That family was the Krupp family, and all those
S.A. troops were indeed homosexual. The way in which I showed “The
Night of the Long Knives”—I refer to the slaughter of the young boys in
their beds—was exactly the way it was reported by witnesses. This means
that The Damned is a sociopolitical document in addition to whatever else
it is.
B.C.: Did you yourself have any trouble of your own with the Fascists in
Italy?
L.V.: They arrested me in my house one night. I told them they were
crazy, but still they took me from one to prison to another. Finally, they
were going to shoot me—but thank God the Americans arrived just in time
and saved me.
B.C.: On the subject of God, are you a practicing Catholic?
L.V.: Let’s just say that I am a Catholic. I was born a Catholic, I was
baptized a Catholic, and I cannot change what I am. Certainly I could not
easily become a Protestant. My ideas and habits may be unorthodox, but I
am still a Catholic.
B.C.: What do you think of the sacrament of matrimony? I ask because
marriage and the family, at least the family, will be at the heart of our
discussion of Bellissima and Rocco and His Brothers.
L.V.: I do regret not having children, but I do not regret never having
married. People usually get married because they are afraid of being
alone. But you can be unmarried and have a beautiful relationship—and
not just with one person! The ideal state is to have children and not
marriage. I myself think I might have been a very good father—perhaps I
do have children somewhere, who knows?
B.C.: What’s a woman’s place, then?
L.V.: In the home, with the men who marry them. They should be
women: that’s enough, if they do it well. Bed, kitchen, mothering: that’s
their place, just as all of us have our place, our duty, our job. A woman’s
job is to get man to eat the apple—to compromise him, if you will.
B.C.: I guess that you will agree that Maria Callas is an exception to this
rule.
L.V.: Yes, but I was never interested in luring her into the world of cinema.
She should have stayed in opera—where I directed her in productions like
 An Interview with Luchino Visconti 13

La Sonnambula and La Traviata—and not made Medea with Pasolini. I

don’t like this movie; singing is Callas’s real talent, not acting. She is not
a movie actress.
B.C.: Let’s move now to a discussion of Bellissima [The Most Beautiful,
1951]. Why did you direct this movie, whose subject seems to be so
different from the ones that you had treated in your previous films?
L.V.: The choice of one subject over another does not depend exclusively
on the will of the director. A combination of factors, naturally including
the issue of money or finance, determines which films get made in the end.
I had to pass, for example, on Tale of Impoverished Lovers [filmed by
Carlo Lizzani in 1954] and Prosper Mérimée’s The Coach of the Blessed
Sacrament [filmed by Jean Renoir in 1952 as The Golden Coach], but then
Salvo D’Angelo presented to me the script of Bellissima, by Cesare
Zavattini. For some time I had desired to make a movie with Anna
Magnani, and it was precisely Magnani whom D’Angelo had in mind for
the leading role in this picture. So I accepted the project. D’Angelo
reinvigorated my interest in making a film with an authentic “personality”
like Magnani, a film whose inner or ultimate meaning would derive in part
from its star. And he interested me in finding out what the relationship
would be between me, as the director, and a “diva” like Magnani. The
result, I believe, was a most felicitous one.
B.C.: What did it mean to you, then, to make such a film of “atmosphere”
or personality?
L.V.: A film centered around a personality. It meant a lot, because I
don’t believe that the use of a star or personality automatically turns a
movie into a wholly commercial vehicle. You can have it both ways if
you use the actress correctly—you have to use her correctly in this case,
since she is at the center of the picture. Bellissima is the story, after all, of
one woman, or, better, of a crisis in her personal history: a mother who has
had to renounce her own secret, petty-bourgeois aspirations but tries to
realize them through her daughter. Then the mother becomes convinced
that, if an improvement in her life is to occur, it must come from a
different direction. And by the end of the film she returns to find her
home, and her husband, just as she left them. She also returns with the
knowledge that she loved her daughter badly by trying vicariously to
achieve her own dreams of movie stardom through a child. This mother
knows now, as well, that the world of show business, which she thought
was so wonderful, is in fact quite deplorable.
B.C.: Did you make changes in Zavattini’s original script, or did you use
his scenario as it was first presented to you?
L.V.: Yes, I made a number of modifications. To begin with, the girl’s
 Chapter One 14

father in Zavattini’s original script was a corporate or office employee; in

the finished film he became a simple laborer. Second, while in Zavattini’s
screenplay the child was totally rejected at her screen test, in my film she
gets a chance to work in pictures—so that her mother can become aware
that she is only living through her daughter and finally refuse to sign a
contract on the girl’s behalf. These were my main structural
modifications, if you will. But during the filming I made many other
small changes as I traveled, in the end, a remarkably different road from
the one traversed by Zavattini in his scenario. There was also some
rewriting of the dialogue, and that had a lot to do with the improvisatory
manner in which Magnani likes to work.
B.C.: Did this result in too obvious a contrast between Magnani’s acting
style and that of the actors playing her child and her husband in the film—
both of whom were acting for the very first time?
L.V.: No, certainly not. Because Magnani’s improvisatory flare has
natural instinct behind it, not theatrical artifice. Moreover, she knows how
to place herself on the same level as her fellow performers, and she also
knows how to carry them along with her—how to raise them up to her
level, as it were. I wanted this particular—and extraordinary—aspect of
her personality, and I got it. In the other major parts, Gastone Renzelli
[the laborer] and Tina Apicella [the child] fulfilled my expectations
completely. Especially the child: one of a kind, she is. She demonstrates
that having a sophisticated or adult intelligence has nothing to do with
acting instinct. After fifteen days on the set, Miss Apicella knew all there
was to know about the acting trade—so much so that sometimes she left
me and the crew baffled. In one scene, for instance, she had to cry. She
was quite calm, even tranquil, up to the moment that I gave the signal for
action, upon which she immediately began to cry; and when I yelled
“Cut!” she immediately stopped crying. And she did this more than ten
times in a row. All this from a child of five-and-a-half!
B.C.: What’s the best way to get a good performance from actors who are
not professionals? Do you use coaxing, or do you rely merely on
suggestion?
L.V.: Something between coaxing and suggestion. It’s a kind of
collaboration between me and them. I try to give them as much leeway as
possible, but at the same time I let them know what it is I want them to
express. This method worked perfectly with Magnani as well. Left
completely to her own devices, I have to say, she would never achieve a
happy result.
B.C.: It seems to me that whether Magnani fully understands or adheres to
the script doesn’t really matter. She’s like a character out of the commedia
 An Interview with Luchino Visconti 15

dell’arte, which, as you know, was essentially an improvisatory art.

L.V.: The scenario serves as the base or framework of any film. And it is
necessary always to have it in place. But neither the action nor the
dialogue can be “set in cement,” so to speak. In realistic films, for
example, the actors sometimes simply cannot say, or will not say, things in
the way a literary person has composed them at a typewriter. For the rest,
I take it that the author of a film must be a single individual: the director.
But a big part of his job is casting the actors: if he does this well, a good
portion of the picture is already made and the remainder can be created on
the spot. Such was the case with Magnani and company in Bellissima.
B.C.: This way of working appears to be adapted to a single type of film:
Bellissima’s type. You seem not to be taking into account the fact that this
method may be inadequate for other kinds of film. I mean the kind, for
example, in which a deeply layered, highly elaborated text is the point of
departure—a text that therefore requires actors who are absolute masters
of their craft. For their part, the Soviet theorists of the 1920s supported the
idea that the actor must have a solid technical base and thorough cultural
or intellectual preparation; they also believed that the actor should
collaborate on the script itself.
L.V.: Well, everyone has his own method or point of view when it comes
to making a film. But, as far as the actors go, I insist on asserting that if an
actor has talent—what I like to call the cinematic instinct—then a good
director can get a good performance out of him apart from this actor’s
“preparation” or “technique.” Talent is the one thing absolutely necessary
in itself, and it can’t be taught; everything else can be supplied.
B.C.: Of course, everything else has to be supplied if you’re dealing with
non-professionals.
L.V.: Not necessarily. Vittorio De Sica, it’s true, supplied everything for
his non-professionals; he even acted out the scenes beforehand and then
asked his amateurs to mimic what he had done. But if you can discover an
actor somewhere in your non-professional—an acting talent, as I have
stated—then a balance can be struck and the actor can give as well as get.
That’s the kind of non-professional performance which makes the most
“sense” to me. We’re not dealing with beauty contestants here, after all—
just breasts and legs and buttocks. I’m talking about working with
people—non-professional actors—of character, of feeling and
temperament, who know how to do more than merely move around and
show themselves off from this or that vantage point.
B.C.: Is there any way to change this?
LV: Change what? What’s there to change? Send Bellissima’s Gastone
Renzelli and Tina Apicella to acting school?
 Chapter One 16

B.C.: Could you say something about neorealism and the Italian cinema?
L.V.: The big mistake of neorealism, to my way of thinking, was its
unrelenting and sometimes dour concentration on social reality. What
neorealism needed, and got in a film like De Sica’s Miracle in Milan
[1951] and even Pietro Germi’s The Road to Hope [1950], was a
“dangerous” mixture of reality and romanticism. I hope that I supplied
this in Bellissima, as well. After all, these are poor people, the characters
in this film, and to enable her family to escape from poverty, the mother
turns to the dream-world or fantasy-factory of the popular cinema. Now
that’s a romantic notion! Yet, at the same time, the mother returns to
sobering reality at the conclusion of the picture, and she accepts it—
accepts that the illusionary world of show business is a kind of bad drug to
which her own impoverished condition is far more acceptable, as long as it
is ameliorated by the love of one’s family. This is another romantic
notion, of course, but it’s firmly grounded in social reality. So we are
back in the world of neorealism at the end, with a slight yet elevating
twist. And thus I tried to have it “both ways” in this film.
B.C.: Another, related question: what’s the situation in the Italian cinema
in general right now? Does it have serious problems?
L.V.: I can respond in just a few words: the situation is disastrous. The
problem is one of subject matter, of material: it is often on the lowest,
most vulgar level. We are in a period of decline. The war of course is
long over, and now Italy is a prosperous country, but its prosperity has
brought with it creeping commercialism, all-consuming materialism, and
smug complacency—a combination that is never good for art, and
especially not for an art as “public” as the cinema.
B.C.: Let’s move to the subject of Rocco and His Brothers, a film that has
more in common with Bellissima than one might think: its “improvement”
on neorealism through a “dangerous” mixture of reality and romanticism,
as well as the fact that Rocco itself is star-centered: in Alain Delon. Why
did you use Delon in the role of Rocco?
L.V.: Because Alain Delon is Rocco. If I had been obliged to use another
actor, I would not have made the film. I wrote the role for him, and Rocco
is the main character in the story. After all, the title of the picture is
“Rocco and His Brothers.”
B.C.: What exactly is Rocco’s role?
L.V.: I really don’t want to recount the plot of my own film. Nonetheless,
just for you I will do so. A mother and her five sons live in the Lucania
region of southern Italy, but, in order to find work, they all eventually
move north to Milan. Rocco is the first one seized by a desire to escape to
the north. He wants to leave, so he just runs away from home, and,
 An Interview with Luchino Visconti 17

inspired by his example, the other brothers quickly follow suit. Though
she would rather stay at home in the south, their widowed mother doesn’t
want to be separated from her sons, so she too goes north along with her
boys.
B.C.: It’s Rocco, then, who serves as a role model for his brothers?
L.V.: It’s more or less fated to be this way, but that is not immediately
evident, nor is such a familial “fate” preconceived on Rocco’s part. In
Milan, the family settles in a slum. At first everyone looks for work, but
no one finds it. Very quickly, the situation there deteriorates and the
domestic atmosphere becomes polluted.
B.C.: Even for Rocco?
L.V.: Yes and no. Rocco is pure, you see, the only one who can
successfully resist this degrading environment and preserve his integrity.
He is also the person who suffers the most, for he is conscious of the
familial tragedy, of the irresponsibility of certain of his brothers in the face
of the vicissitudes of life that are destroying them. Rocco’s drama is
therefore double because, in addition to his own suffering, he takes upon
himself the misery of every other member of his family.
B.C.: What are the stages of this domestic tragedy, the events that trigger
it?
L.V.: Well, the situation is tragic at the very start. The events that follow
are the natural consequence of the social situation in which this family
finds itself. That is what I was always at pains to show. And, at the same
time, I must insist on the communication gap between Italians of the north
and those of the south. We also have our racists, you know, and they are
not only of the linguistic kind.
Discouraged because they can’t find work—disheartened is perhaps a
better word—three of the brothers end up by becoming boxers. But, above
all else, please do not believe that I was out to make a boxing film. This is
merely one element in the picture, almost an exterior one or an accessory;
simultaneously, boxing is of course intended to be a symbol of physical
violence in the face of the figurative violence that Rocco’s family
encounters.
Confronted by the difficulties of life in the big city, the brothers fall
from grace one after the other. The one who falls first, Simone, is Rocco’s
favorite. (For this role I engaged the actor Renato Salvatori.) Simone
arrived in Milan almost in rags, but soon he was outfitting himself in silk
shirts; and the audience well understood the source of his newfound
income without explicitly being shown that he had become a gigolo. In
the end, this character plays a very important part in the drama. For what
happens to Simone makes clear that the reasons for, or causes of, a
 Chapter One 18

family’s survival—or self-destruction—are not the unique location in

which it finds itself, as you might expect. Basically, this family, had it
remained united, in Milan or anywhere else, would have had a chance to
survive intact. Staying together would have been its best strategy for
success, if you will.
Another element apart from unemployment divides the family,
however, and pits two of the brothers (the others are too young) against
one another. In the same ghetto as theirs lives a call girl named Nadia.
She is also poor by birth, but her job permits her to live better than those
around her. Every day, she lures young men into her bed, and for them
she represents luxury of a kind, even mystery. Only Rocco remains
insensitive in the beginning to the charms of this urban princess. But such
precise delineation or differentiation is unnecessary here, since all these
characters are part of the same reality. I don’t need to assign it any poetic
quality, for poetry emanates naturally from this environment—from the
clash between fish out of water, as it were (Rocco and his displaced
family), and the highly toxic water in which they now find themselves (the
city of Milan).
Still, in her mysterious way, Nadia herself is a character apart from this
environment, and one who intervenes directly—almost constantly—in the
tragedy, precipitating its events. This is because she falls in love with
Rocco, the family’s only hope for salvation. Nadia and Rocco’s rapport,
which forms gradually, is difficult to fathom. There are so many “shades”
to their relationship that I simply could not explain them all in mere words.
You have to see the film. But the result of Rocco and Nadia’s liaison is
obvious: it arouses the jealousy of others. And Rocco suffers as a result,
because saving his family is more important to him than Nadia’s love.
It is the “fallen” Simone who is the first to fall passionately in love
with Nadia, but she scorns him. Naturally, he is jealous of Rocco, who for
his part feels guilty, yes guilty, at being loved by a woman whom he
himself does not really love, and whose love, he knows, could only placate
and even change for the better his favorite brother, Simone. But Rocco
also wants Nadia, and this feeling at times shames him. Already trapped
in a dizzying downward spiral where his material life is concerned, he now
finds himself hounded by moral dilemmas to which he cannot find a
solution. And because no material hardship can destroy him, it is his
reason that begins to waver. Up to a certain point, though, Rocco is able
to remain whole, spiritually as well as physically.
Already harassed and even harmed by a kind of social fatality,
however, Rocco is remorselessly reduced to a slow death, to a more or less
long decay. And it is Simone himself who will be the clumsy instrument
 An Interview with Luchino Visconti 19

of his demise: driven in the end by extreme jealousy (Nadia has ridiculed
him at the same time as she has clearly stated her preference for Rocco),
he loses his head and murders this girl who has sown discord among
brothers. After Nadia’s death, Rocco finally becomes bereft of all reason,
his “escape” to Milan having removed forever the possibility for him of a
normal and healthy life. His mother, for her part, subsequently returns to
southern Italy with the youngest of her sons.
B.C.: Is Nadia really the cause of Rocco’s folly-become-madness?
L.V.: To the extent that one can assign causes to madness, yes. These
characters are linked: Nadia loves Rocco, who can no longer stand the
sight of Simone, who is otherwise his favorite brother and the lover of
Nadia. The lines of this story are simple yet unerring, and the very setting
of “cold,” utilitarian Milan lends itself to such a narrative. I had no
intention, however, of treating this film as a melodrama; for me, it is a
realistic tragedy.
B.C.: Can you tell me if, in the choice and structuring of the subject matter
of Rocco and His Brothers, you were open to any influences or
suggestions from others?
L.V.: In everything each of us does—artistic or otherwise—there is
something that preceded us and from which “suggestions” might arise,
without one’s ever noticing, out of a thousand different directions. For
Rocco and His Brothers, a piece of fiction about which I thought for a
long time, the major influence was probably Giovanni Verga’s I
Malavoglia [The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881], with which I have
been “obsessed” ever since I read it for the first time. (The other novel by
Verga that comes to mind in this context is Master Don Gesualdo [1899].)
Actually, now that I think about it, the core of Rocco and His Brothers is
more or less the same as that of Verga’s novel. In this way, Rocco is
similar to my earlier film La Terra Trema [The Earth Trembles, 1948]—
itself a kind of adaptation of I Malavoglia. Indeed, Rocco could almost be
called Part II of The Earth Trembles.
To this “obsession” of mine caused by a major work by the Sicilian
Verga, I would have to add two other “obsessions.” First, I had the desire
to make a film about a mother who, believing that she is the “master” of
her own sons, wants to exploit their energies for the satisfaction of the
everyday needs of the family—and this without taking into account the
diversity of their individual characters and the potential of each of her
boys, from whom she asks too much and who will, necessarily and
forcefully, disappoint her. Second, the problem of housing has always
interested me. And in Rocco, it allowed me to connect the problems of the
miserable south (another element in Rocco that can also be found in The
 Chapter One 20

Earth Trembles) to those of the modern north, in the person of the city of
Milan.
Besides these two reasons for wanting to make Rocco and His
Brothers, there were others: for those, you’d have to take a look at the
Bible as well as Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers [1933-43];
you’d have to read Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837-1839), where the
illusions are necessarily those of a man who must be disillusioned in the
face of the brutal aggressiveness of capitalist society; and naturally you
would have to consider the work of Giovanni Testori, on whose novel The
Secrets of Milan: The Ghisolfa Bridge [1958] Rocco is also based. You
might also look up Rocco Scotellaro, the poet of Lucania, who wrote five
parables about the peasants of his native region. Finally, there is a
Dostoyevskyan character whose inner life, in more than one aspect,
resembles that of Rocco: Prince Mishkin from The Idiot [1869], a
representative of illustrious goodness as an end in itself.
But there are even more reasons: in Italy, Elio Vittorini had already
sounded the alarm about the differences, the conflicts, between north and
south in his book Conversations in Sicily (1941). And Antonio Gramsci
convinced me, through the acuteness of his historical and political
analysis, that southern Italy is a market for a type colonialist exploitation
by the ruling classes of the north, which has always tried to keep the south
in a state of economic subjection. I discovered in Gramsci, the founder of
the Italian Communist Party, the foundation of a realistic, practical
solution to the overarching problem of Italian unity or solidarity: an
alliance between the workers of the north and the peasants of the south, so
as to break up the power of the agri-industrial capitalist block. All these
mental “solicitations”—sometimes imponderable ones, I must admit—
gave rise to the story of Rocco and His Brothers, as well as to the story of
Rosaria, their mother.
Energetic, strong, stubborn, Rosaria is the mother of five sons who are
themselves strong, handsome, and healthy, just like the five fingers of a
hand. To recapitulate, her husband dead, this woman is drawn to the north
by the mirage of the big city, to which she moves to escape her misery.
But, ultimately, Milan does not permit two of her five sons such a happy
lot. Simone, who looks the strongest but is in reality the most feeble, goes
berserk and kills the prostitute Nadia. Rocco, the most sensitive and
sensible, the most spiritually complex of Rosaria’s brood, achieves a
success that, for him—given the fact that he considers himself to blame for
the misfortune of his brother Simone—is a form of self-punishment.
Rocco becomes famous thanks to boxing, a sport that repels him because,
faced with an opponent in the ring, he feels unleashed in himself a fierce
 An Interview with Luchino Visconti 21

hatred against everyone and everything—a hatred, moreover, that he

abhors.
Ciro, the most practical, the wisest, the most optimistic and forward-
looking of all the brothers, will be the only one to urbanize himself
completely and become a member of the greater Milan community, well
aware of his new opportunities as well as responsibilities. The youngest
boy, Luca, will perhaps remain in the Basilicata region in southern Italy
(to which he returns with his mother), especially if conditions down there
finally change for the better. As for the remaining brother, Vincenzo, he
will content himself with living a modest but nonetheless secure life
together with the wife he has taken. So each of these three, one could say,
has been restored to grace.
B.C.: What were the stages leading to the creation of your final shooting
script for Rocco and His Brothers?
L.V.: For the first time, I wrote the story all by myself. Then I
collaborated with Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Vasco Pratolini on the
“treatment” of that story-idea for the screen. Next, I made my own little
private expedition to Milan to get at the heart of this metropolis, as well as
to identify the places where my characters could live (particularly districts
filled with large, gray, anonymous buildings, such as Ghisolfa and Porta
Ticinese). On the basis of this research, I wrote the first draft of the
screenplay of Rocco and His Brothers with the assistance of Suso Cecchi
d’Amico, Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, and Enrico Medioli.
I did, however, make another trip to Milan before getting down to
work on this draft, and the second trip allowed me to develop the
characters, as well as the premises, in greater detail. For example, in the
initial “treatment” of the story, we highlighted the nostalgia of people from
the south who move to Milan. But, chatting with a number of such
migrants, I realized that they had no desire whatsoever to leave the big
city, that they were unwilling to return to their native region because—
they said—it’s better to subsist in Milan than to suffer and succumb in
southern Italy. I also noted another element during my second trip to
Milan—the particular way in which Sicilians create a home, or turn a
“foreign” place into their own—and we took this into account when
writing the actual screenplay.
In the end, we were aiming to make the script more “modern”—more
scientifically realistic, if you will—than it had been in the treatment stage.
But, of course, we were also concerned with more than the documentary
side of realism. For instance, in the first draft of the scenario, Rocco died
in a boxing match held on a day when he knew he was in poor physical
condition and should not fight; and in the second version, Rocco, not
 Chapter One 22

Simone, was arrested for the murder of Nadia. Finally, we came up with
the ending that you see in the finished film (Rocco’s deranged acceptance
of his own repeated pummeling in the ring, a self-punishment no less
natural than any other)—an ending absolutely devoid of the melodramatics
of the ending in the first draft, and devoid as well of the artifice of the
conclusion to the second version.
B.C.: Did the definitive, written scenario undergo any changes during
filming, or did you just follow the script faithfully once you were on the
set?
L.V.: Naturally, there were changes during the filming; the script always
serves only as a basis or springboard for the shooting to come. I invent as
I need to when filming, especially as I take into account location, weather,
and light, and perhaps above all as I re-think the dramatic necessities of
the narrative—what has to happen, that is, as opposed to what might
happen. This is the way I work on each of my films.
B.C.: Is it true that you had to change the last name of Rocco’s family
from Pafundi to Parondi? If so, why?
L.V.: Yes, it’s true. “Pafundi” was the original name of the family in
Rocco and His Brothers, but this upset one of the many real-life Pafundi
families in Lucania. I was even threatened with a lawsuit. So, to avoid
wasting time and money on a lengthy legal case, I changed the name in the
script—in the dialogue—and I used what were then modern optical
techniques to black-out “Pafundi” from the back of the characters’ boxing
robes, as well as to white-out the name from the posters advertising their
matches.
B.C.: In The Earth Trembles, Bellissima, and Rocco and His Brothers,
you were always dealing with, and even focusing upon, mothers. How are
the respective mothers in these films—Maruzza Sicilienne, Maddalena
Romaine, and Rosaria Lucaine—similar? What do these three female
characters have in common?
L.V.: These are three “moments” in the development of one character: the
mother. The mother in The Earth Trembles seemed to be overwhelmed or
overpowered by events; Maddalena of Bellissima, she was tough as well as
tender, and she is related to Rosaria in Rocco and His Brothers in the
sense that she tries in vain to point the way to her child’s success. Like
Maddalena, Rosaria will also be disappointed, but even more so because
of the origin of her disappointment in her own “exteriorizing” of internal
feelings, her always overdoing the momentousness of a particular
situation, be it a joyful or a painful one. Sound familiar?
B.C.: In conclusion, do you agree with the French director René Clair
when he says that “a good script must be able to ‘narrate itself’ in a mere
 An Interview with Luchino Visconti 23

phrase or two”?
L.V.: In one word, I would say—a word that puts the imagination in play
and inspires the director who will listen to it.
B.C.: What’s more important to you: your enjoyment in making a film or
an audience’s enjoyment in watching it?
L.V.: Neither. What I want above all from a film is that it make people
think.
B.C.: Think about what? That’s the real question. You are a member of
aristocratic family, you once held the title of count, and you are even
reported to be a millionaire, but you have been charged with voting—and
filming—”left” and living “right.”
L.V.: Look, Italy is a republic now. I am no longer a count; I am nothing.
My family was very rich, yes, but I am not. I work all the time. I do like
to live comfortably, but that does not prohibit me from having ideas about
social reform. I don’t have to wear a burlap bag and live in a stable to
entertain such ideas, do I? I feel that the world is becoming a better place,
for all people, and that we don’t need Maoist extremism to make it an even
better place. Society can’t go backward, it must go forward.
B.C.: Well, art moved forward when the cinema was invented, I think we
can agree on that. If the cinema hadn’t existed when you came of age, by
the way—when it came time for you to choose a profession—what would
you have done?
L.V.: I would have invented it.
 CHAPTER TWO

THE COMING-OF-AGE FILM À LA FELLINI:

THE CASE OF I VITELLONI

BERT CARDULLO

In the most impressive phase of his career (from Variety Lights [1950]
through 81/2 [1963]), Federico Fellini (1920-1993) was, above all, an
observer, constructing his films through juxtaposition: that is, through
setting details of reconstructed reality side-by-side to point up a common
denominator, or (more often) to expose the ironic relationship between
unlike things. This method of reconstruction is the one associated with
Italian neorealism, which Fellini himself defined in a 1971 interview with
Charles Thomas Samuels as “the opposite of manufactured effects, of the
laws of dramaturgy, spectacle, even of cinematography”—in other words,
the presentation of the world in as natural a manner as possible, without
arranging things in order to create plots or entertainments.
What distinguishes Fellini from the neorealists, however, is an
insistence on the primary force of human imagination. His characters
aren’t solely motivated by externals—the theft of a bicycle, social
indifference, child and elderly abandonment or neglect—as Vittorio De
Sica’s were. Nor, like Ermanno Olmi, does Fellini invert neorealism by
studying only the human accommodation to such external circumstances.
Instead, he denies the pure externality of events, choosing instead to show
that reality and imagination interpenetrate. Hence Fellini’s characters
never face a fact without dressing it up: if, as in I vitelloni (1953), they are
in an empty piazza during the small hours of the night, they actively deny
the implication that all human activities must pause; if, as in The Nights of
Cabiria (1957), they are stepping in place on what amounts to a treadmill,
they are nonetheless always on parade, decked out and boisterous.
Continually awaiting an answer to, or a satisfaction of, their deepest needs,
they are nonetheless always disappointed; what we see of them may
26 Chapter Two

literally cease at film’s end, but in fact they never reach their final
destination.
Essential stasis is thus crucial to Fellini’s world. Conventional
dramaturgy, by contrast, exalts the will: characters want something; they
reach out for it; and they get it or don’t get it. Sometimes they fail, or
succeed, because of circumstances; sometimes they do so because of
another character. Whatever the case, their fate becomes established in a
conflict that peaks in a climax, after which there is a dénouement. But
such strategies Fellini either rejects or transforms. Like other directors
who wish to wean the cinema from its addiction to popular fiction and
melodrama, he tries to inject the bracing truth that, from start to finish, life
isn’t very dramatic after all.
Among the neorealists, it’s true, episodic structure and open endings
are fundamental strategies. Yet the scenarios of Cesare Zavattini don’t
avoid narrative causality and suspense; and, although Olmi’s characters
seem to wander in and out of unconnected experiences, they too eventually
reach a turning point, so that in retrospect their wanderings appear to
conform to a dramatic pattern. At his most characteristic, Fellini
eliminates such remnants of conventional dramaturgy. Scenes are related
in his films, not by causality or in order to create a crisis, but as
illustrations of a state of being. At his best, Fellini shows us people in
several versions of hopefulness, which, because it is unchanging and
unassuageable, can achieve only the resolution of the spectator’s
understanding.
This constancy, rather than any outer achievement or inner alteration,
is Fellini’s typical subject; and he wants us to find it both deplorable and
marvelous. Not simply for defying dramaturgical artifice or for showing
that perception shapes experience does Fellini deserve to be credited with
having deepened cinematic realism, however. His films are especially
realistic in precluding unequivocal judgment. Life, Fellini intimates, is not
dramatic but repetitious, not external but mediated by the imagination, and
neither to be admired nor despised. And not wanting his audience to be
partisan, he must simultaneously put us outside his characters to show
their errors and inside them so that we do not dismiss them as fools. This
double exposure, if you will—a subjective view laid over the objective—is
the Fellinian touch that first signals the presence of a personal and incisive
refinement of realism.
Often cited as his masterpiece, I vitelloni clearly exemplifies Fellini’s
methods, though, in terms of actual technique, it may be the least
“Felliniesque” of this director’s major films. It makes far less use, for
example, of the odd foreshortenings, the unexpected close-ups, the expert
 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni 27

manipulation of relations between foreground and background that came

to form so much a part of Fellini’s expressive vocabulary; and there are
fewer of the gargoyles and dreamlike or surreal characters that populate
his most recognizable work. In parts of I vitelloni the camerawork (by the
three-man team of Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli, and Luciano Trasatti)
itself is uncharacteristically languid, as in the early scenes where the
character of Fausto prepares to leave his father’s house after learning that
his girlfriend Sandra is pregnant.
A bit of regional slang, literally “the big slabs of veal” but roughly
translated as “the overgrown calves,” the title I vitelloni designates five
superannuated juveniles whose antics comprise a model of provincial
stagnation. All the vitelloni recognize that they should leave their
hometown of Pesaro, but each prefers to gaze carelessly on its arid slopes,
dreaming of green fields. They talk of girls and of honeymoons in Africa,
but only one of them marries; and Fausto has to be beaten into fulfilling a
spousal role too lightly assumed. The others do not even come this close
to maturity. Leopoldo dreams of becoming a playwright at the same time
as he pointlessly flirts with the maid next door. Alberto upbraids his sister
for trysting with a married man and thus worrying their mother, yet he
lives off the object of his sermons. Riccardo wants to be a singer, but not
even fervently enough to earn him a large place in I vitelloni. Moraldo, for
his part, simply stands by and watches his friends’ antics.
What do the friends do? Little that is either impressive in itself or
rendered so by dramatic arrangement. Most of the scenes concern
Fausto’s shotgun wedding to Sandra, the job (in a religious statuary shop,
a typical Fellini touch of uncommon satirical depth) he takes reluctantly
and then flirts away, his wife’s defection, and their subsequent reunion.
This slight plot (which includes such details as Fausto’s invitation to
Sandra to applaud his feat of lowering the shutters on the shop where he
works; his celebration of his sexuality by shadowboxing after getting a
kiss from his wife; and his doing deep-knee bends after he makes a pass at
his boss’s wife), ending without Fausto’s reform, is constantly interrupted
for vignettes about the other characters, so that suspense is never allowed
to build. We watch the vitelloni razzing a whore whom they accidentally
meet in the piazza, playing pool in a café where they make feeble jokes
about the waiter, going to a carnival or to the theater; and, when nothing
else offers, we observe them gazing out on a wintry sea while wondering
how much it would cost to get any of them to take a swim.
Such details, together with the random construction, authentic locales,
and natural performances—all shot by an unobtrusive camera—make I
vitelloni a convincing paradigm of life in a small Italian town during the
28 Chapter Two

postwar period. Despite its brevity, the film even has room for a host of
minor characters, some of whom appear for less than a minute but manage
nonetheless to give the sense of a entire world unto itself. Parents,
employees, and friends flit through one another’s lives and themselves
engage in activities no less important than what we see—as if to imply that
Fellini could follow these, too, if wanted to.
Instead he concentrates on the vitelloni as viewed retrospectively by an
unidentified former member of the group. This character’s voice-over, in
addition to offering the standard expedients of commentary (temporal
elision, background information, etc.), helps us to shape our response into
the Fellinian “double perspective” to which I referred earlier. Like the
film’s other non-natural device—Nino’s Rota’s musical score—the
narration tells us to feel differently from the characters, teases us into
seeing them more tenderly than they see themselves, and protects them
from the derision otherwise earned by their behavior.
Masterpiece or not, I vitelloni, in the long dream of image and
spectacle that was to become Federico Fellini’s moviemaking career,
occupies a nodal point. Filmed between the brilliant but somewhat
superficial White Sheik (1952) and his first fully characteristic work, La
strada (1954), I vitelloni marks a big step forward in Fellini’s attempt to
get deep into his characters’ psychology. It points ahead both to the bitter
social satire of La dolce vita (1960) and to those great canvases of
personal nostalgia and artistic self-exploration, 81/2 and Amarcord (1974).
Indeed, I vitelloni takes the first definitive plunge into many of Fellini’s
dominant thematic and imagistic preoccupations: arrested development in
men, marriage and infidelity, the life of provincial towns versus the
cosmopolitan city, the melancholy and mystery of deserted nighttime
streets, the magic of the seashore, of the movies themselves. To be sure,
many of these major themes and images can be found in germinal form in
The White Sheik, and even to some degree in Variety Lights. But it is in I
vitelloni that they move from being accessories to the action to being the
heart of the matter.
Moreover, I vitelloni hangs us on the horns of an insoluble dilemma
that lives at the center of Fellini’s work. That dilemma takes subtly
shifting forms in his films but ultimately seems to stem from the tension,
on the one hand, between childhood’s sense of wonder and possibility,
with its undertow of infantile dependence and decay (if the individual
never grows up), and, on the other hand, adulthood’s practical, realistic
understanding of life’s responsibilities as well as costs—an understanding
that carries with it its own undertow of potential stultification, cynicism,
and corruption. This tension finds its most pointed expression in the
 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni 29

repeated images, throughout Fellini’s oeuvre, of the callous exploitation of

the mysterious, the wondrous, or the sacred by those whose overdeveloped
ego or lust for power has blinded them to what is most precious in life. I
vitelloni brings this imagery into the center of the picture for the first time.
The vitelloni, as I have described them, are a sort of provincial Rat
Pack, living off mothers and sisters and fathers, dressing handsomely,
chasing women, and idling their time away in this small seaside town
apparently modeled on Fellini’s hometown of Rimini. Alberto Sordi and
Leopoldo Trieste, both of whom played major roles in The White Sheik,
are outstanding here (unsurprisingly, as Alberto and Leopoldo), as is
Franco Fabrizi, who as Fausto bears an eerie resemblance to the young
Elvis Presley. Franco Interlenghi (Pasquale in De Sica’s Shoeshine
[1946]) plays Moraldo, the thoughtful one and the only member of the
group who seriously questions the life they lead. Riccardo Fellini, the
director’s brother, is somewhat less defined as a character—Zeppo among
the Marx Brothers, if you like.
Against the narcissism and lassitude of the five vitelloni are posed the
solidity and maturity of the town’s older men, who have assumed, and
who meet, the standard obligations of middle-class family life. But
admirable as they may be, these upright citizens—unimaginative and even
stolid, stuck in claustral interior settings yet somehow satisfied with their
lot—are hardly made to seem a stimulating alternative. At the end of I
vitelloni, therefore, Moraldo leaves the town’s tape loop of foreclosed
possibilities for another arena of possibility, in the city. And it is through
Moraldo in particular that Fellini reflects the “double perspective” on
Fausto, for Moraldo begins by romanticizing his friend but ends by
repudiating him. Indeed, only in Moraldo’s growing alienation from
Fausto does the film have a progressive action; and, typical of Fellini, this
action is one of perceptual disenchantment.
Thus, when Sandra faints after being crowned “Miss Siren” during the
opening sequence of I vitelloni, Fellini shoots the crowd of well-wishers
from her angle, making us feel that she is being undone both by the crowd
and by all the excitement. However, a later glance from her brother
(Moraldo) to Fausto, as the latter expresses bewilderment and the dawn of
chagrin at what has happened, establishes the true cause of Sandra’s
collapse: the onset of pregnancy. We are ready to laugh at this discovery,
but the music, with its haunting strings, keeps us from mocking Fausto.
Only after the following scene, when, bludgeoned by his father into doing
the “right thing,” he collides with the vitelloni, who are howling at his
predicament, can our laughter find its release.
Next, Fellini augments our amusement and, by default, our sympathy
30 Chapter Two

for this trapped young bull by dissolving from the laughing calves to a
gaggle of tearful biddies, hypocritically concealing their own delight about
the bourgeois respectability about to be inflicted on the young couple.
Behind the priest officiating at the nuptial rites of the middle class, Fellini
then stations a choirboy unaffectedly picking his nose. Such is the manner
in which the double perspective on Fausto (and, by extension, on petit-
bourgeois life in the Italian provinces), balancing compassion and disdain,
is reflected. (That balanced perspective will disappear in Fellini’s Il
Bidone [The Swindle, 1955], which stands out as a transmutation of the
provincial vitelloni from harmless, middle-class parasites into hostile,
ruthless con men and thieves.)
Although Leopoldo and Alberto are not so prominent as Fausto in I
vitelloni, they come to us through methods perhaps more typical of Fellini,
whereby he places a character in an environment altered by his mode of
perception. Unlike Fausto, on whom Moraldo provides the primary
judgmental perspective, Alberto and Leopoldo must be understood almost
solely through the details of their behavior, as in the scene where
Leopoldo falls for the spell of the theater, only to be disillusioned when
the actor he idolizes is revealed to be no more than a tawdry vaudevillian
and aging queen who would seduce him. And as in the scene, as well,
where Alberto, in drag, throws himself into the frenzy of a party, only to
find himself hung over toward morning on an empty dance floor, where a
trumpeter plays flat and Alberto dances to the bitter end with a detached
papier-mâché figure from a carnival float. Such a method of detailing
behavior also explains the otherwise seemingly gratuitous scene,
interrupting the search for Sandra, in which the vitelloni razz a road crew
and are then beaten up by the irate laborers when the boys’ car breaks
down. Besides keeping us from getting too worried about Sandra’s
defection, this scene underlines the insult to honest work implicit in the
high jinks of the vitelloni.
In 81/2, Fellini’s alter ego, the director Guido, also caught, like the five
vitelloni, between childhood and maturity, in addition to being obsessively
unfaithful to his wife and unable to endow his film-in-progress with an
explainable theme or a plot with a definable shape, finally creates a great
circus mandala in which everyone and everything has a place (an echo of
the procession at the end of The Nights of Cabiria)—and which of
necessity represents acceptance and inclusion, as well as a transcendence
of the polarities of human existence. I vitelloni, filmed ten years earlier,
offers no such reliable image of wholeness and affirmation. The closest it
comes is the character of the station boy (also named Guido) with whom
Moraldo passes time now and again during his nocturnal ramblings, and
 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni 31

who watches Moraldo leave town at the end. It is in moments like this last
one, signaled by camera placement, editing, and music, that Moraldo’s
character merges with the subjective, authorial consciousness of Fellini,
which will become more direct and forceful in the later Fellini films. (In
fact, at the end of the film, when Moraldo is saying good-bye to the station
boy from the train, Interlenghi’s voice is dubbed by Fellini himself.
Moraldo’s character was to have been continued in the scripted, but never
filmed, Moraldo in città, and a character similar to him gets off the train at
the beginning of Roma [1972].)
Moraldo’s departure at the conclusion of I vitelloni is neither happy
nor sad because what he leaves behind is ambiguous. Fellini makes this
ambiguity clear, as Moraldo’s train pulls out and he looks back at what he
is leaving, by cutting to a series of shots—all shaking as if seen from the
train, whose movements are heard on the soundtrack—of the vitelloni
asleep. Visualizing what is in Moraldo’s mind, these shots suggest both
the stagnancy of the other boys’ lives and their enviable comfort to
someone departing for the unknown. Incorrigibly somnolent, the vitelloni
are also stable in their sleep. Sleep is their life; they wake to dream. And
the film’s rhythm, like that of all Fellini’s major films, is an oscillation
between such soporific reality and the clamor of delusion.
It is worth remembering, however, that I vitelloni ends not on the
image of Moraldo leaving amid the glimpses of the sleeping vitelloni, but
on the station boy walking down the tracks, back toward town. Young
Guido has a simple relation to his work, and, most importantly, seems to
accept life as a gift and a grace. “Are you happy?” Moraldo asks him at
one point, and the boy responds, “Why not?” This is the stance that Fellini
reserved for some of the characters he plainly loved the most: the Fool in
La strada; Cabiria in The Nights of Cabiria, shrugging and smiling into
the camera as she joins the procession at the end; Guido in 81/2,
summoning everyone into the moving circle at the film’s conclusion.
I vitelloni is full of its own subtle and beautifully achieved dramatic, as
well as comic, moments: Alberto standing next to Fausto and blocking
Sandra as they pose for the wedding photo; Leopoldo at the restaurant, in a
narcissistic trance, reading his cliché-laden play to the aging actor and
lecher Natali, as the latter gorges himself and the vitelloni flirt with the
female members of his vaudeville troupe; the hilarious mixture in the
troupe’s performance itself of bathetic sentimentality, military bluster, and
vulgar display. Throughout, Nino Rota’s music strikes its own
characteristic balance between calculated vulgarity and aching nostalgia.
A representative, marvelously juxtaposed segment makes excellent use of
that music: the segue from the frenetic carnival celebration, in which the
32 Chapter Two

band plays a breakneck version of the old pop song “Yes, Sir, That’s My
Baby” (Rota liked this song and used it again in La dolce vita), to the
scene after the ball, where a couple of vitelloni and their partners are still
dancing amid the tatters of the party to a solitary trumpeter playing the
same tune, moving it up in key a half-step each time, until finally the badly
soused Alberto shouts at him to stop.
One of the film’s most important sequences finds Fausto convincing
Moraldo to help him steal the statue of an angel from his former
employer’s shop. After they do so, the two of them try unsuccessfully to
sell it at a convent and then at a monastery before entrusting it to the idiot
fisherman Giudizio for safekeeping overnight. Giudizio (the name means
“judgment”), alone with the statue after toting it around all day, sets it up
on a mound outside his hovel and regards it in awe, doffing his cap and
stroking the statue’s arm and hair. This is a touching and even ingenious
moment, one that finds its echo in most of Fellini’s subsequent films—
above all in La strada, which is a sort of extended fugue on the subject.
For we are made to realize by Giudizio’s behavior that the angel isn’t only
saleable gilt. His worship of the angel, together with the graceful tracking
of Fellini’s camera and the delicacy of Rota’s music, works to make the
statue seem as beautiful to us as it is to the village idiot and thus, through
its very object presence, a severe indictment of Fausto’s venality and lack
of imagination.
The masks of carnival work in a roughly reverse manner. Indeed,
much of the wistfully tragic cadence of the film derives from the despair
behind the merry masks of the vitelloni, a rhetorical figure actualized in
the town’s frenzied carnival celebration. For this Dionysian event is the
perfect visual and rhythmic representation of misdirected energy—the
very kind, it is hinted, that led to the twisted, inebriated alienation,
neurotic sexual frustration, and adolescently-inspired Fascist ideology of
Italian society before World War II, after it, and well on into the 1950s.
Alberto’s own drag costume and enormous mask, with its features set into
a grotesque, scream-like pose, are themselves indications that farcical
anarchy and psychological anguish are never too far from each other.
Among its other virtues, I vitelloni is also the first of Fellini’s films to
use the open-ended form that would mark his major work from then on.
As I’ve already suggested, Fellini was allergic to endings that sum things
up too neatly, or that resolve in a definitive way the tensions set up in a
film. To this end, he once remarked, “Our duty as storytellers is to take
people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train.
But we must at least get them to the station, to a point of departure.” This
is a striking image, yet one foreign to many popular storytellers: the
 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni 33

ending of a story seen not as a final arrival but instead as an anticipated

departure.
I vitelloni, of course, takes us literally to the station at its conclusion,
with Moraldo’s departure from his provincial hometown. But on a deep
level the film was Fellini’s point of departure, too—the beginning of his
important work as a director, the place where he got serious about his art.
And, as he made clear at the end of Intervista (1987), the only thing that
really made him happy was his work, his life in art. The end of any
project for Fellini was therefore a kind of death, overcome only at the
moment when he was ready to begin anew, like carnival every spring—to
try to get it right one more, if not one last, time.
 CHAPTER THREE

COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE:

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARIO MONICELLI

DONATO TOTARO

Mario Monicelli (born 1915) is the king of Italian comedy. With his
proverbial Tuscan sense of humor and social conscience (think of that
other anarchical Tuscan, Roberto Benigni), he has laid the pillars of a
genre on which others have built flimsier work. Monicelli’s writing-and-
directing career has spanned sixty-nine years and is still counting—
including more than sixty feature films, television fiction (including two
teleplays with scriptwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico), opera, and theater
pieces from Arsenic and Old Lace to new plays. Currently, he’s preparing
Desert Roses, a major new feature set in Libya about the Italian army’s
invasion of that country during World War II. It’s a comedy, of course.
It is startling to remember that, for decades, Monicelli was considered
a mere craftsman whose long string of commercial hits put him beneath
critical consideration. The turning point, he recounts, came when Big Deal
on Madonna Street opened in a little cinema on the outskirts of Paris.
Week after week, it tenaciously held on until the Parisian papers started
reviewing it: positively. Only at that point did the Italian critics sit up and
take notice of the man who, one year later, would win the Golden Lion in
Venice for The Great War.
Monicelli’s influence on postwar Italian cinema has been prodigious.
In the late forties and fifties he tallied screenwriting credit for up to nine
films a year, including some of the key works of the period—Vittorio De
Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us, Pietro Germi’s In the Name of the
Law, and (uncredited) Giuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice. Directing the
legendary Neapolitan actor Totò (who is as popular in Italy as Charlie
Chaplin), he became a father of the commedia all’italiana even before
consolidating his international reputation with a trio of masterpieces—Big
36 Chapter Three

Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti, 1958), The Great War (La grande
guerra, 1959), and The Organizer (I compagni, 1963). Italian comedy
reaches its peak in these films as they effortlessly merge bitter social
critique with laugh-out-loud humor.
A sad signpost (some would say tombstone) for the genre was the
death on June 4th this year of Nino Manfredi, the last of the five
“musketeers” of Italian comedy. He was preceded by Ugo Tognazzi,
Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, and Alberto Sordi, all actors
Monicelli worked with frequently, reconfiguring their unforgettable faces
in wry, bittersweet, sometimes slapstick roles. Forty years on, one wonders
where Italian cinema will find actors, and films, like these again. As
Monicelli suggests, social conditions may have changed, yet the wave of
globalization sweeping the world potentially holds much in the form of
comic material—for those fearless enough, that is, to embrace a broad
vision of life in all its comedy and tragedy and to highlight its paradoxes.
Recently Monicelli has contributed to several collectively made social
documentaries. He was among the fifty-five Italian directors who worked
on the 2001 documentary Another World Is Possible, which recounts the
G8 summit and the anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa, during
which a protestor was killed by the police. As he declared to the
newspaper Corriere della Sera: “I have always been on the left and I don’t
see why I should change my mind now. The Seattle people aren’t
communist, they’re anti-capitalist. How can you fail to agree with them,
when capitalism has been the most ruthless ideology of this century?”
Ever active at the age of eighty-four, Monicelli is in great demand at
festivals and travels frequently. He was in Montreal to serve as Jury
Member at the 1999 Montreal World Film Festival, where I spoke with
him about Italian comedy in general and, in particular, about one of the
first films to gain both critical as well as popular success and help cement
the international reputation of Italian film comedy, Big Deal on Madonna
Street. This interview was conducted in Italian on September 17, 1999,
and translated into English by the author.

Donato Totaro: What does “Italian comedy” mean to you?

Mario Monicelli: Italian comedy is a type of comedy quite specific to
Italy. The Italian comedy revolves around ideas or themes that are very
dramatic, and sometimes tragic. So the subject is serious or tragic, but the
point of view is comic and humorous. This is a type of comedy that grows
out of the fact that Italians see reality and life precisely in this manner. But
this goes way back in time; it surely isn’t something my generation
invented. It comes from ancient Roman literature, from Boccaccio, from
 An Interview with Mario Monicelli 37

the commedia dell’arte. The subjects that make one laugh always concern
poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death. These are the
subjects that make Italians laugh, in any event. And our best works have
always used these.
D.T.: Do you think the situation is the same today?
M.M.: Today, it isn’t entirely the same, or in this way. The fact is, only for
now hopefully, that there are no longer the directors and actors to make
such films. But younger directors even today still draw from things that
aren’t necessarily funny, but are dramatic. And the more dramatic and
tragic the moment, the more material there will be for irony and comedy.
This is so for Italy, not necessarily in general.
D.T.: Some critics write that the classic Italian comedy of the fifties and
sixties left behind visual humor—Arlecchino’s slapstick, let us say. But I
think there still is a considerable amount of this type of humor in Big Deal
on Madonna Street, for example.
M.M.: Yes, and not only in this film, because in Italy we have a tradition
of actors who are expressive, who use gesture. This comes from the great
tradition of, and I repeat, the commedia dell’arte, of the comic deployment
of movement, gesture, and the body. In fact, if you notice, in most Italian
comedies there is little use of the close-up; the preference instead is for
shots showing the whole body—as in the great American comic tradition
of Chaplin and Keaton. The close-up is usually more dramatic, while the
medium or long shot is better suited to the comic or ironic. The reason,
course, is that the actor expresses himself with the body and not just the
face.
D.T.: In Big Deal on Madonna Street there are many medium or long
shots that are tightly composed, with two, three, four, or five characters in
the frame. This helps render the idea of a group.
M.M.: Yes, because, in general, in my films I always look at a group of
people who want to attempt an enterprise greater than their means or
abilities. They begin at this enterprise and they inevitably fail. In my
comedy, in Italian comedy, there is almost always a sad ending, or the lack
of a happy ending. The ending is bad, which seems like the contrary of
most comedy, where the ending is happy.
D.T.: And what’s funny about the end of Big Deal on Madonna Street is
that the Gassman character, Peppe, actually stumbles into work, which is
even worse!
M.M.: Yes, that’s true.
D.T.: Was Big Deal on Madonna Street also intended as a parody of
neorealism?
M.M.: Yes, although by then neorealism was already a thing of the past,
38 Chapter Three

something that had been superseded. Big Deal on Madonna Street was
more a parody that was aligned with a certain realism all around us at the
time, with real poverty and with people who had to do the best they could
with whatever means possible to survive, including the committing of
petty crimes. I couldn’t make the same film today, with a group of people
robbing a bank using drills, small bombs, etc., because it wouldn’t be
realistic.
D.T.: What you describe is one of the reasons why the characters in Big
Deal on Madonna Street are sympathetic: they aren’t really criminals.
M.M.: No, they are people without education or strong family support
who are only attempting to get by. All my films have this type of theme or
idea.
D.T.: Many people have also called the film a parody of the American
director Jules Dassin’s picture Rififi, shot in France.
M.M.: Yes, because we saw this as a film shot in a very harsh, realist
style—very scientific, as the Peppe character continually says. So we
wanted to do the same thing, but the characters didn’t have the means. The
way they worked was quite the contrary actually.
D.T.: Maybe the Totò character worked in a somewhat scientific way, in
the scene where he demonstrates the different methods for breaking into a
safe.
M.M.: Well, he was a professional safecracker. So he was somewhat of a
professional, but not the others.
D.T.: Speaking of Totò, the group of actors you put together for this film
is exceptional: Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Totò, Claudia
Cardinale. Big Deal on Madonna Street was in fact Cardinale’s first Italian
film. Is it true that she did not speak Italian then?
M.M.: Yes, she didn’t speak it or understand it. This is because she was
born in Tunisia and spoke only French. But she was only seventeen years
old, a young girl really. She later said that as she played this rather small
role, she didn’t understand anything at all. She didn’t know what her role
was, who she was, but only followed my strict directions and moved about
accordingly, speaking French.
D.T.: Do you speak French?
M.M.: Yes.
D.T.: So she learned to speak Italian later, as she made films, and she
married an Italian if I remember correctly.
M.M.: Yes, she then stayed in Italy and became an Italian actress. After all
her surname, her family name, Cardinale, is Italian.
D.T.: Related to this, why is it that most Italian films are shot silent and
post-dubbed?
 An Interview with Mario Monicelli 39

M.M.: There are many reasons. First of all, because in Italy we often shoot
with actors who are not professional. For example, in Big Deal on
Madonna Street the guy who plays the Sicilian, the jealous brother
Ferribotte, was not an actor. He was a dishwasher in a restaurant I would
frequent. The fellow who plays Capannelle, the sporty guy, wasn’t an
actor either. I think he was a bricklayer. Of course Cardinale herself
wasn’t an actress then. But this way of shooting films was quite common
in Italy, to use actors taken from the street. So because they didn’t know
how to recite their lines they had to be dubbed. Moreover, you know that
in Italy we speak many different dialects. For example, the actor who
plays the Sicilian was not Sicilian. He was neither an actor nor a Sicilian!
So I had to have a Sicilian dub his voice. Another one of the actors who
was supposed to be Bolognesian (from Bologna) was from Naples, so I
had to dub his voice. Cardinale spoke French so I had to dub her voice into
Sicilian.
D.T.: It seems to me that Mastroianni and Gassman did their own dubbing.
Is that true?
M.M.: Yes, Marcello, Gassman, and Totò dubbed their own voices.
D.T.: This was Gassman’s first comic role. Was it difficult working with
him?
M.M.: No. It is easy to work with good, quality actors, much more so than
with mediocre actors. There is good communication and understanding
with a quality actor. Gassman read the script, we discussed his character a
bit, and he quickly understood it. We exchanged very few words about this
matter. A day or two of rehearsals and we were ready. On the other hand,
with mediocre actors you often have to go back to the beginning, to start
over and over again.
D.T.: How was it working with the great Totò, with whom you had
worked with on many occasions before this film?
M.M.: He was a great actor, even though he wasn’t well known outside
Italy. But in Italy he was very, very popular. He was an excellent stage
actor, with a powerful comic presence. He knew what to do, and how to do
it. Because even if an actor understands his character, he also has to know
how to interpret it with gestures and expressions. And many actors don’t
have the actual body control to accomplish that. But Totò did.
D.T.: How long did it take to shoot the film?
M.M.: Ten weeks.
D.T.: Was it shot mainly in a studio or on location?
M.M.: Most of it was shot on location. Even most of the interiors were
done on location. The only interior that was shot in a studio was the wall
that gets broken into at the end, because I couldn’t break a wall in an
40 Chapter Three

actual apartment! But all the other interiors were shot on location, which
of course was a particular trait of Italian cinema, to shoot on location. This
was especially true in those days, although that tendency remains even in
contemporary Italian cinema.
D.T.: I mention this because the exteriors reminded me of Fellini’s I
vitelloni, which I was surprised to find out was shot in a studio.
M.M.: Yes. Fellini always filmed everything in Cinecittà. He was unique
in that way. Most other Italian directors also filmed on location, such as
Visconti, De Sica, and Germi.
D.T.: You’ve also written many films in addition to directing them.
M.M.: Seventy!
D.T.: In your opinion, what is the secret to writing characters that are inept
and egotistical, yet still sympathetic? This is something that I find
particular to so many Italian comedies.
M.M.: Well, you’ve been to Italy, so you know Italians. That’s the way
Italians are! They’re a little confused, but sympathetic. They aren’t hard or
violent. Even if you get to know people leading a more or less bad life or
who are on the road of hard knocks, you will discover that they are
sympathetic and entertaining. The trickster has to be that way or else he
won’t be able to deceive! Italians are that way.
D.T.: You have been fortunate to have worked with some of the great
Italian screenwriters, like Age (Agenore Incrocci) and Furio Scarpelli, and
some of the great cinematographers, like Gianni Di Venanzo, who
unfortunately died so young.
M.M.: Yes, he invented a whole new style of photography.
D.T.: That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about, this bleached-white
look. Can you talk a little about that?
M.M.: It’s a gray-white look that also includes very harsh, very sharp
light. At that time we usually shot with lots of light. So the shots were
complicated because of all the lights, electricians, etc. But Gianni shot
with very little light. He was very fast, so we could shoot in real locations
with a small crew. He had a style well suited to neorealism. Di Venanzo
was one of the first cinematographers to shoot in this way, along with
Tonino Delli Colli and Giuseppe Rotunno. The latter two, in fact, also
taught the Americans, because they both worked considerably in America.
D.T.: At what time did you shoot those desolate street scenes, early in the
morning?
M.M.: No, we didn’t have to, because at that time in Italy, in the fifties,
there were not that many cars and therefore there was little traffic. Italy
was a poor country. People walked or took what little public transportation
there was, especially on the outskirts of the city. In the city centers, of
 An Interview with Mario Monicelli 41

course, it was a little busier, but still not heavy in traffic. Italy was a
country not far removed from the war, with much visible destruction. That
was the reality.
D.T.: Big Deal on Madonna Street was filmed in Rome?
M.M.: Yes, on the city periphery, where the characters lived. They didn’t
live in city-center buildings or near La piazza di Spagna or La piazza di
Venezia!
D.T.: In those places there would be more people, surely.
M.M.: Yes, and people of a higher social standing.
D.T.: These locations help considerably to give the film its sense of
realism, with the destroyed buildings and empty lots. There is also, with
the newly constructed buildings, the sense of an Italy starting over again.
M.M.: Yes, certainly. In fact this was a very vibrant period for literature,
cinema, and the theater.
D.T.: Did you plan much before shooting with Gianni Di Venanzo?
M.M.: We talked but not much, because we were in agreement that we
wanted to shoot the film in a photographic tone that was dramatic, not
comedic and therefore brightly or colorfully lit. On the contrary, the light
had to be harsh and dramatic, because the film has a dramatic side in that it
is about poor people. We also have the death of Cosimo and his funeral.
So the movie’s a comedy but with death included. This was something
new at the time. It was rare to find death and failure in a comedy. I had
difficulty making the film because the producers didn’t want me to make it
in this way—with Vittorio Gassman, who wasn’t a comedian, with the
film ending in failure, and with the death of a central character. All this
made production difficult. But Di Venanzo understood the tone: to make
people laugh with a story that was dramatic rather than comic. Yet a story
viewed with a comic eye.
D.T.: How did you go about writing the screenplay with Age-Scarpelli?
M.M.: We would begin by talking about everything but the film. We
would talk about what happened that day, newspaper items, as well as
about books we had read and films we had seen. And then, bit by bit, we
would get to the film. We would begin by talking about specific scenes,
work scenes out, take notes, and then divide things up. You write this
scene and I write that one. We would then get back together, exchange our
scenes, and make comments. Then we would go back to do rewrites and
go through the process again until we arrived at the final script.
D.T.: Was it all scripted and ready before shooting or was there any
improvising?
M.M.: No, I don’t do improvising. I don’t know how. I like to know
everything in advance and for this reason I spend a long time in
42 Chapter Three

preparation.
D.T.: Well, it shows because I noted in the film the powerful and
pervasive theme of imprisonment. All the characters are imprisoned in one
way or another. At the beginning we see Cosimo and Peppe in jail, and
Marcello’s wife is also in jail. We see Marcello at home with the baby.
The Sicilian Ferribotte keeps his sister locked at home. What were you
trying to say with this?
M.M.: I wanted to say that this was a reality at the time. It existed.
Everyone, to survive, had to do what was necessary. One guy sold
cigarettes on the black market, so he eventually went to prison. The
photographer had to stay home to take care of his baby. The little old man
who ate all the time survived by pick-pocketing on the bus. These were not
big criminals. Many were in jail only three, four, or five months, then they
would come out for a while, steal again, and go back in. It was a
continuous cycle for all of them.
D.T.: Getting back to the script, I think one of the funniest lines in the
movie comes after they watch the film shot by Marcello to help Totò with
the safe. They ask Totò what he thought about the film, and he replies,
“Well, as a film it stinks, but it’s better than nothing.”
M.M.: Even this, the film-within-the-film, represents a lack of
professionalism. It was shot with a camera stolen at a flea market that
doesn’t work well, and then the view of the safe becomes blocked by a
passing clothesline.
D.T.: Was the film-within-a-film shot in 16mm?
M.M.: Yes.
D.T.: When I watched it I wondered if it had influenced Scorsese in the
making of Mean Streets and Raging Bull.
M.M.: Well, Scorsese is someone who knows a great deal about Italian
cinema. He, Coppola, and Pacino—all the Italian-Americans—have a
profound awareness of neorealist cinema. More than we do!
D.T.: Another very funny moment is the ending where they break into the
wrong wall and end up in the kitchen, but nonetheless seem content to eat
the pasta-and-beans they find in the refrigerator! That scene always makes
me hungry!
M.M.: Yes. The refrigerator becomes like the safe!
D.T.: The scene is also funny because you realize that it’s the poor
stealing from the poor, because pasta-and-beans is not a meal eaten by the
bourgeoisie. In this sense, the humor is culturally specific, since a non-
Italian may not get the social meaning of pasta-and-beans. And you take
the gag further by having the characters discuss the cooking quality of the
pasta-and-beans, with Tiberio arguing it needs more oil and Peppe
 An Interview with Mario Monicelli 43

defending the woman who cooked it, while Nicoletta, says the dish is just
fine.
M.M.: Yes, it’s a great dish, and even if we all eat it, it’s understood to be
a meal for the poor.
D.T.: The characters become imprisoned once again her, in a kitchen. The
scene also displays your funny use of slapstick, when they throw the cat
out at the janitor and when they overhear him on the phone being asked to
go look for the cat. Have you ever encountered problems with the Italian
censors, by the way?
M.M.: Yes, many times, but before this film.
D.T.: Some of your films nonetheless make fun of fascism, of Mussolini.
M.M.: All my films do! I was born with a certain left-wing conscience or
way of thinking. I was more socialist than communist—well, socialist-
communist. But whatever film you make, even if it’s a love story (though I
never made one), what you have inside you in your DNA—the socialist
part, the leftist part, the social-consciousness part—is always going to
come out, even without your knowing it, without trying.
D.T.: Do you think that comedy allows a greater freedom for social
criticism than straight drama?
M.M.: Certainly. True social criticism is done only with comedy because
if you laugh at misery, illness, or poverty—conditions that aren’t funny or
ridiculous—you can go deeper into it. And you accomplish more. The goal
is to consider the serious reality around you, but from the point of view of
the humorist.
D.T.: I think a good recent example of that is Roberto Benigni’s Life Is
Beautiful.
M.M.: Yes, precisely. As I said, you can make people laugh at the most
horrible of things. It’s hard, but in the end it’s more profound.
D.T.: Do you think there are any taboo areas for comedy?
M.M.: No. If the eye is sensitive enough, anything is possible.
D.T.: How did the selection of jazz music in Big Deal on Madonna Street
come about?
M.M.: That was the first time jazz music was used in an Italian film. I
knew a musician named Umiliani, who was a ghostwriter for film music.
He would write music for other people whenever a little jazz piece was
needed, but he never received credit. This was his first screen credit.
D.T.: I haven’t seen it, but Louis Malle made a remake of Big Deal on
Madonna Street called Crackers (1984). Have you seen it?
M.M.: It’s a disaster! They did two things wrong. They shot it in San
Francisco, and in such a relatively wealthy society, you cannot make that
film. Secondly, Bob Fosse did a musical number in Crackers that was
44 Chapter Three

awful. The characters didn’t fit in with this milieu, and overall the film just
didn’t work.
D.T.: There was also a sequel to Big Deal on Madonna Street, titled I
soliti ignoti vent-anni dopo (1987), or Big Deal after Twenty Years.
M.M.: Yes, that was directed by my assistant Amanzio Todini. It also
didn’t work because twenty years later the nature of film crime had
changed. There were revolvers, shooting, blood, and bombs. The era itself
was too harsh, too violent, and consequently it lacked humanity. You
could do it but then it becomes another, quite different film.
D.T.: The following year, 1959, you made The Great War. I think
Giuseppe Rotunno shot that.
M.M.: Yes, he shot The Organizer, too.
D.T.: His dramatic use of Vista Vision and depth of field in the film is
famous. Was it difficult to do such an antiwar, anti-militaristic film?
M.M.: Very difficult. No one wanted to make it. When it became known
that I, a director of comic films, working with writers who had worked
with me on comedies—even some of my Totò pictures—wanted to make a
film about the First World War, the newspapers rebelled! They wrote long
editorials, saying that it shouldn’t be allowed because, up to then, the war
was considered untouchable by the Italians—a great event, extraordinary,
the war of Italian independence, etc. The official version had it that
everyone went off happy to fight; they kept emphasizing and glorifying
this “Great War.” Since I knew it wasn’t like that, I wanted to say the
opposite of what had been repeated through twenty years of fascism. In
fact, at one point the producer Dino De Laurentiis got support from the
Ministry of Defense—they were going to give us weapons or tanks or
some such thing. But when they saw that the press was against the project,
the Ministry of Defense withdrew its support. And De Laurentiis made it
anyway. He was courageous, because this was a very expensive film for its
time.
D.T.: What happened after The Great War came out? Was there an outcry
against your approach to the war?
M.M.: [Laughs] No! From the time it came out, people started talking
about World War I in precisely the way we had filmed it—that it was
badly conducted, badly led, and fought by poor people who didn’t know
anything, who were ignorant and illiterate. Seventy percent of the country
was illiterate then. They didn’t know where they were, where they were
going, where Trieste was, why they were fighting—they didn’t know
anything.
D.T.: So the film actually established a precedent.
M.M.: And it was a huge success.
 An Interview with Mario Monicelli 45

D.T.: I was reflecting that, shot in black and white, The Great War is
much less realistic than war films today—like Saving Private Ryan, say,
where rivers of blood flow and the horrors of war are visualized in bright
red.
M.M.: The truth is, all directors of my age and even younger ones prefer
to shoot in black and white. No real director wants to shoot in color—
except for musicals and that sort of thing. They’d even prefer to shoot love
stories in black and white. Today, in color, everything is emphasized; the
audience likes special effects, emphatic effects. But there were no special
effects when I shot The Great War. We didn’t know how to do them.
Besides, there was no need.
D.T.: Can you make a film like that today?
M.M.: Sure you can. I’m thinking of making a film about the war in
Africa, the Second World War, the Afrika Korps, the Germans, Rommel,
all that. In Libya.
D.T.: Enzo Monteleone made a film called El Alamein recently.
M.M.: I don’t want to glorify El Alamein or exalt war. I want to show
things as they were—as usual, badly conducted and led, with no one
wanting to fight, or knowing what they were fighting for. My attitude
remains the same.
D.T.: Will it be a comedy?
M.M.: Of course. War has everything.
D.T.: Two of the screenplay writers you have worked with most, and to
whom we have already referred—Age and Scarpelli—wrote The
Organizer with you. Where did the original idea come from?
M.M.: The idea was mine. As I’ve said, I like making films with a lot of
actors, where there are various connections between multiple characters,
not just two actors relating to each other. I’ve made a lot of “choral” or
ensemble films, let’s call them. I was in Paris with the producer Franco
Cristaldi and thinking about how I could use my left-wing background in a
way that would interest me most. I had made Big Deal on Madonna Street
with him, which had also used a group of characters. I said I’d like to
make a film about how a strike comes into being. The strike would
ultimately fail, but there would be humorous, amusing moments, with old
and young workers alike. Cristaldi said OK. Then I talked to Age and
Scarpelli and we started to think. Since there’s a lot of material on strikes
in Turin, we went there and worked on this story idea.
D.T.: Was the picture shot there?
M.M.: No, Turin is too modern to double for a late-nineteenth-century
city. The Organizer was shot mostly in Zagreb, where we found the
factories, the steam engine, and so on, and partly in Cuneo, near Turin.
46 Chapter Three

D.T.: At the end of the film, after the violence, the strikers return to work.
Debate rages in American labor circles over whether this is meant to
indicate that the strike has been broken.
M.M.: Oh, yes, the strike fails. Everything fails. The strike fails because
the workers were unprepared, because it was the first time that they had
gone on strike. There was only one person, the organizer—played by
Marcello Mastroianni—who knew what would happen and, still, he sent
them to certain defeat. But he believed it was right that, even if they lost,
they should learn some social and political battles must be fought. This
was a way to learn how to fight.
D.T.: The ending is a little ambiguous, maybe because the viewer wants
the workers to win so much.
M.M.: There’s absolutely no ambiguity about their defeat. On the
contrary, it’s total. There’s even the little boy of ten or eleven who goes
off to work at the end.
D.T.: We assume that the film’s theme is the struggle goes on.
M.M.: The struggle goes on. Mastroianni, the organizer, goes to jail, but
there’s another man, played by Renato Salvatori, who runs away to
another city to do the same thing the Mastroianni character did. It’s like
passing on the torch. This was the beginning, at least in Italy at the end of
the nineteenth century, of the social movements.
D.T.: What kind of immediate, as well as long-term, impact did the film
have in Italy?
M.M.: It was a big flop in Italy, though it was successful over time. The
Italian title, I compagni (The Comrades), contributed to the film’s
problems. It was a very complicated moment for the country, politically
speaking, because the Socialist Party and the Communist Party were
together. But the Socialist Party wanted to detach itself from the
Communist Party and ally itself with the Christian Democrats. They were
in the process of fighting about this. So The Comrades sounded like a
propaganda film for the radical workers’ group Lotta Operaia. No one
went to see it, neither the bourgeoisie who didn’t want to see a pro-
working-class propaganda film, nor the proletariat who were fed up with
seeing know-it-all films about workers. But later The Organizer enjoyed
great success. I still get calls to take part in debates about it. Actually, the
film was a lot more successful in the United States than in Italy. It did very
well there, considering that Italian films don’t get regular commercial
release in America. It played at Columbia University and Berkeley and art-
house theaters. American directors liked it, too. When I meet them, they
all remember The Organizer.
D.T.: The dynamics of filmmaking in the 1960s, when the film was made,
 An Interview with Mario Monicelli 47

were very different from today. Was it easier or harder to finance films
then?
M.M.: It was much easier, because Italian cinema was much more
important then, even in Italy. It was very popular and so it was easy to find
a producer or financier. Italian films were more popular then in Italy than
American ones, so movies were a good investment. Today this is not the
case, particularly for a political subject like The Organizer.
D.T.: Did the film enjoy any kind of revival during the period of the extra-
parliamentary groups after 1968 and in the seventies?
M.M.: In Italy, as elsewhere I imagine, films don’t get rereleased. But The
Organizer got lots and lots of screenings in Italian schools and universities
and art-house theaters—too many, even.
D.T.: Today, what we know as Italian comedy is a cinema that has gone in
a completely different direction. Is the original, the real Italian comedy
you describe, dead?
M.M.: You can still make it. It’s that directors and scriptwriters, mirroring
the reality of today, look around them and see that a lot of things have
changed, beginning with Italy’s social structure. Now it’s hard to find
people starving and living in ditches. Italy was once like that; now it isn’t.
But you can still do comedy. The more dramatic and difficult the moment,
the more you can find comic material with which to make Italian comedy.
You can find humor in a funeral, in a wake. René Clair based his comedy
on funerals and that type of thing. The true comic, the true director of
comedy, draws a great deal on poverty and misery, on dramatic things that
don’t otherwise seem comic.
D.T.: Mr. Monicelli, in your long, illustrious career, is there something
that you are most proud of?
M.M.: You know I cannot really say, because sometimes you are most
proud of a film that had great critical and audience success, and another
time you have affection for a film for the contrary reason. You loved the
film and worked very hard on it, but it didn’t catch on with the public. It’s
like a son who fails. Another time the film is very original, without
precedent, and you feel proud for that reason—yet it doesn’t do well.
Hence I don’t know what to say because there are two, three, four films
that could apply here. Amici miei atto II (My Friends, 1982), I don’t know
if you’ve seen it, but it’s a film of mine that had a sensational success and
started a type of Italian Tuscan Comedy, in the Tuscan dialect. Or, my
favorite film, L’armata Brancaleone (The Incredible Army of
Brancaleone, a.k.a. For Love and Gold, 1965), a film that takes place in
the Middle Ages, a period of history that is extremely poor, miserable, and
ignorant. It’s not the Middle Ages as taught in school, with knights on
48 Chapter Three

white horses and jousting tournaments. This film had an incredible success
in Italy. Professors called to discuss the film with me; the students agreed
with the film’s tone, but not the professors. So L’armata Brancaleone
provoked much discussion. I traveled across all of Italy discussing this
film, and I received great satisfaction from this.
D.T.: Are there particular directors or films you admire today?
M.M.: Not so many. Not so many. I don’t know why—there’s a lack of
directors, writers, actors. But filmmaking is still possible.
D.T.: What to you think of Italian directors like Nanni Moretti, Roberto
Benigni, and Maurizio Nichetti?
M.M.: Well, they’re good, but there aren’t many of them. Benigni is good
because he does everything—he writes, directs, and acts—which is
difficult to do. He’s had great success, although he isn’t a great director.
He’s a good actor and has a very good screenwriter, Vincenzo Cerami. As
we discussed earlier, he did the hardest thing in the world in Life Is
Beautiful: he made people laugh at what was happening in a concentration
camp. Almost an impossible thing to do—but he did it. From a terrible,
horrible subject he created comedy. This is typical, classical Italian
comedy. Italians know how to do it.
D.T.: All your films have this kind of Shakespearean vision of life,
blending the tragic side of things with the humorous.
M.M.: That’s what life is. It’s not as if I invented it.
D.T.: Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of directors in Italy today who have
the ambition to express life in its totality.
M.M.: Because they were born in a different social and political climate.
We were born under a dictatorship, we went to war, we lived through the
war, then we went through reconstructing the country. Even with all the
difficulties we were happy, lighthearted; we were glad the dictatorship fell,
happy the war was lost by the fascists: by the Italians—even though we
were Italian—and by the Nazis. So we had a different relationship to
reality. We were all poor, and we had to find ways to get by. I left home at
seventeen, like my brothers. They couldn’t feed us at home. Today kids
live at home with Mom and Dad until they’re thirty or more. Especially
the boys—the girls are more courageous.
D.T.: Today most people are glued to their television sets . . .
M.M.: . . . watching dancing girls and game shows offering money.
D.T.: Mr. Monicelli, what do you do to keep so young?
M.M.: I have good health! I eat and drink what I want, but in moderation.
I’m lucky.
D.T.: Are you actively working on anything right now?
M.M.: Yes. In Italy presently there is a mania for gambling: lotto, cards,
 An Interview with Mario Monicelli 49

soccer, all for money. So I’m making a film about this mania that has
captured Italy in the last few years, especially on television. It’s a huge
industry.
D.T.: There’s quite a bit of social criticism about it because most of the
people who gamble are those who can’t afford to do so. Instead of eating,
they gamble.
M.M.: Yes, it is mainly the poor who throw away their money in this way.
Gambling also discourages someone from learning a trade, or going to
school. Why should I learn a profession when I could guess the lucky
number and be set for life?
D.T.: So this new project sounds like a comedy.
M.M.: Yes, of course. I only make comedies!
 CHAPTER FOUR

MORE FROM LESS:

THE MOVIE AESTHETIC
OF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

BERT CARDULLO

In an interview with Michelangelo Antonioni in 1978 (later published

in 2008 in his collected interviews from the University Press of
Mississippi), I asked, “In a world without film, what would you have
made?” Like his work, the answer was concise. “Film,” he said. And in a
world with film, it could be said, Antonioni (1912-2007) also created film,
in the sense that he made a new art form or made the existing art form
new. In La notte (1961) even more strikingly than in L’avventura, with
which he scored his first international triumph in 1960, he was forging a
new language apposite to a changed world.
For Western society, theistically based and teleologically organized,
the concepts of drama that derived substantially from Aristotle had
sufficed for centuries. The cinema was born to that inheritance and, out of
it, still produced fine works in the 1960s (although with a perceptibly
increasing tinge of nostalgia that has, by the twenty-first century, become
overwhelmingly palpable). But Antonioni saw the dwindling force of this
inheritance—“of an aging morality, of outworn myths, of ancient
conventions,” as he put it in a statement accompanying the initial
screening of L’avventura at the Cannes Film Festival—and was finding
new means to supplement it. He was achieving, in other words, what
many contemporary artists in his and other fields were seeking but not
often with success: renewal of his art rather than repetition.
It is a commonplace that the most difficult part of an artist’s life in our
time is not to achieve a few good works or some recognition, but to have a
career, as Antonioni has done: to live a life in art, all through one’s life, at
52 Chapter Four

the same time as one replenishes the life of that art. But since the
beginning of the Romantic era and the rise of subjectivism, the use of
synthesis—of selecting from both observation and direct experience, then
imaginatively rearranging the results—has declined among serious artists,
until by the 1960s art had taken on some aspects of talented diary-keeping.
(The most obvious examples from the period are “confessional” poetry
and “action” painting.) An artist’s life and internal experience have thus
become more and more circumscribedly his subject matter, and his
willingness to stay within them has become almost a touchstone of his
validity. This has led to the familiar phenomenon of the quick depletion of
resources—all those interesting first and second works, and then the sad,
straggling works that follow them—not to speak of the debilitation of art.
The question is further complicated because the more sensitive a person is,
the more affected he is in our time by Ibsen’s Great Boyg—that shapeless,
grim, and unconquerable monster from Peer Gynt (1867) who represents
the riddle of existence—which increases the artist’s sense of helplessness,
of inability to deal with such experience as he does have.
One such response from the 1960s—the decade during which
Antonioni made his great trilogy, which includes L’eclisse (1962) in
addition to L’avventura and La notte—was that of Jackson Pollock, Hans
Hofmann, and their kin, who were exponents of dissatisfaction rather than
re-creation. Another was that of French anti-novelists like Alain Robbe-
Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, who, in their frustration with the limits of
the conventional novel, asked readers to share their professional problems
rather than be affected as readers. Bertolt Brecht, for his part, jostled the
traditional drama healthily (ironically, more so subsequent to his death in
1956 than prior to it), but his theater was didactic and aimed towards a
different godhead—a temporal one that now seems sterile to many. The
so-called Theater of the Absurd faced reality rigorously and even
poetically, but such a theater of images and few or no characters was
limited to disembodied effects—and each of its playwrights (Ionesco,
Beckett, Pinter) seemed to have one reiterated effect.
In films, too, the avant-garde—Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and many
others to follow—had tried to find new methods or forms; but they, too,
concentrated so much on the attempt that they neglected to communicate
much content. A more conventional artist like Ingmar Bergman felt the
spiritual discontent of the 1960s as keenly as anyone, but his films from
this period, for all their superb qualities, exemplify Buck Mulligan’s line
to Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “You have the cursed jesuit
strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way.” The fountainhead of these
Bergman films, that is, may be mysticism, but his asking whether the God-
 More from Less: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni 53

man relation was still viable seemed anachronistic—to put it mildly—by

the second half of the twentieth century. Antonioni himself seemed,
around the same time, to have answered that question in the negative; to
have posited that human beings must learn self-reliance or crumble; to
have begun hoping for the possibility of hope.
Nonetheless, Antonioni seemed to be forging a miracle, albeit of the
secular kind: finding a way to speak to his contemporaries without
crankily throwing away all that went before and without being bound by it.
He was re-shaping the idea of the content of film drama by discarding
ancient and less ancient concepts, by re-directing traditional audience
expectations towards immersion in character rather than conflict of
character, away from the social realism of his neorealist forbears and
toward what can be called “introspective realism”—in order to see just
what remained inside the individual after the nightmare of World War II
(with its Holocaust and atomic weaponry) and all the political as well as
economic upheavals that followed. Particularly in the trilogy but also in
the film immediately following it (and his first one in color), Il deserto
rosso (1964), Antonioni arrived—without inventing a totally new
language of cinema—at a new and profoundly cinematic mode of
expression or exposition, in which every aspect of style, of the purely
visual realm of action and object, reflects the interior state of the
characters.
Indeed, these films exemplified far more profoundly than any other
works of the time the capacity of the screen to be a source of myth in the
sense of crystallizations of centrally contemporary significance, of dreams,
and more—picturings of our truest, previously unsuspected selves. These
movies, linked to one another much less by subject than by sensibility and
attitude, were creations that told us what we were going to be like next,
how we were about to act, and the kind of regard we would have for our
actions. At the same time—and as a principle of these forecasts—they
delineated the world with a scrupulously accurate sobriety, a refusal to
enhance or “dramatize” what lay open to the ordinary eye.
The same cannot be said for such films of his from the previous decade
as Le amiche (1955) and Il grido (1957), though it’s true that as early as
Cronaca di un amore (1950) one can discern Antonioni’s habit of shooting
rather long scenes, in long takes. Antonioni was thus re-shaping not only
the idea of the content of film drama, he was also re-shaping time itself in
his films: taking it out of its customary synoptic form and wringing
intensity out of its distention; daring to ask his audience to “live through”
experiences with less distillation than they were accustomed to; deriving
his drama from the very texture of such experiences and their
54 Chapter Four

juxtaposition, rather than from formal clash, climax, and resolution.

Fundamentally, he was giving us characters whose drama consists in
facing life minute after minute rather than in moving through organized,
cause-and-effect plots with articulated obstacles—characters who have no
well-marked cosmos to use as a tennis player uses a court, and who live
and die without the implication of a divine eye that sees their virtues
(whether people do or not) and will reward them.
Over such characters, Antonioni ever hovered with his camera:
peering, following, and then lingering to savor a place after the people
have left it. Again, he was more interested in personality, mood, and the
physical world than in drama, in setting as a way of expressing states of
mind—so much so that in Il deserto rosso, he even had the natural
surroundings painted to serve the film’s underlying psychological scheme
as well as to connote the seemingly metaphysical world of its characters.
He was interested more in the observation of characters than in the
exigencies of storytelling. And it is this interest—if we apply
conventional cinematic standards—that at times makes his pictures, with
their elliptical approach to narrative, seem to have lost their way.
For Antonioni was trying to exploit the unique powers of film as
distinct from the theater. Many superb film directors (like Vittorio De
Sica) were oriented theatrically; Antonioni was not. He attempted to get
from the cinema the same utility of the medium itself as a novelist whose
point is not story but tone and character, and for whom the texture of the
prose means as much as what he says in the prose. In this way,
Antonioni’s movies, like other great works of film art, can be seen as
sharing in the flexibility and potential subtlety of imaginative prose, which
stems from the very abstractness of words, their not being “real” objects—
just as film, being made of reflections cast on a screen, is not “real” either.
In fact, by purely theatrical standards, any of Antonioni’s major
feature films could easily be condensed by a skilled cutter—in
L’avventura, for example, the search on the island, the visit to the deserted
town, the kisses of Sandro and Claudia in the field. But when the film is
all over, you see that such condensation would sharpen the pace at the
expense of the purpose. Antonioni wants the discoveries of this pair—of
every one of his characters, as I intimated earlier—to occur in something
more like real time than theatrical time, because long, lingering shots, by
their very leisurely immobility, suggest the overbearing pressure that time
exerts upon human emotions. Obviously, this is not real time or we would
all have to bring sandwiches and blankets with us to the movie theater; but
a difference of ten seconds in a scene is a tremendous step towards veristic
reproduction rather than theatrical abstraction.
 More from Less: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni 55

John Grierson once said that when a director dies, he becomes a

photographer; but Antonioni got emotional utility—in films about people,
let us not forget—out of the quasi-veristic reproduction of surfaces and
compositions. (Even his early documentaries, like Gente del Po [1947],
were about people, not about objects or places.) He used photography for
enrichment, in other words, not to elicit salon gasps. Thus the
overwhelming sense of characterological estrangement and malaise
conveyed by L’avventura, for one, is as much a product of the style of the
movie as of its events or dialogue.
In the island settings that dominate the first third of the film, for
instance, characters stand two or three in a shot, looking away from each
other and isolated against the sea or the arid volcanic landscape; indeed,
the studied compositions work to emphasize the space between characters
as much as the characters themselves. And cutting and camera movement
are unconventional, not simply for the sake of being so, but to lend force
to the film’s ideas. To wit: point-of-view shots are rare (part of
Antonioni’s battery of techniques precluding simple emotional
involvement on our part), and the basic narrative resource of the shot-
reverse-shot pattern is carefully modified, so as simultaneously to express
the internal dislocation of this world and to position us in relation to it.
L’avventura’s breaking the “rules” of film grammar is not merely
capricious, then, and the much admired “beauty” of the film’s photography
is not simply pictorialism. Our very awareness of such composition,
texture, and montage helps to keep us at the contemplative distance that
the picture requires.
Such a contemplative distance is required because, in L’avventura,
Antonioni introduced to the screen an almost unprecedented, empathy-
reducing quality of randomness or indeterminate narration. The long,
fruitless search for the girl lost on the island and her subsequently being
entirely dropped from the plot were particularly striking instances of an
imagination no longer concerned to use the screen for purposes of shapely,
narratively consistent, and logically unfolding drama. And it was these
gaps and holes, the seemingly aimless movements of the film’s action, that
were a chief source of the tedium felt by many of the film’s first viewers,
just as, on the contrary, they were the very basis of its supremely original
beauty in the eyes of a minority who could look at it without
preconceptions.
La notte takes us to the same place, by a different route. Here
Antonioni leads us into the city, into concrete walls and reflections in
glass, after the rocks, great spaces, sea, and terraces of L’avventura. And
here the search, or the movement, comes to the same end, or a fractional
56 Chapter Four

distance beyond. The acceptance is made of what we are; it is impossible

not to accept such a conclusion as this film dies out on its couple
shatteringly united in the dust, because everything we are not, but which
we have found no other means of shedding, has been stripped away. La
notte, then, is composed according to the same principle of narrative
indeterminacy as its predecessor—the same refusal to tell an easily
repeatable, anecdotal “story,” and of course it proceeds from the same
kind of insight into contemporary moral or psychic dilemmas. The
relationship between the insight and its expression is crucial, and I will
return to it, but at this point I want to discuss the sequence that, in my
view, best represents Antonioni’s style: the one from La notte in which
Lidia, the wife of the novelist Giovanni, slips away from the publisher’s
party and wanders through the streets of Milan.
Conditioned as we are, we expect something to happen during this
sequence; we think that Lidia is off to meet a lover, or that she may get
involved in an accident, even that she may intend to kill herself. But
nothing happens, and everything happens. Lidia strolls past a bus
conductor eating a sandwich and is fascinated both by his existence and
his appetite in the same universe with her; she passes two men laughing
uproariously at a joke and she smiles, too, although she has not heard it,
anxious as she is to join them, to be one of the human race; she encounters
a crying child and kneels briefly but unsuccessfully to comfort it; she tears
a flake of rust off a corroding wall; she sees two young men punching each
other ferociously, watches horrified, then screams for them to stop. Next,
in the suburbs, Lidia watches some boys shooting off rockets. She finds
she is in a neighborhood where she and Giovanni used to come years
before, so she telephones him and he drives out to pick her up.
Now by film-school definition, this is not a cumulative dramatic
sequence. It is a miniature recapitulation, deftly done, of the possibilities
of life: there is a child but there is also an old woman; we see a man eating
and a man punching; sunlight on a fountain gets juxtaposed, at one point,
against the lewdness of a greasy stall-keeper. Antonioni holds it all
together with something like the surface tension of liquids and, by not
commenting, comments. His art is essentially as drastic a revolution as
abstract expressionist painting or Samuel Beckett’s litany-like
deconstruction of dialogue, but Antonioni has not estranged us in order to
speak to us about loneliness, and he has not sacrificed the link of
recognition in order to create new images. Put another way, he has not
had to use absurdity to convey the absurd—an absurd made manifest in
our age by the crisis of faith, for which, in La notte, Lidia and Giovanni’s
vitiated marriage itself serves as one large metaphor.
 More from Less: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni 57

I think this stripped and mercilessly bare, yet nonetheless

“recognizable,” quality of Antonioni’s films is what was then so new, and
what is still so marvelous, about them. The island criss-crossed a hundred
times in L’avventura with nothing come upon; the conversations, from any
film in Antonioni’s trilogy, that fall into a void; the head and shoulders of
Jeanne Moreau (as Lidia) traveling, microscopically, along the angle of a
building in La notte; unfilled or unoccupied distances; a bisected figure
gazing from the corner of an immense window in L’avventura: all adding
up to anomie, anguish, abandonment, diminishment, the anticipated event
or sighting that never occurs, just as Godot never comes. For Beckett and
Antonioni are two artists who enforce our relinquishment of the answer,
the solution, the arrival, two creators who dis-illusion us (and, in
Antonioni’s case, without simultaneously estranging us). The search for
reality, and not reality as it appears to be, is thus Antonioni’s subject; his
discovery is that the real world is lying, is insubstantial, and even
treacherous, a thoroughgoing accomplice of our lovelessness.
Lovelessness, and the tiny, sorrowing, infinitely vulnerable gestures
we try to make to restore the possibility of love—these, too, are
Antonioni’s subjects; they, too, make up the new reality he has discovered.
Both L’avventura and La notte end in scenes of almost unbearably painful
acceptance: of our having to be what we are, of there being no fiction that
will exonerate or console us, no ending. Monica Vitti places her hand on
Gabriele Ferzetti’s head in the most delicate, dry-eyed, yet anguished
acceptance of what they are: frail, faithless, destined to defeat; the victory
is in the recognition of this. And the couple of La notte, writhing carnally
in the dust on the rich man’s lawn, struggle ferociously toward truth, or
rather toward truthfulness. They do not love; they may love again; they
have at least begun by acknowledging their suffering and despair.
Clearly, L’avventura and La notte are movies without a traditional
subject. (We can only think they are “about” the despair of the idle rich or
our ill-fated quest for pleasure if we are intent on making old anecdotes
out of new essences: more on this subject later.) Yet they are about
nothing we could have known without them, nothing to which we had
already attached meanings or that we had surveyed in other ways. They
are, without being abstract, about nothing in particular, being instead, like
most painting of their period, self-contained and absolute, an action and
not the description of an action. To paraphrase Beckett on the fiction of
James Joyce, L’avventura and La notte are films of something, not “about”
something.
They are part of that next step in our feelings that true art is continually
eliciting and recording. We had been taking that step for a long time, most
58 Chapter Four

clearly in painting, but also in music, in certain areas of fiction, in anti-

theatre or meta-theatre (of the kind, still scarce, which through new
parodic languages, breaks with everything moribund or dead in our
theater). It might be described as accession through reduction, the coming
into truer forms through the cutting away of created encumbrances: all the
replicas we have made of ourselves; all the misleading, because logical or
only psychological, narratives; the whole apparatus of reflected wisdom,
inherited emotions, received ideas, reiterated clichés. For, as the leading
woman, Claudia, says in L’avventura: “Things are not like that . . .
everything has become so terribly simple.”
When, in my early twenties, I followed that long, disconsolate,
abandoned island-search in L’avventura, that arc of despair which led to
truth—the assurance, that is, in knowing that one can live without
assurances—I knew that it traced what I had been prepared to feel next;
that from then on it would be impossible not to see existence with the
same narrowed, dry-eyed, precipice-crawling intentness as Antonioni.
Now we have all had the experience of watching a film that seems to be
changing our perception as it unfolds, affecting the way we see and not
simply offering us exotic or heightened images of what we have already
perceived without the camera’s intervention. And when we leave the
movie theater we discover that the world, which we thought we knew, has
changed to meet the new ways in which it’s being regarded. This
reciprocity—a new reality being summoned by a new perceptiveness and
in turn compelling that perceptiveness into being—seems to me to be at
the heart of the filmmaker’s art and of the filmgoer’s experience on the
level of creative spectatorship. On any other level a film, like every object
of popular culture, is there to console, divert, flatter, bludgeon, or
confirm—in any case to see to it that we remain unchanged.
In the preface to the 1963 volume of screenplays for four of his films,
Antonioni himself wrote, “The problem for a director is to catch reality an
instant before it manifests itself and to propound that movement, that
appearance, that action as a new perception.” In its rescuing of the
director from the status of a recording agent who decides which aspects of
established reality are to be photographed (or, rather, who enhances or
“dramatizes” those aspects of reality that lie open to the ordinary eye), this
seems to me to be as useful a description of the art of filmmaking as we
are likely to find. Or at least of one aspect of filmmaking; there is another,
which is the inventing of reality, the making of something that hasn’t
existed before.
I’d like to think, however, that Antonioni would agree that the two
functions are ultimately the same, that the act of discovery of what reality
 More from Less: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni 59

is going to be next, the apprehension of its impending face, is a mysterious

cause of the new, a procedure that brings it into being and that thus invents
reality anew. If this weren’t true, then the director would merely be
prescient and his art only one of prediction. The artist is indeed a kind of
prophet, but prophecy isn’t simply prediction; it is a force, a pressure on
things to be other than they would be if left to themselves. And this
power, while it may partake of or draw upon fantasy, isn’t in its most
serious uses a faculty of fantasy at all; there is nothing “unreal” or escapist
in what it brings to birth.
To say all these things, though, is not to say why Antonioni’s best
works, those of the 1960s, are so much greater than, say, Federico Fellini’s
La dolce vita (1960)—another picture, like Antonioni’s trilogy, on the
theme of well-heeled decadence and the moral crisis of the haute
bourgeoisie, but one marred by its patness or obviousness and the
mechanical application of its ideas. The critical failure has always been in
not seeing that Antonioni’s films transcend their ostensible subject and
milieu, as La dolce vita does not, that L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse
are creations of universal validity and not simply portraits of a particular
class or of a particular species of decadence. All three films, their
readings go, are documents of upper-class exhaustion, fables of
sophisticated despair. All three testify to present anomie among the
privileged, the failure of sexuality to overcome existential ennui, and to
the spiritual aridity that accompanies all dedicated pursuits of pleasure.
But these readings are all too thorough, certain, and self-confident, and
they are mistaken.
I say this despite Antonioni’s own statement to me that “the experience
which has been most important in making me the director I have become
is that of my own middle-class background. It is that world which has
contributed most to my predilection for certain themes, certain conflicts,
certain emotional or psychological problems.” (Read closely, however,
this statement cannot be equated with the declaration that Antonioni’s
films directly concern, and only concern, the [upper] middle class.) His
films are not really about decadence at all. Like Henry James’s novels,
these pictures employ privileged characters, men and women with the total
physical and economic freedom to choose their lives, precisely in order to
exhibit the difficulties of such choice, the anguish of such freedom, for
anyone who has it—even if only in part.
Thematically, Antonioni was treating of human connections no longer
sustained by traditional values, or by any convictions at all (a humanity
with too much freedom of choice, as it were), and therefore forced to abide
with the most fragile and precarious of justifications. One might say that
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his films were the first truly existential ones. When I first saw them I was
filled with a sense of discovery of a world—a visual one this time, not a
theoretical, abstract one as in Kierkegaard or Sartre—which no longer
replied to the questions I had about it and gave me no feeling of nurture,
acceptance, or invitation. And that is the way Antonioni’s characters
move through their environments, in a new and strange alienation, an
individual isolation in the midst of constant social interaction: a condition
very different from, and far more subtle than, what is suggested by the
clichés of modern sophisticated awareness, all our talk (even more
feverish in the twenty-first century) about the failure of communication,
technological dehumanization, the death of God, the fragmentation or
atomization of society, and the like.
This new alienation—this despair or desolation in spite of the
superficial appearance of affluence and pleasure, this emotional barrenness
that Antonioni called (in a public appearance at the 1962 Cannes Festival)
“the eclipse of all feelings”—is what we might call his subject or theme,
but that isn’t the same thing as his art and it is a great mistake to think it is.
The basis for my argument that Antonioni’s films are not “about” a
decadent class—let alone the death throes of capitalism—is that the visual
world he composes, the one he discovers beneath appearances and calls
into being, is the one we all inhabit, whether or not we have been
summoned into any of its particular scenes. This is one reason why
L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse are related in an indestructible unity:
in the first picture, we move through physical landscapes, bare islands, the
sea, or through nature and whitewashed ancient towns that seem to be part
of nature; in the latter two films, we move through the city (Rome, rather
than Milan, in L’eclisse), with its geometry of streets and its assembly of
artifacts, the coldest products of modern materialistic “wit” and
inventiveness, the new nature. Between them these hemispheres make up
the world for all of us. But it is Antonioni’s characters that have been
given the task of being its explorers—and its exhibited sacrifices.
Coherence, unity, connection between interior self and exterior reality
are no longer sustained by this world of commerce and utility, so its
inhabitants have to establish for themselves the very ground of their
behavior. What is mistaken for boredom in Antonioni’s characters, then,
is actually a condition of radical disjunction between personality and
circumstance. For a vital connection has been broken: the physical world
has been dispossessed of the inherited meanings and principles according
to which we had previously motivated our lives and structured its psychic
as well as moral events. In such a world the idea of a “story,” in the sense
of a progressive tale leading from a fixed starting point to a dénouement
 More from Less: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni 61

that “settles” something or solves some problem, no longer has any use
and is in fact inimical to the way this world is actually experienced.
This is the reason for the broken narratives, the conversations in a void,
the events leading nowhere—the search for the lost girl in L’avventura,
Jeanne Moreau’s wandering without destination through the city in La
notte, the final, fifty-eight-shot montage in L’eclisse from which not only
the couple Vittoria and Piero but all human contact is banished. For a
story implies a degree of confidence in the world, or at least a trustfulness
that our environment, no matter how painful or brutal it might be, is
knowable, makes sense, hangs together. But of course there is a “story” in
Antonioni’s films, though not of the traditional kind. Will I be understood
if I say that this story is in one sense the tale of the end of the stories with
which the screen, along with the novel (the art form film most nearly
resembles), has heretofore beguiled us? I mean that our former modes of
fiction—the love story, the romantic quest, the action epic—have lost their
power of conviction because the world we experience has lost its own such
power. The essence of Antonioni’s art in these films therefore is to forge,
in the face of our lost convictions and acceptances about the world—
convictions and acceptances upon which we had based our narrative arts—
a new, mercilessly stripped “telling” of our condition of bereftness and
chill, one that refuses to find “endings” or resolutions or definitive images
that reassure us.
Such abstraction and reduction, like irony and parody, are forms of
aggression against the traditional subject, against what art is supposed to
treat. They are, much more than direct violence, our most effective means
of liberating our experience, of releasing those unnamed emotions and
perceptions that have been blockaded by everything we have been taught
to see and hear and feel. This blockage is the reason why, despite the fact
that Antonioni’s films are far from experimental in the sense of the work
of Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, or Andy Warhol, his fictional
narratives always feel flattened, or why they seem curiously mat, as if the
spectator’s ability to gain immediate access to the fiction were being
impeded by something. Put another way, we are learning something in the
act of watching a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, and that always feels at
first as if we are losing something.
And what we learn from Antonioni’s world of alienation and
disjunction is exemplified, as I have tried to make clear, not merely by
what his characters do and say, but by the images they compose and that
are composed as the context for their cinematic existence. I think now of
the revelers eddying like dry leaves across the rich man’s lawn in
L’avventura; the rain on the car window making a screen between the
62 Chapter Four

woman and her potential lover in La notte; the camera tracking slowly
around the woman’s room in Il deserto rosso, painstakingly exhibiting
every domestic object in its absolute separateness from, and indifference
to, her feelings; the seven-minute take at the end of The Passenger (1975)
that proceeds, in a 360-degree pan, out of the reporter Locke’s hotel room,
through a wrought-iron grill on to a dusty Spanish plaza, and then finally
returns to the room where Locke now lies dead. All these images are of a
world newly forced to yield up its true face, to look like what we have
secretly felt it to be.
“The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought,”
the great critic and theorist of the French New Wave, Alexandre Astruc,
wrote over sixty years ago. L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, and two or
three other Antonioni films are works in which thought (impulsive or
instinctual though it may be in Antonioni’s case)—indissolubly fused with
image, lying behind it, selecting it and justifying it—produces an art
worthy of ranking with any other. Indeed, I don’t think it too much to say
that the movies, having come into their maturity at this time—around the
middle of the twentieth century—have been giving us, ever since, more (or
more useful) freedom than any other form.
Let me digress for a moment and say what should be obvious by my
very choice of Antonioni as the subject of this essay: that I respond most
to austerity and restraint and economy in films. When I say austerity and
restraint I certainly don’t mean narrowness of imagination or skimpiness
of theme. I mean a cinema with silences and absences that can reveal
more than thick, dense presences—the hurly-burly activity with which it is
all too easy for a filmmaker to clot our eyes. After all, the world is
indubitably there in its plethora of detail, and if that isn’t enough there’s
always the studio in which to construct spaceships and saloons with
swinging doors. But the austerity I’m thinking about isn’t always a matter
of a repudiation of physical sumptuousness, and in any case a cinema thick
with objects and actions isn’t necessarily the same as one with visual
richness. Good films, after all, are precisely interactions of the extremely
visual and the interiorly personal, and the austerity I’ve been talking about
concerns more than anything else the intelligence to resist handing over
everything to the purely visual, to action and object for their own sakes.
In the entire range of Antonioni’s oeuvre, we see being fought this
tendency of narrative to turn into an extended anecdote that serves either
to legitimate or mythologize actuality, and thus to turn it into nothing more
than an illustration of what we have already undergone, surmised, or
wished for. That Antonioni, like other filmmakers (among them Godard,
Bresson, Dreyer, and Ozu) who try to present not new stories but new
 More from Less: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni 63

relationships between consciousness and reality, was expected to do

otherwise was the basis not only of complaint against ostensible failures of
his like L’avventura and L’eclisse. It was also the basis of extreme outcry
against the apparently more “mod,” more mainstream Blow-Up (1966)—
even among many of Antonioni’s erstwhile supporters.
But in Blow-Up Antonioni was not attempting a portrait of London,
swinging or otherwise, so that the accusation at the time, “That’s not what
it’s like,” was especially obtuse. If anything, Antonioni’s stranger’s eye
on London provided him with the perspective of strategic naïveté, the
freedom from any complacent conviction of knowledge, the anti-
sophistication that he needed to be able to set about his real business.
(And Antonioni, like any artist, was in need of such unsophistication on
the level of the human and the social, for one creates in order to find out,
not to exemplify what one already knows.) This was precisely to deal with
the relationship between what we think the world is like—our ideas
derived mainly from what others have thought it is like and, especially
today, from publicized ideas about it—and what the imagination together
with all other perceptive powers is compelled to decide.
Blow-Up is really “about” something society, as society, cannot know
in regard to itself: the fact of life caught between complacent knowledge
and radical doubt, passion and enervation, reality and illusion. Its subject
isn’t London or sexual mores and ennui among the chic, but the way in
which the imagination attends to such things. The film’s central
sequence—the fashion photographer Thomas’s “discovery” of a murder
concealed in the fine grain of one of his photographs—conveys the theme
concisely. It is only by blowing up tiny sections of the picture that this
new reality, of death, is revealed; that is, only by adopting an alternative
perspective can we get a different sense out of what we perceive. All of
Antonioni’s movies are similarly new forms of perception about, and
artifacts of, our continuing dilemmas and contradictions and perplexities,
not representations of them. That is why I still remember my first
experience of such a picture, have gone back to it here, and will continue
to re-visit it, like my experiences of other Antonioni films—in movie
theaters as well as in the movie theater, or mind screen, of my imagination.
 CHAPTER FIVE

THE CINEMA AS HERESY,

OR THE PASSION OF PASOLINI:
AN INTERVIEW WITH PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

FROM PASOLINI ON PASOLINI:

INTERVIEWS WITH OSWALD STACK.
BLOOMINGTON: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1969

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema is deeply embedded in Italian culture:

hence the confusion that many British and American critics have felt when
confronted with his work. This is not only because many of the important
influences on Pasolini (1922-1975)—Pascoli, Gramsci, Rossellini—are
little known in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also
because Italian culture itself is full of contradictory traits and components,
which Pasolini’s films reflect. The most obvious of these contradictions, of
course, is that between Catholicism and Marxism, the two commanding
ideologies that dominate Italian intellectual life, both of which have left
their stamp on Pasolini. The restlessness and eclecticism of Pasolini’s
career, which shifted incessantly from one genre to another—painting,
poetry, criticism, short stories, novels, feature films, reportage, and the
theater—and from one style and subject matter to another, reflect a search
for some appeasement of the multiplicity of incompatible contradictions
that formed his view of the world and of art.
Pasolini’s Marxism itself is far from being a unifying system: in his
thought it is but one of many conflicting strands, now surfacing, now
submerging. If there is one constant, one invariable, it is Pasolini’s
uncritical attachment to the peasantry, an attachment that can be presented
in the light of Marxism, but more consistently in the light of a backward-
looking romanticism. He took from Gramsci, for example, the emphasis
on the potentially revolutionary role of the Italian peasantry and the need,
66 Chapter Five

in Italian conditions, for a national-popular movement. Thus was Pasolini

able to absorb Marxism partially without permitting it to overwhelm in its
totality other aspects of his thought.
When Pasolini started directing films he had already worked on a
number of scripts, for directors like Fellini and Bolognini. This was on the
strength of his Roman novels, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta. Many
of his scripts were set in the same Roman sub-proletarian milieu, and these
led directly to his first films as a director, Accattone and Mamma Roma,
which should be seen as part of his “Roman” period, including novels and
screenplays as well as his work as a director in his own right. It is
misleading to divorce Pasolini’s work in the cinema from his other work,
particularly his writing: poetry, novels, criticism. Like Robbe-Grillet and
Kluge, Pasolini was a writer before he was a director, and his writing
continued unabated throughout his career. Theorem, for example, appeared
as a book as well as a film.
After Mamma Roma, Pasolini’s next major work was The Gospel
According to St. Matthew, in which the influence of Rossellini, especially
his film Francesco, giullare di Dio, first became prominent. Pasolini’s
cinema is clearly in the tradition not only of Rossellini but also of Dreyer
and Mizoguchi, in its juxtaposition of natural and supernatural elements,
though it lacks the purity and coherence of the work of these masters. In
The Gospel, for instance, a traditional Christology, drawn from sacred
music and painting, is superimposed on the brusque and literal,
Rossellinian treatment of a popular and anecdotal text, and the result is to
deliver the film into the hands of the Catholic Church. Yet The Gospel is
the film of Pasolini’s that least betrays his drive towards eclecticism and
pastiche. In Uccellacci e uccellini, for instance, different levels, styles, and
allusions—to Rossellini, Fellini, Lukács, Togliatti, even the Pope—jostle
against each other in hopeless confusion.
Despite the lack of any consistent drive, either in form or content, one
underlying tendency can be discerned in Pasolini’s career: his emphasis on
the need to restore an epic and mythological dimension to life, a sense of
awe and reverence to the world—a sense, he believed, that the peasantry
still sustain, though the bourgeoisie itself has done all in its power to
destroy it. The following interview with him was conducted in Rome over
a period of two weeks in 1968. The original Italian has been edited in the
process of translation. Pasolini, who does not speak English, consented to
the publication of this interview in translation without himself checking
the final version as printed here.

Oswald Stack: Could you tell me how your thinking about the Italian
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 67

language as a medium has evolved as you have moved from poetry to

novels and on to the cinema?
Pier Paolo Pasolini: First, I’d like to say that you can see my pasticheur
nature in the cinema, as in other art forms—pasticheur by passion, that is,
not by calculation. If you see a bit of one of my films, you can tell it’s
mine from the tone. It’s not like with, say, Godard or Chaplin, who have
invented a style which is completely their own. Mine is made up of
various styles. You can always feel underneath my love for Dreyer,
Mizoguchi, and Chaplin—and some of Tati. Basically, my nature hasn’t
changed in the move from literature to cinema.
My ideas on the relationship between the Italian language and the
cinema are much better expressed in my essays on the subject, but very
simply let me say this: at first I thought the shift from literature to cinema
involved simply a change of technique, as I have often changed
techniques. Then gradually, as I worked in the cinema and got more and
more into it, I came to understand that the cinema is not a literary
technique; it is a language of its own. The first idea that came to me was
that I had instinctively given up writing novels and then gradually given
up poetry, too, as a protest against Italy and Italian society. I have several
times said I would like to change nationality, give up Italian and take up
another language; so I came to the idea that the language of the cinema is
not a national language, it is a language I like to define as “transnational”
(not “international,” because this is ambiguous) and “transclass”—i.e., a
worker or a bourgeois, a Ghanaian or an American, when they use the
language of the cinema all use a common system of signs. So at first I
thought this was a protest against my society. Then gradually I realized it
was even more complicated than that: the passion that had taken the form
of a great love for literature and for life gradually stripped itself of the love
for literature and turned to what it really was—a passion for life, for
reality, for physical, sexual, objective, existential reality around me. This
is my first and only great love and the cinema in a way forced me to turn
to it and express only it.
How did this come about? By studying the cinema as a system of
signs, I came to the conclusion that it is a non-conventional and non-
symbolic language unlike the written or spoken language, and expresses
reality not through symbols but via reality itself. If I have to express you, I
express you through yourself; if I want to express that tree I express it
through itself. The cinema is a language that expresses reality with reality.
So the question is: what is the difference between the cinema and reality?
Practically none. I realized that the cinema is a system of signs whose
semiology corresponds to a possible semiology of the system of signs of
68 Chapter Five

reality itself. So the cinema forced me to remain always at the level of

reality, right inside reality: when I make a film I am always in reality,
among the trees and among people like yourself; there is no symbolic or
conventional filter between me and reality, as there is in literature. So in
practice the cinema was an explosion of my love for reality.
O.S.: I’d like to go back and ask you how you started out in the cinema.
You’ve said that you thought about making movies when you were a
child, and then gave up the idea. What was the first film you saw—and did
it make a strong impression?
P.P.P.: Unfortunately, I can’t remember the first film I saw because I was
too young. But I can tell you about my first relationship with the cinema,
as I remember it, when I was five years old—which was a bit weird, and
certainly had an erotic-sexual facet to it. I remember that I was looking at
a publicity folder for a film showing a tiger tearing a man to pieces.
Obviously the tiger was on top of the man, but for some unknown reason it
seemed to me with my child’s imagination that the tiger had half-
swallowed the man and the other half was still protruding out of its jaws. I
terribly wanted to see the film; naturally my parents wouldn’t take me,
which I bitterly regret to this day. So this image of the tiger eating the
man, which is a masochistic and perhaps cannibalistic image, is the first
thing that remained impressed on me. Though obviously I saw other
movies at the time, I can’t remember them. Then when I was about seven
or eight, and was living at Sacile, I used to go to a cinema run by some
priests, and I can remember bits of some of the silent movies I saw there,
and I can remember the transition to the talkies: the first talkie I ever saw
was a war movie.
So much for my cinema pre-history. Then when I was in Bologna I
joined a film club and saw some of the classics—all of René Clair, the first
Renoirs, some Chaplin, and so on. That’s where my great love for the
cinema started. I remember entering a local literary competition and
writing a mad D’Annunzian piece, completely barbaric and sensual. Then
the war interrupted everything. After the war came neorealism. I can
remember going especially from Casarsa to Udine to see Bicycle Thieves,
and above all Rome, Open City, which I saw up in Friuli, which was a real
trauma that I still remember with emotion. But these films were only
remote cultural objects for me while I was still living in the provinces, like
the books and reviews I used to get sent to me. Then I came down to
Rome, not thinking at all about going into the cinema, and when I wrote
my first novel, Ragazzi di vita, some directors asked me to do scripts for
them. The first was Mario Soldati, an early Sophia Loren piece called La
donna del fiume, which I did with Giorgio Bassani, who himself is also the
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 69

author of several novels, including Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini. Then

there was Le notti di Cabiria with Fellini, and quite a lot of others, and so
the desire to make films naturally came back to me.
O.S.: You seem to have worked with directors with whom you have little
in common, people like Bolognini, for example. You don’t seem to me to
have much in common with Fellini, either. The person with whom you do
share a great deal is obviously Rossellini, yet you never worked with him.
Why is this?
P.P.P.: Purely practical reasons. When I came to Rome I was completely
broke. I didn’t have a job, and I spent a year in extreme poverty—some
days I didn’t even have the money to go to the barber, for example, so you
can see I was in the most dire poverty. Then I started teaching at a school
at Ciampino, so I went to live at Ponte Mammolo, which is a slum right on
the outskirts of Rome. I had to make a terribly long journey each day, and
I earned only 27,000 lire (just over £16 at the time) a month. When my
first novel came out I started to get a few royalties, but I still needed a job
badly, so I became a scriptwriter. Obviously I couldn’t choose whom I was
going to work with; it was the other way round. But I was very lucky, for I
always had good people to work with. Although this was all
commissioned work, I feel that some of the scripts (like La notte brava)
are among the best literary works I have ever done: I’ve collected some of
them in Alì Dagli Occhi Azzurri.
O.S.: What part did you have in Le notti di Cabiria?
P.P.P.: I wrote all the low-life parts. As there were these kinds of
characters in Ragazzi di vita, Fellini thought I knew that world, as indeed I
did because I had lived out at Ponte Mammolo, where lots of pimps and
petty thieves and whores lived; all of the setting, Cabiria’s relations with
the other whores, and especially the episode about Divine Love were done
by me—the story’s in Alì Dagli Occhi Azzurri. My main contribution was
in the dialogue, which has been a bit lost because Fellini’s use of dialect is
fairly different from mine. Basically, the first draft of the dialogue and at
least half the episodes are mine.
O.S.: You’ve worked quite a lot with Bassani: how did you meet?
P.P.P.: We’re very close friends and we’ve worked together a lot. I first
met him when he was running the review Botteghe Oscure. I went to see
him professionally, and then we became great friends. I wrote for his
review, and we both admire each other’s work.
O.S.: Apart from the period when you were doing scripts for other
directors, there is nothing to ask you about your collaborators, as you seem
to be the complete auteur of all your own films. Did you feel very
disappointed with what other directors did to your texts?
70 Chapter Five

P.P.P.: No, a director has the right to make these changes. But if I wanted
to describe a certain milieu, certain faces and gestures that were
transformed from how I’d imagined them, then, naturally, there was a gulf
I wanted to bridge—apart from my long-standing desire to make movies.
As for my own films, I never conceived of making a film that would be the
work of a group. I’ve always thought of a film as the work of an author—
not only the script and the direction, but the choice of sets and locations,
the characters, even the clothes; I choose everything, not to mention the
music. I have collaborators, like Danilo Donati, my costume designer; I
have the first idea for a costume, but I wouldn’t know how to make the
thing, so he does all that, extremely well, with excellent taste and zest.
O.S.: I’d like to ask you a bit about how you work. Totò laid some stress
on the fact that you shot everything in very short takes: is that your normal
method?
P.P.P.: Yes, I always shoot very short takes. Referring back to what I said
earlier, this is the essential difference between me and the neorealists. The
main feature of neorealism is the long take; the camera sits in one place
and films a scene as it would be in real life, with people coming and going,
talking to each other, looking at each other just as they would in real life.
Whereas I myself never use a long take (or virtually never). I hate
naturalness. I reconstruct everything. I never have somebody talking in a
long shot away from the camera; I have to have him talking straight into
the camera, so there is never a scene in any of my films where the camera
is to one side and the characters are talking away among themselves. They
are always in champ contre champ, or shot-reverse shot. So I shoot like
that—each person says his bit and that’s it. I never do a whole scene all in
one take.
O.S.: This must have created difficulties with some actors. Surely some of
them must have wanted to know what was happening.
P.P.P.: Yes. It works easily with non-professionals, because they do
everything I ask them to, and anyway it is easier for them to behave
naturally. I must admit that professional actors get a bit traumatized
because they are used to having to act. Besides—and this is rather
important for defining my way of working—real life is full of nuances and
actors like to be able to reproduce them. An actor’s great ambition is to
start out weeping and then move very, very gradually through all the
different stages of emotion to laughing. But I hate nuances and I hate
naturalism, so an actor inevitably feels a bit disappointed working with me
because I remove some of the basic elements of his craft, indeed the basic
element—which is miming naturalness. So for Anna Magnani it was a
major crisis to have to work with me. Totò argued a little and then gave in.
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 71

Silvana Mangano accepted immediately without the slightest discussion,

and I think this method suited her, because she is a very fine actress.
O.S.: You’ve acted a bit yourself—as the High Priest in Oedipus, and for
Lizzani in Il gobbo. How did that happen?
P.P.P.: I’ve acted twice for Lizzani. He is an old friend of mine and I just
couldn’t say no. I very much enjoyed it, and it was quite useful just to give
me an idea of what a set was like—because I did the acting part in Il
gobbo before I made Accattone. It was a bit of a holiday as well; I did a lot
of reading. The other part was in a western Lizzani made recently, called
Requiescant, where I played a Mexican priest on the side of the rebels.
O.S.: Directors from different countries work in different ways. Do you
yourself give all the actors the complete script?
P.P.P.: When it exists, yes. But Theorem, for example, I shot almost
without a script at all. Silvana Mangano saw it for the first time when the
film was half finished. But in general I always give the actors the script
out of politeness, though in fact I prefer to talk to each one about his or her
role. No method is perfect because, as you know very well, if I say “sad”
there are infinite gradations of sadness; if I say “egotistic” there are plenty
of different ways to be egotistical. Basically I prefer to set everything up
by talking to the actor and trying to define the part like that.
O.S.: Do you tend to change the script much while you’re shooting?
P.P.P.: No, in general the only changes are minor adaptations, either
because of the setting or, more often, to the character when I see how he or
she is working out in the part.
O.S.: What about Franco Citti in Accattone—although you did not use his
voice at all, did you fix what he was supposed to say with him before
shooting?
P.P.P.: Oh, yes. The whole script was written for him personally, even
though he did not speak it. I wrote every line for him, and the script in the
film is exactly as I wrote it, down to the last comma.
O.S.: What about Orson Welles—was it difficult to direct him? Did the
fact that he was both a great director and a great intellectual lead to de
facto co-direction?
P.P.P.: No, no, Welles is both an intellectual and an extremely intelligent
person; he was a very obedient actor. I am just the same with Lizzani; I
never open my mouth. I think directors understand this aspect of working
better than anybody. It was really wonderful working with Orson Welles;
in fact I tried very hard to get him for Theorem, but it was impossible. I’m
thinking of trying to get him for St. Paul.
O.S.: What about the American cinema? The last time I heard you talking
about this—in an interview in Filmcritica in April-May of 1965—you
72 Chapter Five

were fairly enthusiastic about Cassavetes’ Shadows and about It’s a Mad,
Mad, Mad, Mad World, but you seemed not to be following the American
cinema very closely: is this still the case?
P.P.P.: I used to go a lot when I was younger, in fact until I started making
films; since then I’ve been going much less. I’m not quite sure why this is.
One factor certainly is that after a whole day working on a film I find it
physically impossible to go back to the cinema; after hours and hours in
front of a Moviola I just don’t feel like it. Then I get slightly panic-
stricken when confronted with a film of mine that is finished, so much so
that I don’t want to see my film or anyone else’s! Fellini doesn’t go to the
cinema at all now, ever, and I can understand him, though I think it is a bit
much never to go. Also I have become much more demanding: I can’t go
to the cinema for entertainment any longer, just to enjoy myself at some
American movie; I used to like doing that, but now I will only go if I’m
guaranteed 90 per cent that the film is going to be really good—and that
happens only about five or six times a year.
O.S.: But do you still follow the work of directors you were interested in
before—would you definitely go and see a new John Ford, for example?
P.P.P.: Well, Ford is a bad example, because I don’t much like him. I
don’t like the great epic American directors. I did like the American
cinema very much when I was younger but I don’t like it now, though
there are still some directors I would go and see if they made a new film. I
don’t feel I have got very much from the American cinema except the
myth of the cinema, which I’ll leave to Godard and the Cahiers du cinéma
crowd. Basically the real myth of the cinema came to me from the auteurs
I mentioned earlier, from the silent cinema.
O.S.: When you went to the cinema, whom did you follow?
P.P.P.: Well, it was all a bit indistinct then, for I just went to see average
American products; I think most of the directors I liked weren’t really
American anyway: they were Europeans who had immigrated to
America—people like Lang and Lubitsch. But I didn’t like the last big
American productions just before the war, or the postwar stuff—say, by
people like Kazan. I can sometimes admire them, but I don’t really like
them.
O.S.: You have mentioned the importance to you of Mizoguchi: do you
follow the Japanese cinema as a whole?
P.P.P.: Very few Japanese films come to Italy, unfortunately. I don’t like
Kurosawa nearly as much as others do, but I like what I’ve seen of Kon
Ichikawa—The Burmese Harp was a very fine film, and so was his film on
the Olympics.
O.S.: What about the general condition of the Italian cinema? In
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 73

Uccellacci e uccellini you portray the death of neorealism, but can you see
anything to take its place, or just chaos? Is there anybody in Italy you
follow particularly?
P.P.P.: The situation as I see it is extremely simple: Italian neorealism
moved into France and England. It has not finished. The only place it is
dead is in Italy. It has changed its nature and become a different cultural
entity, but it has continued in France with Godard and in the new English
cinema, which I don’t like at all (though I do like Godard). The odd thing
is that after moving into France and England particularly via the myth of
Rossellini, neorealism is appearing again in Italy with the younger
directors: Bertolucci and Bellocchio are carrying on Italian neorealism
filtered back via Godard and the English cinema.
O.S.: One of the most surprising things about coming to Italy is that a lot
of cinephiles here are very enthusiastic about all the English directors I
myself can’t stand. Do you think this is a devious cultural response to the
neorealist influence?
P.P.P.: I think so. Even without doing a breakdown on a Moviola I think
you can see the English cinema is very much influenced by neorealism. I
was in England just a while ago and I saw half of Loach’s Poor Cow—
even a child could see that it is a product of Italian neorealism, which here
has simply moved into a different context.
O.S.: Bertolucci of course started out as your assistant on Accattone.
P.P.P.: Yes. Then later he made La commare secca, which I was
originally going to do. When I made Accattone he knew nothing about the
cinema at all; but then I have always avoided having professional
assistants. Sometimes this can be a disadvantage, but I much prefer to
work with someone who understands me and can give me moral support
than to work with a professional. Recently, I’ve just started in the theater,
and my first demand to the financial backers has been that I should not
have to be subjected to the stench of the theater world, that there should be
no professional assistants around.
O.S.: If Bertolucci is one of the directors bringing neorealism back into the
Italian cinema, how do you assess your influence on him?
P.P.P.: I think more than being influenced by me, he reacted against me. I
was rather like a father to him, so he reacted against me. In fact when he
was shooting a scene he would think to himself, “How would Pier Paolo
shoot this?” and so he would decide to shoot it a different way. Maybe I
gave him something indefinable, but he was always able to tell the
authentic from the inauthentic. I only had a very general influence on him,
and as regards style he is completely different from me. His real master is
Godard.
74 Chapter Five

O.S.: As you write, direct, choose the music, locations, and almost
everything else for your films, there is not very much to ask you about the
people you work with, but could you say something about Alfredo Bini
and Sergio Citti?
P.P.P.: Bini had confidence in me at a time when that was extremely hard:
I knew nothing about the cinema, and he gave me carte blanche and let me
work in peace. Sergio Citti has been a very valuable collaborator indeed,
first on the dialogue of my novels and now on my movie scripts. I find it
very easy to work with him, and he is extremely proficient at everything
now.
O.S.: All your editing is done by Nino Baragli, who seems to be your most
permanent colleague.
P.P.P.: Yes, this is the one case where I trust a professional. Baragli is a
very practical person. He has made thousands of films. He is full of good
sense, and he is a Roman, so he has a sense of irony, which is the reason I
use him to keep a rein on some of my excesses. He is the voice of common
sense. But even here I never let him do anything on his own. We always
work together on the Moviola and he just performs the technical side of
the editing, putting the bits together.
O.S.: There is a very striking gap in general between cinema and cinema
criticism. As you both make movies and write about cinema theory, could
you, for example, produce a theoretical criticism of one of your own
movies?
P.P.P.: Yes, I think I could. I have in fact done a breakdown of certain
films. In one of my texts, “La Lingua Scritta dell’Azione,” published in
Nuovi Argomentri 2, new series (which was originally a talk at Pesaro),
I’ve documented my argument with an analysis of some brief sequences
from two films, one by Olmi (Il tempo si è fermato) and one by Bertolucci
(Prima della rivoluzione). When I was giving the talk, I put them on a
normal screen, but I did the original analysis on a Moviola. I did much the
same thing with a Ford film (Gideon of Scotland) on a Moviola at the
Centro Sperimentale during the student occupation of the school. This
wasn’t an aesthetic breakdown; it was purely grammatical and syntactical.
It was an attempt to establish by close study of the text, and not intuitively
(naturally with intuition you can understand anything in just a few words),
whether the film in question was written in the language of prose or the
language of poetry—i.e., this was just a first step towards a stylistic
examination. With literature all you have to do is open a page to see if the
text is in prose or poetry, but with the cinema this is more difficult. But I
think my analyses have shown that this can quite easily be done for the
cinema, too, which, again, is an essential first step for any more thorough
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 75

examination. The Ford picture turned out, as it were, to be in prose.

O.S.: In “The Cinema of Poetry,” which is the only text of yours that has
been translated into English as far as I know (in Cahiers du cinéma in
English, 6), you introduce the concept of dreamlikeness, which has been
widely criticized. One of the criticisms is that it obscures the fact that
when you make a film you in fact have much more control over the images
used than when you write; you actually choose them yourself and your
choice is open, whereas the drift of saying that something is dreamlike is
to stress the spontaneity and lack of control in the process.
P.P.P.: When I said the cinema is dreamlike, I didn’t mean anything very
important; it was just something I said like that, rather casually. All I
meant was that an image is more dreamlike than a word. Your dreams are
cinematographic dreams, they are not literary dreams. Even a sound-
image, say thunder booming in a cloudy sky, is somehow infinitely more
mysterious than even the most poetic description a writer could give of it.
A writer has to find oneiricity through a highly refined linguistic
operation, while the cinema is much nearer to sounds physically; it doesn’t
need any elaboration. All it needs is to produce a clouded sky with thunder
and straight away you are close to the mystery and ambiguity of reality.
O.S.: But dreams are usually very weak in films—Fellini’s dream
sequences just aren’t like dreams at all.
P.P.P.: That is simply because the cinema is already a dream. Fellini’s
films are particularly dreamlike, deliberately: everything is seen as a kind
of dream, a kind of dreamlike or surrealistic deformation, so, naturally, it
is rather difficult to insert a dream into a movie that already has the
characteristics of a dream. But take Bergman, who is much less dreamlike,
perhaps more mysterious but less obviously dreamlike: as a result, the
dream in Wild Strawberries is remarkable, and it comes very close to what
dreams are really like.
O.S.: You have quite rightly said that there was an enormous increase in
interest in the cinema for a while when the cinema itself was badly on the
decline—and you ascribe this to the fact that Marxism had become
fashionable. I agree with the general proposition, but the explanation
won’t do for a country like America, will it? Were you just thinking of
Italy?
P.P.P.: Yes, I think I was mainly concerned with Italy, and with Europe—
auteurs’ films. As long as Marxism was a living culture, with considerable
weight in public life, some films by auteurs were valorized and thus found
a way to be seen and distributed. But when Marxism was overtaken by
events, it fell into a crisis and thus to some extent lost prestige, and since
then films by auteurs have found much less support. So clearly this was
76 Chapter Five

something that concerned both Italy and Europe.

O.S.: In “The Cinema of Poetry” you mention the importance of making
the audience aware of the camera as a criterion of poetic cinema. There
has been some confusion as to whether you meant that the cinema is
naturally poetry and, if so, first, how has prose cinema—like the
aforementioned Gideon of Scotland—managed on the whole to impose
itself?; and, second, if the cinema is naturally poetry, in what way does
making people aware of the camera determine whether or not it is poetry?
P.P.P.: In my view the cinema is substantially and naturally poetic, for the
reasons I have stated: because it is dreamlike, because it is close to
dreams, because a cinematic sequence and a sequence of memory or of a
dream—and not only that but things in themselves, in reality—are
profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face
photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is
an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity,
because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a
linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself.
Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious
speaker. Therefore the cinema, by directly reproducing objects physically,
is substantially if paradoxically poetic at the same time. This is one aspect
of the problem, let’s say a pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic one.
After that we have the cinema as a historical fact, as a means of
communication, and as such it too is beginning to develop into different
subspecies, like all communications media. Just as literature has a
language for prose and a language for poetry, so does the cinema. That’s
what I was saying. In this case you must forget that the cinema is naturally
poetic because it is a type of poetry, which, I repeat, is pre-historic,
amorphous, unnatural. If you see a bit of the most banal western ever
made or any old commercial film, if you look at it in a non-conventional
way, even a film like that will reveal the dreamlike and poetic quality
which exists physically and naturally in the cinema; but this is not the
cinema of poetry. The cinema of poetry is the cinema that adopts a
particular technique just as a poet adopts a particular technique when he
writes verse. If you open a book of poetry, you can see the style
immediately, the rhyme-scheme and all that: you see the language as an
instrument, or you count the syllables in the verse. The equivalent of what
you see in a text of poetry you can also find in a cinematic text, through
the stylemes—i.e., through the camera movements and the montage. So to
make films is to be a poet.
O.S.: I’d like to move now to an in-depth discussion of your films
themselves, such as the first one you directed, Accattone. Had Accattone
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 77

been going round in your mind for a long time before you made it as a
film—that is, was it conceived as a cinematic subject?
P.P.P.: The idea of making a film and the idea of doing Accattone came
together. Before that I’d written another piece for the cinema, La commare
secca; but this project got blocked, and so I replaced it with Accattone,
which seemed a better idea.
O.S.: What do you mean it “got blocked”? It didn’t get financial backing?
P.P.P.: No, I was supposed to do La commare secca, but then I changed
my mind and wrote Accattone. Then Accattone ran into trouble (which I
talk about in the preface to the published script of Accattone), but La
commare secca would probably have run into the same difficulty. Simply
put, I decided to replace La commare secca with Accattone.
O.S.: Previously when you have talked about the shift from writing to
making a movie—specifically, in Filmcritica 116 (January 1962) and Film
Culture 24 (Spring 1962)—you said the only big change was the lack of
metaphor in the cinema. Do you still think this is the biggest problem?
P.P.P.: Well, I said that a bit carelessly. I didn’t know very much about
the cinema, and it was a long time before I started all my linguistic
research on the cinema. It was just a casual remark, but was intuitively
fairly prophetic: Jakobson, followed by Barthes, has spoken of the cinema
as a metonymic, as opposed to a metaphoric art. Metaphor is an essentially
linguistic and literary figure of speech that is difficult to render in the
cinema except in extremely rare cases—for example, if I wanted to
represent happiness I could do it with birds flying in the sky. It wasn’t that
I felt the difficulty of not being able to use metaphor; I was glad not to
have to use it because, to repeat, the cinema represents reality with reality;
it is metonymic and not metaphoric. Reality doesn’t need metaphors to
express itself. If I want to express you I express you through yourself; I
couldn’t use metaphors to express you. In the cinema it is as though reality
expressed itself with itself, without metaphors, and without anything
insipid and conventional and symbolic.
O.S.: That comes through particularly in your treatment of the Franco Citti
character in Accattone. How did you find him?
P.P.P.: He was the brother of my oldest friend in Rome, Sergio Citti. I met
Sergio Citti about a year after I got to Rome in 1950, and we became great
friends. As I’ve noted, he helped me enormously on all my novels, and
was like a living dictionary for me. I used to jot down notes at home and
then I would go over and see Sergio to get him to check the jokes and the
local slang of the Roman characters, in which he was extremely proficient.
I’d known his brother Franco for years, ever since he was a small boy, and
when I had to choose the people for Accattone I thought of him for the part
78 Chapter Five

immediately.
O.S.: You have said the fact that you made Accattone during the Tambroni
government (a Christian-Democratic coalition that depended on right-
wing, including monarchist and fascist, support) influenced the way you
ended the film. What did you mean by this?
P.P.P.: The Tambroni government did not influence the film. I knew and
cared nothing about Tambroni, who was a complete nonentity and could
therefore not possibly have had the slightest influence on me. What I
meant was that Accattone was a film that could emerge in Italy only at a
certain cultural moment—i.e., when neorealism was dead. Neorealism was
the expression in the cinema of the Resistance, of the rediscovery of Italy,
with all our hopes for a new kind of society. This lasted until the late
1950s. After that neorealism died because Italy had changed: the
establishment reconsolidated its position on petit bourgeois and clerical
bases. So I said that Accattone is what it is (apart from the fact that it is
what it is because I am made the way I am) for external cultural reasons,
by which I meant not just the Tambroni episode, but the whole re-
establishment of officialdom and hypocrisy. The Italian bourgeoisie,
underwritten by the Catholic Church, had closed one cultural period, the
age of neorealism.
O.S.: You changed Citti’s voice, as previously discussed. Why?
P.P.P.: Yes, I had him dubbed, but it was a mistake. At the time I was a bit
unsure of myself. Later I had him dub himself and he was excellent—and I
even got him to dub other Roman characters. Anyway it was, let’s say, a
theoretical error. Paolo Ferraro, who dubbed him in Accattone, was
extremely good and I think he added something to the character because
dubbing, while altering a character, also makes him more mysterious; it
enlarges him, if you will. I’m against filming in synchronization. There
was a seminar at Amalfi recently, organized by Filmcritica, and it came
out with a declaration in favor of synchronized sound, which I see I’ve
unwittingly signed. But in fact I’m against synchronization because I think
that dubbing enriches a character. Dubbing is part and parcel of my taste
for pastiche; it raises a character out of the zone of naturalism. I believe
deeply in reality, in realism, but I can’t stand naturalism.
O.S.: So you’re not only for dubbing later, with an actor dubbing himself,
you also like having the actor dubbed by another person’s voice?
P.P.P.: Unfortunately, the situation is made rather difficult in Italy because
of the dubbers. They’re not quite as awful as they are in France, where
they really are execrable, but all the same the Italians are extremely
conformist. What I often do is to “cross” two non-professionals—i.e., have
a non-professional dubber dub a non-professional actor. I like elaborating
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 79

character in this way, for I believe in the polyvalence of character. The

main point, again, is that my love for reality is philosophical and
reverential, but it is not naturalistic.
O.S.: But actors depend for their identity on a number of factors, among
which their voice can be crucial—Robert Mitchum or John Wayne, to take
two prominent examples, could not exist without their voices.
P.P.P.: That is true, but I’m not interested in actors. The only time I’m
interested in an actor is when I use an actor to act an actor. For example, I
never use extras in my films, because they are just hacks. Their faces are
brutalized by living all their life at Cinecittà, surrounded by the whores
who are always hanging around there. When I shot The Gospel According
to St. Matthew, I went around and chose all the extras myself, one by one,
from among the peasants and the people in the villages near where we
were shooting. But when I made La Ricotta, where the characters are real
extras, I used real extras. I’m only interested in an actor when he’s acting
an actor; I’m not interested in him qua actor. The fact, as you say, that an
actor may depend on his voice is something that interests me very little.
O.S.: Do you mind what happens to your films when they go abroad? For
example, in Spain, Christ in The Gospel was dubbed with a voice that
completely changed his character. In the Italian version you gave Christ a
rather hard voice that none of the foreign dubbings reproduced.
P.P.P.: Far worse things than that happen in Spain. In a country where
people are still garroted I can resign myself to the idea that my characters
may be badly dubbed. All I can say is that I despise anybody who is
responsible for doing things like that. Part of the dubbing in Spain I
organized myself, but it was half done when I got there and it was horrible,
so I tried to fix the other half as best I could. In civilized countries like
England and America the film came out with sub-titles, which I prefer.
O.S.: When you mentioned neorealism you defined it as the expression of
the Resistance. I’d like you to expand on this, because I have just seen two
of the films Rossellini made during the fascist period, La nave bianca and
L’uomo della croce: stylistically, these are exactly the same as the films he
made during the so-called neorealist period. Have you seen these films,
and can you see any change in Rossellini’s style between the fascist period
and the postwar period?
P.P.P.: I agree that I did say neorealism is a product of the Resistance, and
I stand by that remark. But, having said this, I must add that neorealism is
still full of elements from the preceding period. I have often criticized
neorealism—for example, in Officina. I remember criticizing neorealism
for not having sufficient intellectual strength to transcend the culture that
preceded it. I criticized it for being naturalistic, above all. Naturalism was
80 Chapter Five

a taste that went right back to the nineteenth century, to Verga, for
instance. I also criticized neorealism for being crepuscolar—twilight-like
or melancholy—which is a characteristic of Italian poetry from the early
twentieth century, when some writers, as exemplified by Guido Gozzano,
were reacting negatively to the modernization of modern life. I don’t know
if there’s anything like it in England; in France there are people like
Laforgue, who is related to the decadents. Then I also criticized
neorealism for remaining subjective and lyricizing, which was another
feature of the cultural epoch before the Resistance. So, neorealism is a
cultural product of the Resistance in regard to its content and message, but
stylistically it is still tied to pre-Resistance culture. Basically there is
something rather hybrid about it. Anyway, if you think about other
products of the European Resistance, much of the poetry is written in the
same style as before the war—in the use of surrealist elements, for
example. This hybridization is a phenomenon common to the whole of
Europe, I think.
As for Rossellini, no, I haven’t seen the two films you mention. When
they first came out I never had a chance to see them and now I’m not too
keen to see them—it’s a bit because I’ve been too busy to see these
pictures, and at bottom I just don’t want to see them.
O.S.: To go back to Accattone, could you say something about the way
you were influenced in this work by the three directors you have singled
out: Dreyer, Mizoguchi, and Chaplin?
P.P.P.: Well, I don’t know if you can really talk about direct influences. I
don’t know if I was thinking about these auteurs when I was shooting the
film; they are sources I referenced somewhat from the outside after I’d
finished the film. When I was making it the only auteur I thought of
directly was the Florentine painter Masaccio. When I’d finished Accattone
I realized that some of my great loves had played a part in it. Why these
three? Because they are all in their own way epic directors. Not epic in the
Brechtian sense of the word; I mean epic in the more mythic sense—a
natural epic-ness that pertains more to things, to facts, to characters, to the
story, without Brecht’s air of detachment. I feel this mythic epic-ness in
Dreyer and Mizoguchi and Chaplin: all three see things from a point of
view that is absolute, essential, and in a certain way holy, reverential.
O.S.: Have you ever thought much about the question of producing a
religious film within a Protestant culture as compared with a Catholic one?
I think some of the French critics, Roger Leenhardt in particular, have
written about this with reference to Dreyer and Protestantism.
P.P.P.: No, I haven’t studied this very much because it is a problem that
can’t arise in Italy: there is no objective relationship between Catholicism
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 81

and Protestantism in Italy; here it’s a purely abstract problem. This might
be a real problem in England or Belgium, or even in France, but it’s a
problem you can’t even think about in Italy.
O.S.: When you talked about the shift from Accattone to Mamma Roma in
an interview in Filmcritica (125) in September 1962, you said that the
Anna Magnani character in Mamma Roma had petit bourgeois ideals,
whereas the characters in Accattone were not even aware of the existence
of petit bourgeois ideals and morality. But Accattone’s dream about his
own death seems to me to be conceived very much along petit bourgeois
lines, at least along the lines of the religious beliefs of the petite
bourgeoisie.
P.P.P.: I’m rather surprised you should say that, because I’ve never
thought about the matter in this way. It seems to me that Accattone’s
dream has the characteristics I mentioned earlier: it is epic-mythic-
fantastic; and these aren’t typical characteristics of the petite bourgeoisie.
Perhaps you are referring to the salvation of the soul, but this isn’t a
bourgeois problem because the bourgeoisie hasn’t got a transcendental
religion, except verbally; it’s only catechistic and liturgical, it isn’t real.
The bourgeoisie has replaced the problem of the soul, which is
transcendental, with the problem of conscience, which is a purely social
and mundane thing. Accattone’s metaphysical projection of his own life
into a world beyond is mythic and popular; it isn’t petit bourgeois, it’s pre-
bourgeois. The petit bourgeois ideals I talked about in Mamma Roma were
all petty, mundane ones like having a home, holding a job, keeping up
appearances, owning a radio, and going to Mass on Sunday, whereas in
Accattone I don’t think there’s anything petit bourgeois like that. The
Catholicism in Accattone still retains the pre-bourgeois, pre-industrial, and
therefore mythical features that are typical only of the people—in fact, the
final sign of the Cross in the film is done wrong. Perhaps you didn’t notice
this, but instead of touching their left shoulder and then the right, the
characters touch the right shoulder first and then the left, just like the
children who cross themselves while the funeral is going past and make
the same mistake. The sign they make is not even a Christian sign; it’s just
vaguely religious and protective. It certainly isn’t Catholic in the
orthodox—and therefore bourgeois—sense of the word.
O.S.: 1’d like to move on to Mamma Roma now and ask you about the
conflict in the Anna Magnani character: the fact that she has petit
bourgeois ideals but in fact can’t realize them—the futility of petit
bourgeois morality, let us call it. And why did you choose Anna Magnani
for the part, who is a professional actress?
P.P.P.: Well, I’m rather proud of not making mistakes about the people I
82 Chapter Five

choose for my films, and—particularly in The Gospel According to St.

Matthew—I feel I have always chosen well. The only mistake I’ve made is
this one with Anna Magnani—though the mistake is not really because she
is a professional actress. The fact is, if I’d got Anna Magnani to do a real
petite bourgeoise, I would probably have got a good performance out of
her; but the trouble is that I didn’t get her to do that, I got her to do a
woman of the people with petit bourgeois aspirations. And Anna Magnani
just isn’t like that. As I choose actors for what they are and not for what
they pretend to be, I made a mistake about what the character really was;
and although Anna Magnani made a moving effort to do what I asked of
her, the character simply did not emerge. I wanted to bring out the
ambiguity of sub-proletarian life with a petit bourgeois superstructure. But
this didn’t happen, because Anna Magnani is a woman who was born and
has lived as a petite bourgeoise and then as an actress, and so hasn’t got
the necessary characteristics.
O.S.: How did you find Ettore Garofolo?
P.P.P.: That was a bit of luck. I knew his elder brother, who lived in
Trastevere. I saw Ettore Garofolo when he was working as a waiter in a
restaurant where I went for dinner one evening, Da Meo Patacca—exactly
as I showed him in the film, carrying a bowl of fruit just like a figure in a
Caravaggio painting. I wrote the script around him, without telling him
about it, and then when it was finished I went over there and asked him if
he’d like to do it.
O.S.: Ettore’s death is taken from a real event here in Rome, isn’t it?
P.P.P.: Yes, about a year before I did the script a young man called
Marcello Elisei died in just that way.
O.S.: Did the scene in the film—and the fact that somebody actually died
like that in prison—have any effect in real life? Did people react?
P.P.P.: Well, it had a bit of an effect, but not all that much, because you
know things like that happen fairly often in Italy. Just yesterday I saw a
high-ranking politician’s denunciation of the police in the newspapers. But
such police methods are nothing new. The scene in question did have an
effect, but only in the context of the film as a whole, not as an episode on
its own.
O.S.: The script that you’ve published in the volume Alì Dagli Occhi
Azzurri is quite different from the script you used in the film—in fact
several of the scripts you’ve published differ quite a lot from the ones
you’ve used in your films: why is that?
P.P.P.: The script of Accattone is almost identical; there’s just one episode
missing that I had to cut because it was too long. In Uccellacci e uccellini,
too, the script is almost the same—again, there’s only one episode
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 83

missing, which I cut because it was too long but that I did shoot. So both
these instances are the same, in the sense that I cut out a sequence because
of its length. Mamma Roma is different. What happened is that the script
was exactly as I shot it, and the changes in the published script I made two
or three years after I shot the film, for literary reasons. When I read
through the script later I didn’t like it—from a literary standpoint—so I
changed it.
O.S.: The critics who complained a lot about the music in Accattone seem
to have digested the music in Mamma Roma without much trouble. Do
you know why that was?
P.P.P.: I’m not sure. I think what scandalized them in Accattone was the
mixture of the violent Roman sub-proletariat with the music of Bach,
whereas in Mamma Roma there is a different kind of combination that was
less shocking—ordinary people who are trying to be petit bourgeois to the
accompaniment of the music of Vivaldi, which is much more Italian and is
based on popular music, so the contamination is not as violent and
shocking.
O.S.: There are two things that weren’t quite clear to me. One occurs when
Franco Citti tells Ettore about his mother: is this supposed to demoralize
him completely?
P.P.P.: Yes, certainly. It gives him an absolute trauma, because he had not
lived in a completely sub-proletarian world. I’ll give you an example: in a
completely sub-proletarian world, a world without any bourgeois features,
a sub-proletarian world almost in the sense of a concentration camp, when
a boy finds out that his mother is a whore he gives her a gold watch so that
she will make love with him. Perhaps this is a correct reaction in a sub-
proletarian context. Whereas Ettore has been educated by his mother to
have a certain petit bourgeois outlook; he’d been to school as a child and
so finding out his mother was a prostitute gave him a trauma, just like any
bourgeois boy finding out something bad about his mother. Therefore he
has a collapse, a real crisis, which eventually takes him to his death.
O.S.: The other thing is that Bruna does not quite seem to belong to the
world of the sub-proletariat like the others.
P.P.P.: You could contrast Stella in Accattone with Bruna in Mamma
Roma. Stella is completely immersed in her sub-proletarian world of
poverty, misery, and hunger. She lives in a real slum. Whereas if you
remember, Bruna at a certain moment points out where she lives; when
she’s going off with Ettore in the middle of the ruins, walking down that
sort of huge ditch as they’re going off to make love, she says “look up
there” and points to a large block of flats. Obviously there’s TV and radio
and all that in this block of flats. Bruna does belong to the sub-proletariat
84 Chapter Five

inasmuch as there is no real proletariat in Rome to belong to because there

is no industry, but it’s an upper sub-proletariat so to speak, a sub-
proletariat at the moment when it is tending to become petit bourgeois and
therefore perhaps fascist, conformist, etc. This is the sub-proletariat at the
moment when it is no longer barricaded inside slums but is exposed to and
influenced by the petite bourgeoisie and the ruling class through
television, fashion, and so on. Bruna is sub-proletarian, then, but she has
already been corrupted by petit bourgeois influences.
O.S.: Death is stressed even more in Mamma Roma than in Accattone and
it’s a subject you’ve talked about a good deal in connection with the
irrational, particularly in Nuovi Argomenti 6 (new series).
P.P.P.: Death does determine life, I feel that and I’ve written it, too, in one
of my recent essays, where I compare death to montage. Once life is
finished it acquires a sense, but up to that point it has not got a sense; its
sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere, I
must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified by reason,
if it is not rationalized. For me death holds the maximum of epic-ness and
myth. When I talk to you about my tendency towards the mythic and the
epic—the sacred, if you will—I should say that this tendency can only be
completely realized by the act of death, which seems to me the most
mythic and epic act there is—all of this, however, at the level of pure
irrationalism.
O.S.: In an interview in Image et Son, Roland Barthes says that the cinema
should not try to make sense but to suspend sense. Do you agree with
that—is it something you’ve thought much about?
P.P.P.: Yes, this is an old idea of mine, which I have expressed several
times ingenuously and crudely when I’ve said that my films are not
supposed to have a finished sense; they always end with a question, and I
always intend them to remain suspended in this way. So this idea of
Barthes’s, which I myself have talked about mostly in connection with
Brecht, had already expressed itself—perhaps to some extent
unconsciously—in my film style and aesthetic ideology.
O.S.: You changed that style with Uccellacci e uccellini: initially, it was
supposed to be what you called an “ideo-comic” film, but it didn’t exactly
come out like that.
P.P.P.: Well, I don’t know, perhaps it came out too much like that: too
“ideo” and not “comic” enough (anyway, that was a formula I just
invented for fun; it’s not a serious category). As for the change of style, I
think I have a basic style that I will always have: there is a basic stylistic
continuity from Accattone onwards through The Gospel According to St.
Matthew, which is obviously part of my psychology and my pathology,
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 85

which as you know is unchangeable. (Even Theorem, which I was going to

shoot in a completely different way, has ended up with analogous features
to my other films.) In Uccellacci e uccellini, I think the new element was
that I tried to make it more cinema—there are almost no references to the
figurative arts, and many more explicit references to other films.
Uccellacci e uccellini is the product of a cinematographic rather than a
figurative culture, unlike Accattone. It is about the end of neorealism as a
kind of limbo, and it evokes the ghost of neorealism, particularly the
beginning where two characters are living out their life without thinking
about it—i.e., two typical heroes of neorealism, humble, humdrum, and
unaware. All of the first part is an evocation of neorealism, though
naturally an idealized neorealism. There are other bits like the clowns
episode that are deliberately intended to evoke Fellini and Rossellini.
Some critics accused me of being Fellinian in that episode, but they did
not understand that it was a quotation from Fellini; in fact, immediately
afterwards the crow talks to the two characters and says, “The age of
Brecht and Rossellini is finished.” The whole episode was one long
quotation.
O.S.: You don’t think the critics got confused between what you were
saying and what the crow was saying?
P.P.P.: I don’t think so, because the crow is extremely autobiographical:
there is almost total identification between me and the crow.
O.S.: How did you handle the crow?
P.P.P.: That crow was a really wild, mad beast and it nearly drove all the
rest of us mad as well. Generally a director’s main worry in Italy is the
sun, because the weather in Rome is very unreliable. But after the weather
my biggest worry was this crow. The bits there are with it in the film I
managed to pull together only by shooting again and again and then
organizing the montage very carefully, but it was a terrible ordeal.
O.S.: What about Totò? You took a chance using him, because he was
already a famous comic actor in Italy, but also very much a typed actor.
Do you think he was too much associated with a certain character in the
Italian mind—though to an outsider he was fine?
P.P.P.: I chose Totò for what he was—an actor, a recognizable type whom
the public already knew. I didn’t want him to be anything but what he was.
Poor Totò, he used to ask me very gently, almost like a child, if he could
make a more serious film, and I used to have to say, “No, no, I just want
you to be yourself.” The real Totò was in fact manipulated; he wasn’t a
straightforward, ingenuous character like Franco Citti in Accattone. Totò
was an actor who had been manipulated by himself and by other people
into a type, but I used him precisely as that, as someone who was a type.
86 Chapter Five

He was a strange mixture of credulousness and Neapolitan authenticity, on

the one hand, and of a clown on the other—i.e., recognizable and
neorealist yet also slightly absurd and surreal. That is why I chose him,
and that is what he was, even in the worst films he made.
O.S.: How did you find Ninetto Davoli?
P.P.P.: I met him by chance when I was making La ricotta—he was there
with a whole lot of other boys watching us make the film, and I noticed
him at once because of his curly hair and his character, which later came
out in my film. When I thought of doing Uccellacci e uccellini, I thought
of him and Totò at once without the slightest hesitation. I gave him a tiny
part as a shepherd boy in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, as a kind
of screen test.
O.S.: I thought it was strange that you chose a father-son relationship—
which is not simply one of generations but also of family linearity—to
illustrate a major ideological shift.
P.P.P.: But Totò and Ninetto are a very normal father and son, for there is
no great clash between them; they are perfectly in agreement with each
other. They embody a type that perpetuates itself: Ninetto is like Totò;
there is this combination of total humdrumness and the magical in both of
them. There is no conflict of generations between them. The son is getting
ready to be an ordinary man just as his father was, with some differences
like the wearing of different clothes. He will probably go and work for
Fiat, but whatever the different characteristics are, they will not establish a
different consciousness in him; they will not become a cause for
disagreement or rivalry with his father.
O.S.: I don’t quite follow that—is this the thesis of the film or is it the
thesis you are criticizing?
P.P.P.: Totò and Ninetto are mankind, and as such both old and new.
What they clash with are new historical situations, but as mankind they are
not in contradiction with each other.
O.S.: But take Togliatti’s death, for example, which plays a big part in the
film—there is actual newsreel footage of Togliatti’s funeral cut into the
film—this did not mark a great change in Italian life, as far as I can see.
P.P.P.: No, in itself it did not, but it did symbolize a change. An historical
epoch, the epoch of the Resistance, of great hopes for communism, of the
class struggle, has finished. What we have now is the economic boom, the
welfare state, and industrialization, which is using the South as a reserve
of cheap manpower and even beginning to industrialize the South as well.
There has been a real change that coincided more or less with Togliatti’s
death. It was a pure coincidence chronologically, but it worked
symbolically.
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 87

O.S.: But in that context the generation break is surely what is most
important, because the communism of the Resistance, together with anti-
fascism in particular, is something that has been kept alive artificially by
the older generation in the Party.
P.P.P.: I agree: the feeling of the Resistance and the spirit of class struggle
have rather outlived themselves, but this is something that involves the
Central Committee and the leadership of the Communist Party, i.e., a
particular group, whereas Totò and Ninetto represent the mass of Italians
who are outside all that—the innocent Italians who are all around us, who
are not involved in history, and who are just acquiring the very first iota of
consciousness. That is when they encounter Marxism, in the shape of the
crow.
O.S.: But straight after Togliatti’s funeral they meet the girl by the
roadside—i.e., once communism is finished (or this epoch is over), they
immediately go off with a woman.
P.P.P.: Well, no. The woman represents vitality. Things die and we feel
grief, but then vitality comes back again—that’s what the woman
represents. In fact, the story of Togliatti does not end there, because after
they have been off with the woman there is the crow again. They perform
an act of cannibalism, what Catholics call communion: they swallow the
body of Togliatti (or of the Marxists) and assimilate it; after they have
assimilated it they carry on along the road, so that even though you don’t
know where the road is going, it is obvious that they have assimilated
Marxism.
O.S.: There is a certain ambiguity about this, for it is both destruction and
consumption.
P.P.P.: Yes, that’s what it’s meant to be. Just before the crow is eaten, he
says, “Teachers are made to be eaten in salsa piccante.” They must be
eaten and transcended, but if their teaching is of any value it remains
inside us.
O.S.: What about the first sequence, which you first tried to cut down and
then finally removed altogether?
P.P.P.: It was the most difficult. After I had cut it down, it was
incomprehensible and so I just excised it altogether. I don’t want to
produce something hermetic, something that is inaccessible to the public,
because the public is not external to the film: it is internal to it, like rhyme.
What decided the matter for me was Totò. In this episode he is a petit
bourgeois who teaches an eagle how to become a petit bourgeois but ends
up becoming an eagle himself: the rationalist, conformist, educated petit
bourgeois ends up being caught by the eagle and flying away—i.e.,
religion wins out over rationalism, conformism, and education. But this
88 Chapter Five

didn’t work because Totò is not a petit bourgeois. His real personality
came through and so there was something wrong about the whole episode,
although superficially it may have looked all right. Totò was just not a
petit bourgeois who would go around and teach good manners to other
people.
O.S.: I found this a very difficult film indeed, not comic at all, but sad and
ideological.
P.P.P.: That’s a personal impression on your part. I agree that the film is
not very funny; it makes you think more than laugh. But when it was
shown in Montreal and New York the audiences laughed a lot, to my great
astonishment—unlike in Italy, where audiences were a bit disappointed,
mainly because they went to see Totò and have their usual laugh, which
they gradually realized they weren’t going to be able to do. Your reaction
may be a bit subjective, though I agree that Uccellacci e uccellini is not a
funny film.
O.S.: You have said that “ideological irony” would be useful for analyzing
Uccellacci e uccellini: were you making more reference here to the
condition of the Italian cinema or to the condition of ideology and politics
in Italy?
P.P.P.: Both. In England or France or America people do not remember
the Industrial Revolution and the transition in its wake to prosperity. In
Italy this transition has just taken place. What took a century in England
has virtually happened in twenty years here. This explosion, as it were,
produced an ideological crisis that particularly threatened the position of
Marxism, and coinciding with this there was a big cultural change here as
well. That is what I was referring to with the term “ideological irony.”
O.S.: Do you ever hold sneak previews?
P.P.P.: They do exist in Italy, but I’ve never had one. They sometimes do
sneak previews for commercial films—they put them on in towns that are
supposed to represent the lowest common denominator of potential
audiences. The only time I ever see one of my films with an audience is at
a festival—Oedipus, for example, I saw complete for the first time only at
Venice. I’ve never dared to go in and watch one of my films in a normal
showing at a public cinema.
O.S.: I’d like to go back to what you said before about neorealism. There
are two issues I’d like to discuss further. One concerns Rossellini: the
films he made under fascism are stylistically the same as those he made
during his so-called neorealist period and the same as his later movies,
right up to La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, which is neorealist in the
sense that Francesco, giullare di Dio is. For me Rossellini is a great—and
homogeneous—director. The other issue or problem is the whole
 An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini 89

categorization of a period as “neorealist,” lumping together two people

like Fellini and Rossellini whom I simply can’t consider on the same level,
and that opinion is held by almost everybody I know in England. I can see
that Uccellacci e uccellini is about aspects of Italian cinema, but I would
like to understand more precisely your attitude toward Rossellini and
neorealism.
P.P.P.: The stylistic history of Rossellini is the stylistic history of
Rossellini, and, as I have said before, there is a certain fatality in a
person’s style. Rossellini has a consistent stylistic history, but it is not co-
extensive with the history of neorealism: part of his history coincides with
part of neorealism. The part of Rossellini that coincides with neorealism
has some features in common with Fellini: a certain way of seeing things
and people. The way these films are shot and edited together is different
from the classical cinema that preceded both Fellini and Rossellini.
Obviously Fellini and Rossellini are two absolutely different personalities,
but the period each of them has in common with neorealism gives them
something in common with each other. The bit of Uccellacci e uccellini
you’ve just mentioned that evokes neorealism, evokes something typical
of both part of Rossellini and part of Fellini: the acrobats, the kind of
woman they turn to—all of that is fairly Fellinian, but it is also
Rossellinian. Also, these two men share what I call “creatural realism,”
which is a feature of neorealism typical of a film like Francesco, giullare
di Dio: a humble person viewed in a somewhat comical way, where piety
is mixed with irony. I think both Fellini and Rossellini have that. But on
the whole, I agree with you: they are two directors who really have
nothing to do with each other, but who chronologically share a common
cultural period that coincides with the period of neorealism.
O.S.: So when the crow says, “The age of Brecht and Rossellini is
finished,” he didn’t mean that Rossellini is finished, just neorealism.
P.P.P.: Yes, Rossellini was the master of neorealism and neorealism is
finished. I meant that the age of social denunciation—of great ideological
drama of the Brechtian kind, on the one hand, and lowly everyday drama
of the neorealist kind, on the other—is finished.
O.S.: One of the Italian critics defined your film as the first realist film in
Italy. I think Uccellacci e uccellini is a realist film, but in very much the
same way as, say, Francesco, giullare di Dio could be called realist—in
fact, the part of Uccellacci e uccellini with the monks draws heavily on
Rossellini’s film.
P.P.P.: I love Rossellini, and I love him above all for Francesco, which is
his finest film. Realism is such an ambiguous and loaded word that it is
hard to agree on its meaning. I consider my own films realist compared
90 Chapter Five

with neorealist films. In neorealist films day-to-day reality is seen from a

crepuscular, intimate, credulous, and above all naturalistic point of view.
Not naturalistic in the classic sense—cruel, violent, and poetic as in Verga,
or total as in Zola; in neorealism things are instead described with a certain
detachment, with human warmth mixed with irony, characteristics that my
own work does not have. Compared with neorealism, I think I have
introduced a certain kind of realism into the cinema—but, I have to say, it
would be rather difficult to define exactly what that realism is.
 CHAPTER SIX

NEOREALIST ART VS. OPERATIC ACTING

IN PASOLINI’S MAMMA ROMA

BERT CARDULLO

Mamma Roma (1962) was the second film that Pier Paolo Pasolini
wrote and directed, but it did not receive its American premiere until 1995
for legal reasons beyond my literary comprehension. Although this
picture betrays the influence of Italian neorealism, like Pasolini’ s earlier
Accattone (1961), it transcends neorealism even as it pays tribute to the
movement. And, like this filmmaker’s subsequent work—I’m thinking
particularly of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), The Hawks
and the Sparrows (1966), and Teorema (1968)—Mamma Roma reveals a
peculiar mixture of Marxism, Catholicism, and Freudian psychology. It
also reveals Pasolini’s concern with that part of the working class known
as the subproletariat, which for him includes pre-industrial peasants (still
to be found, we should remember, in this post-industrial age) as well as
non-industrial whores, thieves, bums, and pimps. Such marginal types are
featured in all his films from Accattone (which means “beggar” or
“scrounger”) to the Sadean Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), even
in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969), which indict
capitalism together with communism for the destruction of pre-industrial
peasant culture and with it the peasantry’s mythic-mystic-mysterious
response to life.
The early Mamma Roma is of a piece, then, with the rest of Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s cinematic oeuvre—I write “cinematic” because he was a
published poet and novelist as well as a filmmaker. But two of the things
you won’t find in Mamma Roma, as you will in a number of Pasolini’s
films, are a “quiet” script and a lot of understated acting, since Anna
Magnani performs the titular role and the picture is about the cafoni who
swell the population of Italy’s capital. Magnani played the heroine of
92 Chapter Six

another, more famous movie with Rome in its title—Robert Rossellini’s

neorealist landmark Rome, Open City (1945)—and her character in
Pasolini’s picture seems to be a resurrection of that heroine, albeit from a
reverse angle, as well as a commentary on the often idealized portrayal of
the lower classes in the socially critical, sometimes politically
programmatic films of Italian neorealism.
For Pina, the character played by Magnani in Open City, is an icon of
proletarian strength who refuses to lower her moral standards in order to
improve her economic standing, and who is pregnant when she’s callously
murdered by the German Gestapo for sheltering a leader of the Italian
Resistance. Mamma Roma, by contrast, is a prostitute with the petty ideal
of social ascent from the subproletariat into the petite bourgeoisie, not
Pina’s wartime ideal of a free and democratic Italy. And Mamma Roma is
the unwed mother of a teenaged son who dies at the hands of the Italian
police—the strong arm of the very nation that had itself suffered under the
yoke of fascism—not the expectant victim of a foreign occupying force.
Although she has a surname, Garofolo, Mamma Roma is never
addressed by a personal name during the film; she is always identified by
her public nickname, which comes to signify not only her dual status as
mother and whore, but also the prostituted nature of a Rome, an Italy,
itself beset by petty, egoistic consumerism during the years of its so-called
economic boom. Rome, città aperta, has thus become open in ways not
envisioned by Rossellini when he filmed his emblem of Italian hope and
faith, just as it has became anything but the città eterna in its losing battle
with noise, pollution, and godlessness.
The movie opens with the image of Mamma Roma shepherding three
little pigs (wearing party hats!) into the wedding reception of her former
pimp, Carmine, and his bride, Clementina. Carmine sardonically refers to
the pigs as Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”), which is the title of the
national anthem and suggests the level to which Italians have been reduced
by the greedy self-interest, the material opportunism, of the postwar
period. Pasolini contradistinguishes his countrymen’s vulgar materialism
not only by making all the celebrants of this holy marriage pimps, whores,
and confidence-men, but also by grouping them around the banquet table
in such a way that the scene—photographed at least twice in italicizing
long shot—ironically resembles Da Vinci’s 1497 painting of The Last
Supper. (Luis Buñuel used the same shot during the orgy of drunken,
diseased beggars in Viridiana [1961], although his intent was not to
highlight the contrast between the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit,
but rather to ridicule and repudiate the latter.)
Indeed, this reception is topped off by a parody of the “Hallelujah
 Neorealist Art vs. Operatic Acting in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma 93

Chorus” during which Mamma Roma and Carmine antiphonally sing, not
praise to the Lord, but insults at each other, so happy are they to be ending
their miserably symbiotic relationship of three years. Carmine will now
settle down in the Guidonian countryside outside Rome with his new wife,
to whom Mamma Roma jeeringly wishes as many sons as were borne by
the wives of the Biblical Jacob; and from that same countryside Mamma
Roma will retrieve her only son, the sixteen-year-old Ettore, whom she
had abandoned as a little boy at a church orphanage, to begin a new life in
Rome selling produce from a stall in the marketplace.
That new life includes a new apartment in a suburban housing project,
the view from which is dominated by the shining dome of a modern
church—a dome that we see, or see through Mamma Roma’s eyes, seven
times during the film, including the final shot. However, spiritual renewal
is not the protagonist’s goal in Mamma Roma, despite the fact that she
attends Mass and visits with her parish priest. Her real reason for going to
church is to find a rich man’s daughter for Ettore or, failing that, to target a
businessman who can be persuaded to give the boy a job. Mamma Roma
had asked the local clergyman to get her son a position, but, upon learning
that the passive, disaffected, even soporific Ettore has little or no
education and no trade, this kindly man advised the youth’s mother either
to send him to vocational school or to work as a laborer. Mamma Roma
indignantly rejects the latter alternative on the ground that a blue-collar job
is simply not good enough for her boy. The priest’s response to her false
pride is telling: “You can’t build something on nothing,” he says, which
can also be taken to mean that you can’t escape the naturalistic pull of the
past—of your heredity and environment, your heritage and experience—
unless you make yourself over from within.
Mamma Roma tries to make herself and Ettore over from without,
through the trappings of petit bourgeois materialism, instead of attempting
a spiritual regeneration, by which Pasolini does not necessarily mean a
Catholic or religious one. (Christian or Catholic references in the film are
thus more metaphorical than literal, even as its Marxist critique of the
capitalist mentality is more theoretically inclined than practically or
revolutionarily oriented.) The result is that for one form of prostitution—
the literal kind she has practiced for thirty of her forty-three years—she
merely substitutes another, the figurative kind of capitalist economics,
which reduces human beings to exploitable pieces of merchandise, to their
saleable if not stealable skills, at the same time as it defines happiness in
terms of the number of consumer products people themselves acquire.
Mamma Roma wants such “nice things” for her son, who doesn’t have
the skills to exchange for them, so she behaves like the prostitute she is, in
94 Chapter Six

spirit if not at the moment in fact, by blackmailing the proprietor of a

popular restaurant in Trastevere (a member of her church congregation)
into giving Ettore a job as a waiter. And, of course, she can perpetrate her
scheme against the prosperous restaurateur only by enlisting the aid of
cronies from her immediate past. They are the whore Biancofiore and her
pimp, Zacaria, who manipulate this married man into a compromising
position from which Mamma Roma “miraculously” rescues him—to
demand the employment of her son in return.
Another crony from Mamma Roma’s past soon tries to enlist her aid:
her former pimp, the twenty-six-year-old Carmine, who has given up on
married life in the country and wants to borrow a few hundred dollars for
investment (appropriately) in an urban meat-selling venture. She tells him
she doesn’t have the money, but he replies that she can get it if she returns
to hustling. If Mamma Roma refuses, which is her first impulse, Carmine
will tell Ettore the truth about her life as a whore—a truth his mother has
not revealed to the boy because she herself has not yet come to terms with,
or atoned for, her past. In other words, just as Mamma Roma has
blackmailed the restaurant owner, her pimp blackmails her: one act of bad
faith in this film tends to engender another.
She gives in, then, to Carmine’s demand that she return to the street,
but Ettore finds out about her past anyway, precisely because she has
made it the present, and word of her nocturnal exploits has spread back to
her son. What’s a mother, or a whore, to do? And what is a son to do
except follow in his mother’s footsteps, duplicating her acts of bad faith?
After all, Mamma Roma’s idea of maternal love is to ask Biancofiore to
sleep with her son so as to win him away from Bruna, a twenty-four-year-
old unwed mother who sleeps with others besides Ettore, often at no
charge. “All women are whores,” declares Mamma Roma, who believes
that the only woman her hitherto virginal son needs is his own mother.
Ettore quits his waiter’s job in a combination of anger and self-pity at
the discovery of his mother’s prostitution, then turns back to the thieving
with which he began the film by stealing first a chocolate bar from a street
vendor and next a phonograph record from his mother (which he pawned
in order to buy a pendant of the Madonna-and-child for Bruna). With the
help of his cronies, teenaged delinquents from public housing, Ettore
attempts to steal a portable radio from a sleeping patient in a hospital
ward, where the boys pose as visitors. But he is caught when the man
wakes up and screams “thief.” It’s not by accident that this man is played
by Lamberto Maggiorani, who played the role of Ricci in Vittorio De
Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), the father who himself turns in desperation
to stealing after he has been robbed.
 Neorealist Art vs. Operatic Acting in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma 95

The difference between Ricci’s thievery and Ettore’s is fundamental,

however: both are immediately apprehended, but the former had tried to
steal back the bicycle that was stolen from him, for without it he could not
keep the job with which he hoped to support his family; whereas the latter
has quit his job and steals in order to assert his sub-proletarian identity as
well as to spite his mother. Moreover, unlike Ricci, who is reunited with
his young son after his apprehenders decline to press charges against him,
Ettore dies of fever in a prison hospital calling for Mamma Roma, whom
he never sees again
Strapped to a table in an isolation cell, he is photographed from above
at such a low angle that he resembles Christ on the cross—again, for
purposes of irony, since the contrast between the life of Jesus and the life
of Ettore Garofolo should be obvious. There has been no spiritual
resurrection in Ettore’s earthly life, so he must die a painful, lonely, bodily
death to complement his mother’s soulful one. After she learns of her
son’s death, Mamma Roma tries to commit suicide by jumping from the
window of her apartment, but is prevented from doing so by fellow
vendors who have followed her home from the marketplace. Nonetheless,
she dies inside herself as she attempts to wriggle from her rescuers’ hold,
even as Pina was machine-gunned to a literal death when she tried to break
free of the grip of Nazi soldiers toward the end of Rome, Open City. But
Pina’s sacrifice was not in vain, the Christian humanism of Rossellini
implies, for it and the execution of her priest, Don Pietro, are followed in
the final scene by the auspicious, becalming shot of children walking
toward the city against a sky dominated by the dome of Saint Peter’s
Basilica.
Similarly, the ending of Bicycle Thieves depicts Ricci walking hand-in-
hand with his little boy, forgiven for his trespass and spiritually buffered,
even restored, by the affection of his son. The father’s spiritual or familial
renewal is underlined by the fact that this film takes place from Friday to
Sunday—a cycle of time with particular resonance for Italian culture,
since it is a reminder not only of the death and resurrection of Jesus but
also of Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise towards
Salvation. Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308-21) is referred to in Mamma
Roma as well—Ettore’s fellow prisoners cite from and discuss it
(particularly the cantos depicting the Pilgrim’s stopover in Hell) prior to
solitary confinement—but there the reference to this work of literature is
just as ironic as the visual allusions to Christ.
What’s not ironic in Pasolini’s film is the secular or non-religious
imagery, related to which is his movement of the camera. Circular forms
appear throughout Mamma Roma in order to suggest the circular or static,
96 Chapter Six

nondirectional or dead-end, nature of the main characters’ lives. (Cyclical

forms in Bicycle Thieves, by contrast, are used to suggest the self-
regeneration or -energization of revolution, of the cycles of time, nature,
and life: Sunday generates a new week that will finally end in, and begin
with, another Sunday; twilight is only a prelude to the dawn, which itself
is but a prelude to day-become-night; the death of winter is followed by
the birth of spring, the life of summer, the decay of autumn . . .) The first
time we see Ettore, for example, he is riding a merry-go-round—
essentially a wheel going nowhere—in an amusement park lined by rows
of airy balloons. The image of the merry-go-round is then almost
immediately followed by that of the phonograph record (the one Ettore
will steal and pawn—at an open-air pawnshop itself filled with circular
forms: the wheels of used bicycles), a disk circling on a turntable to which
mother and son dance, or rather wheel each other around, after arriving at
her new apartment. And the phonograph record itself yields to a
motorcycle, or two-wheeled vehicle, which Mamma Roma gives Ettore as
transportation to work, but which we never see him use to go to a specific
destination.
Significantly, the only time we do see him atop the bike, he is
joyriding around with his mother holding on behind him. Even the place
where they live in the city—not far from Cinecittà on land adjoining some
Roman ruins, through whose broken columns and useless aqueducts they
must frequently walk—suggests the vicious cycle in which these two
characters are caught up, or the dead and deadening past from which they
cannot free themselves. Thus the more Mamma Roma pursues a new and
honest life for herself and Ettore, the more she circuitously relies on
cronies from her old life, as well as the dishonest methods of that life, in
order to achieve it; or the more those cronies and their crookedness return
of their own will to haunt her.
Right after Carmine reenters her life, accordingly, we get a lengthy
tracking shot at night of Mamma Roma walking in the street toward the
camera. Other women walk with her, they all sip alcohol, and various men
drift into and out of the frame as she tells the story of how she was sold
into prostitution—to a man in his late sixties—at the age of thirteen. From
her company and conversation it is clear that Mamma Roma is seriously
considering a return to prostitution, if she has not resumed hustling
already; from Pasolini’s filming of the scene this is equally clear. By
placing the characters against a dark background, then herding them
toward a camera that retreats with their advance, the director consigns
their movement to a limbo of sorts: they walk as though they were on a
treadmill, without seeming to advance, which is one way of saying that
 Neorealist Art vs. Operatic Acting in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma 97

Mamma Roma is trapped in her past or that she will never be able to walk
away from her life as a whore.
Later in the film we see the same shot again, with the same dark
background and backtracking camera, at about the time Ettore is learning
of his mother’s real profession and leaving the waiter’s job she has
procured for him. In this instance only Biancofiore accompanies Mamma
Roma but the latter is still drinking, men are still drifting into and out of
the frame, and she is telling yet another story: this time about her abortive
relationship with Ettore’s biological father. Pasolini uses the frontal,
backward-moving camera in at least one other scene: mother and son’s
motorcycle ride around Rome, which occurs in daylight and therefore
appears to be taking them somewhere (since we can see the background
changing or passing by), but which in fact takes them nowhere except into
the eye of the steadily receding, ultimately unreachable camera. Even
when the camera follows Mamma Roma from behind and therefore does
not negate a sense of directed motion, it creates the impression of stasis by
frequently picturing her entering a room or building whose most
prominent feature is the restrictiveness of its four walls.
The impression of stasis or entrapment in Mamma Roma is created, of
course, by the very nature of the heroine’s profession, whoring, which is
not designed to produce children and extend anyone’s family line.
Prostitution literally feeds off itself, in the process promoting infertility as
well as sexual gratification for its own sake. In Mamma Roma’s case,
however, gratuitous (but not cost-free) sexual acts have led to the birth of a
son, and a son to whom she is more Mamma Jocasta than suckling
madonna or penitent Mary Magdalene, let alone the mother of all Rome
itself. This is a son, remember, whom she has not brought up herself, of
whose relations with young women she is jealous, and with whom she
dances in an overtly sensual manner—cheek to cheek, body to body, with
a kiss here and there—upon their reunion in her Rome apartment. So
overtly sensual is their dancing that it finally becomes somewhat awkward
and they fall down upon her bed in a fit of nervous laughter.
Not long afterwards, and outside church no less, Mamma Roma
jokingly gives Ettore some spending money as if she were turning over her
nightly earnings to her pimp, which is just what she calls her son—with
however much affection—in this instance. Theirs, then, is an essentially
barren relationship, obviously not in the sense that they don’t incestuously
beget their own offspring, but rather in the sense that the erotic subtext of
this relationship may in part be what keeps Mamma Roma from forming a
healthy bond with a male her own age, and what drives her son into the
arms of whores like his mother: namely, Bruna and Biancofiore.
98 Chapter Six

Indeed, in his seeming physical disaffection from reality, manifested

by a kind of sleepwalking passivity, together with his status as an outsider
who refuses work and even integration into the band of ragazzi with
whom he runs (and who similarly reject him by sleeping with Bruna in his
place and deserting him upon his arrest for stealing the radio), the sixteen-
year-old Ettore may be latently homosexual even as Pasolini was openly
so. From the point of view of procreation, such a sexuality, as we know, is
the ultimate dead end. Like Mamma Roma’s prostitution, it is designed
not to produce children and extend someone’s family line, but instead to
join mirror images of each other in acts of sheer lust if not bestiality.
There is one obviously homosexual man in Mamma Roma, replete with
high-pitched voice and affected mannerisms, and appropriately we see him
during the first of the two lengthy traveling—or, better, “treadmill”—shots
discussed above. He is accompanied by another homosexual, and they are
among the last group of men to emerge from the darkness and walk next to
Mamma Roma. Although she dominates the scene and the conversation, a
muffled yet nonetheless audible Latin-American rhythm can be heard on
the soundtrack. Then the most stereotypically gay of the two homosexuals
continues to walk beside Mamma Roma as she leaves the group behind,
suddenly breaking into a cha-cha right in front of her. This is the same
cha-cha that Ettore had told his mother he knew how to dance “a little,”
and which we see him practicing alone in her apartment, with a zeal quite
unusual for him, after his and Mamma Roma’s Roman homecoming is
interrupted by Carmine’s sudden return. Pasolini may make this parallel
between the conspicuously gay man and Ettore in order to suggest the
latter’s latent homosexuality, but certainly he’s also implying something
else: that the son is out of place with his mother, that his relationship to her
is ill-formed or ill-defined, even as the homosexual is out of place in his
virtual solicitation of a heterosexual prostitute.
I hope it’s clear from the preceding conclusion that I believe Mamma
Roma to be a far richer work than do most critics, who generally regard it
as a bad copy of Pasolini’s first film, Accattone. It’s true that the two
movies have much in common: their subject, with Accattone centering on
a young pimp from the Roman slums who, after trying to make an honest
living, takes to thieving and is killed while escaping arrest; the use of a
number of non-professional actors, in particular Franco Citti, who played
Accattone and who performed the role of Carmine in Mamma Roma; the
films’ stark, black-and-white cinematography, in both cases by Tonino
Delli Colli; and their music, although Johann Sebastian Bach on the
soundtrack in Accattone ironically counterpoints the world of pimps,
prostitutes, and street-fighters, whereas Mamma Roma relies heavily—
 Neorealist Art vs. Operatic Acting in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma 99

perhaps too heavily—on Antonio Vivaldi (who, incidentally, greatly

influenced Bach) to intensify its narrative’s sense of foreboding.
Each work even has a parallel in real events: a year before Pasolini
wrote the script of Mamma Roma, a Roman youth named Marcello Elisei
died in an isolation cell in a prison hospital, just as Ettore Garofolo dies in
the film; and twenty-four years after making Accattone, Pasolini was
brutally murdered by a seventeen-year-old boy from the same squalid
milieu as the one depicted in the movie—the section of Rome where the
director himself lived in the I940s—a fatal victim of the very kind of
social outcast to which his art had been drawn.
But there are two chief differences between Accattone and Mamma
Roma. Number one, the plot of the second film is more contrived than that
of the first (which itself is at times strained), conveniently returning
Carmine to Rome to haunt his former prostitute and inflicting a deadly
fever upon Ettore when it is time for his mother’s pietà. Number two,
Mamma Roma has Anna Magnani to make us forget about those
contrivances and concentrate instead on her virtuoso, indeed operatic, yet
utterly truthful and committed performance, which is complemented-
contrasted by the equally honest but rigorously low-key performance of
the teenager who plays her son (whose real name is Ettore Garofolo as
well). In a sense, Magnani contains the film. I find myself blinking at this
statement, since most films “contain” their characters (to good end) and
since bravura acting of itself has never interested me. But that’s the point:
this is bravura acting that goes beyond itself in its brave revelation of
character and thus of theme. It requires only one word in response, and
with which I’ll close: brava!
 CHAPTER SEVEN

REFLECTING REALITY—AND MYSTERY:

AN INTERVIEW WITH ERMANNO OLMI

BERT CARDULLO

Although thematically he inverts neorealism by studying the human

accommodation to difficult external circumstances, Ermanno Olmi (born
1931) is perhaps the best exemplar after neorealism of the neorealist style,
with its disdain for dramatic contrivance and fictive invention. His films
offer slices of life—of ordinary people’s unspectacular lives—with
indefinite or inconclusive endings; they simulate documentary methods in
staging and photography, as they are all shot in actual locations and almost
all of them feature non-actors; and they aspire not to proposition or
evocation but only toward accurate representation. Olmi’s later works
depart from the neorealist style of Il posto (1961) and I fidanzati (1963),
his second and third pictures, but even they are characterized by a kind of
non-discursiveness.
As befits a master filmmaker, Ermanno Olmi is reluctant to give
interviews; he prefers to let his films speak for themselves. Ever a shy,
self-effacing man, Olmi was especially sparse with words when awarded
the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice festival for The Legend of the Holy
Drinker, as well as the Golden Palm at the 1978 Cannes festival for The
Tree of Wooden Clogs. And there hasn’t been a published interview with
Olmi for quite some time. One reason for the reticence is his
embarrassment at having to answer those all too frequent, nagging “how
are you?” and “what have you been doing?” questions. For between the
Cannes premieres of The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Keep Walking
(1983) lay five years of inactivity, then another four years until Long Live
the Lady! (1987) won the Silver Lion at Venice. During much of this time,
he had been wrestling with a long and sometimes paralyzing illness, from
which he has since recovered; still, several years of inactivity continue to
102 Chapter Seven

separate his feature films.

Before proper introductions could be made between us, Olmi queried
why I had bothered to come to interview him at all: “You know my
answers as well as your questions, so what’s the sense of it?”
Nonetheless, speaking in rounded phrases with a sonorous voice, he began
to muse philosophically in his Lombardy dialect about his profession,
about how he seldom needed to go far from home to film a story that was
“part of me,” about how the only measure of a film’s importance is the
common denominator man—or the need for spiritual values, for mystical
tenderness between human beings, in a cold world. Genesis: The Creation
and the Flood (1994), for example, is “about us,” not a homage to a distant
deity in some picture-book. Like all his masterpieces, this portion of The
Bible (produced by Lux), his feature-length episode in the series made for
Raiuno and Lube-Beta Film, is meant to be a personal encounter, a film
carved with a storyteller’s imagination from handed-down oral tradition,
and one that can enchant the hearts as well as minds of an audience.
In the same room with us sat Loredana Detto, Olmi’s wife, taking it all
in with the same wistful charm and anchoring attention that captured the
heart of the youth Domenico in Il posto, perhaps this director’s most
important film. The story of a Lombard peasant boy applying for an
available office job in a large Milan company, and at the same time falling
shyly in love with a young secretary, Magali (Loredana Detto), the core of
the film is a reflection on work—a reflection in this case drawn from
Olmi’s own recollections of himself as an eighteen-year-old looking for
and finding employment at the Edisonvolta company. (The Tree of
Wooden Clogs is also autobiographical, in the sense that it was drawn
from stories about country people told to him by his grandfather.)
The following interview took place in August 2008 at Ermanno Olmi’s
home in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, northeast of Milan. My
plan was to get the director to open up a little more than usual both by
getting him off the subject of his individual films themselves—the
circumstances surrounding their making, the people in them, the amount of
money they made, their critical reception, etc.—and by scrupulously
avoiding questions about his personal life. In order to accommodate me,
Olmi spoke in high Italian (as opposed to his native Lombardy dialect) as
much as possible.

Bert Cardullo: I’d like to focus today, Signor Olmi, on a general or

theoretical discussion of the cinema, of your cinema, as opposed to a
specific discussion of your individual films themselves. Is this acceptable
 An Interview with Ermanno Olmi 103

to you?
Ermanno Olmi: Yes, that’s fine. It also makes for a nice change of pace.
B.C.: Nothing much happens in an Olmi film—that is, if you require the
equivalent of a roller-coaster ride with all the requisite thrills and chills.
Instead of giving your audience a boldly defined series of actions moving
the story along at a furious pace, you share with that audience small
moments that gradually build into the powerful understanding—emotional
as well as cognitive—of an experience. Using real people instead of
actors, you follow your subjects as they live in real time, gently shaping
their lives into fiction with your authorial hand. Why do you work in this
way?
E.O.: Shooting freely with a handheld camera, never selecting anything in
advance, I find that everything happens almost spontaneously. It doesn’t
happen by design, by planning. Why do I work in this way? Because it is
important that the operative technical moment be enveloped in the many
emotions that are in the air at the moment one lives in the scene. There
must always be a participation, a collision with the moment; this is what
determines the choice of image. Otherwise, it’s like going up to a loved
one and first thinking, “When we meet, I’ll touch her hand, and then kiss
her like this, then say these words . . .”
B.C.: Working in such a way, do you get frustrated by the limitations of
the frame?
E.O.: The frame is not a frustration to me, perhaps also because I work
without pre-planned shots. The frame becomes a way of focusing, not a
composition in itself, because it corresponds to the things I want to look at
in a particular moment. It’s good that there is, outside the frame, “a
discussion that continues,” as it were—something I can imagine and even
desire. The same is true in literature, where there are phrases that let you
think of an infinity of other words which are even more beautiful because
they aren’t said.
B.C.: In pre-packaged movies of the Hollywood kind—which are born on
the drawing table, as they are planned out by the art director and all the
technical staff—the camera merely establishes a framing angle selected in
advance, and all the things written in the script occur within this fixed
frame.
E.O.: My own procedure, as you know, is different. At the beginning, I
don’t think about the camera. I think about the ambience and all the
events that are to be presented: place, lighting, people, color. I construct
the fiction I need. When I feel that this fiction corresponds to my needs,
then I go to the camera and let myself be dragged along by the event
without establishing beforehand that “here” I’ll do a close-up, a long shot,
104 Chapter Seven

or a camera movement. With each shot I participate in the event almost

instinctively, gathering up what happens and responding accordingly. It’s
rare that I decide anything in advance. I invent the action at the moment it
takes place.
I almost always work with a handheld camera and, having to get direct
sound when there is dialogue, I need a very heavy camera since I shoot in
35mm and therefore have to put it on a tripod with wheels. I never do
dolly shots or tracks; I never put the camera at a level higher or lower than
a horizontal line drawn at eye-level, though sometimes I go out on a
balcony or shoot through a window. The camera is on this wheeled tripod,
but I move it as if it were part of me, and always at my own height. I
always use the camera in this objective way.
B.C.: What’s the difference between your method of filming and the one
used in documentaries?
E.O.: The difference from the documentary isn’t so much in the
techniques of shooting because, for example, as in my films, in a
documentary there isn’t any elaborate lighting, to name just one technical
element. For me, the technique of shooting is almost the same. The
difference is that in a documentary I shoot a reality from outside my will;
thus my critical participation in the event lies only in choosing with the
camera the image that, at that moment, I find most interesting in a
documentation of the event. In the case of a fiction film, reality doesn’t
happen outside my will, but is organized within me, inside my
consciousness. Thus, my critical judgment and my suggestion of content
lie above all in the organization of the event. As for my approach to the
shooting, I do it just as in a documentary, such that I do not deceive the
viewer with a suggestion made through certain acrobatics of the camera or
through the use of a redundant little touch in the lights or the atmosphere.
In sum, even when the camera is objective in this way, the subjectivity
is my own.
B.C.: Doesn’t this make you feel all alone, as if you are creating a world
to the exclusion of everyone else?
E.O.: I never feel alone. I’m convinced that participating with me in the
action, in this event, are many others. It’s not my personal point of view.
Certainly it is, in the sense that I decide. However, the sensation I have is
that these choices of mine are not only mine but that others have them, too.
I really don’t feel exclusive, that I exclude anybody. There is a certain
type of intellectual who, either out of presumption towards himself or
contempt towards others—which is the same thing—has the ambition to
be so subjective, to be the only one, to observe life and events from such
an isolated perspective. My ambition, instead—perhaps because of my
 An Interview with Ermanno Olmi 105

peasant/worker extraction—is to look at the world with others, not as an

aristocratic intellectual, an elitist, but as someone who mixes with other
people as much as possible.
B.C.: But there are excellent directors who, unlike you, work with camera
operators. As you have been saying, you yourself are behind the camera.
E.O.: Well, everyone makes love the way they want to, in the way that
they themselves feel. Again, conventional shooting is like going up to a
loved one and first thinking, “When we meet, I’ll touch her hand, and then
kiss her like this, then utter these words . . .” Certainly we go to this
intimate meeting with a whole series of motives, but it is only during the
meeting itself that these motives assume their final expressive
physiognomy. There is another reason I am behind the camera. Because
otherwise it would be like going up to a girl and saying, “I love you but
now he’s going to kiss you for me.”
B.C.: Why do you use non-professional actors in your films?
E.O.: I use non-professionals for more or less the same reasons I choose a
real landscape over one reconstructed in the studio. For Barry Lyndon, for
example, Stanley Kubrick looked all over Europe to find the countrysides
and atmosphere that corresponded to his expressive needs. Onto this
countryside, this atmosphere—this choice that he made from the real—he
grafted his professional actors. I prefer to continue such a relationship with
reality, but not with professional actors. The real tree is continuously
creative; the artificial tree isn’t. The fake tree responds to the creative
needs of a fact (let us call it) already laid out and defined, and stops there.
The real tree has continuing virtues: it responds to and reflects light in ever
new ways. When you shoot in the studio, you’ve set up the lighting in
advance; the lights are the same from beginning to end. You can shoot the
same shot a hundred times and it will be the same. The real tree, on the
other hand, is in continual evolution, modifying itself inside the situation,
so much so that you become anxious lest you not be able to capture a
particular moment when the light is changing. This, too, is very beautiful,
because between the first shot and the fourth and the fifth there are
variations—the shot is continually palpitating, in a manner of speaking.
Thus it goes with actors, as well.
B.C.: So you’re saying that you can never get this same effect—of
“palpitation”—from a professional actor.
E.O.: I have always felt in professional actors a bit of cardboard with
respect to the great palpitating authenticity of the real character, who was
not chosen, as professionals are, for their beautiful looks, or because they
characterize a certain type. For instance, in a film about peasants I choose
the actors from the peasant world. I don’t use a fig to make a pear. These
106 Chapter Seven

people, these characters, bring to the film a weight, really a constitution of

truth, which, provoked by the situations in which the characters find
themselves, creates palpitations—those vibrations so right, so real, so
believable, and therefore not repeatable. At the twentieth take the
professional actor still cries. The real actor, the character taken from life,
won’t do more than four repetitions. It’s like capturing a light: either you
get it at that moment or you don’t get it at all. But it isn’t that he exhausts
himself; he becomes something else. And my emotion lies also in
following these things, at the moment they occur.
B.C.: What’s the relationship of your non-professional performer to the
reality from which he is drawn?
E.O.: Since all manifestations of life are life, it’s not that there is more
life in a man, in one of my non-professionals, than in a frog or a tree. Life
is life represented in all forms of expression. It’s so extraordinary and
mysterious that we cannot know all these forms of life. Truth is the same
thing. It’s not true, for example, that there is more truth in dialogue
between real persons than in a poem or a piece of fiction. This depends on
the presuppositions that have generated the words or the dialogue, the truth
of one’s authentic emotions. False emotions are always discovered for
what they are.
Some would say that the raw material of film is the image, but it’s not
just the image. Today we have the image, sound, rhythm. All that is so
simple, and at the same time it is complex, just like the unwinding or
playing out of life itself. While sound is one moment here, and the image
there, cinema is this extraordinary instrument that allows you to
reproduce—but “reproduce” isn’t the exact word—to repropose some of
those moments, some of the fractions of life, to select and compose them
into a new mosaic through the editing. This operation consists of choice,
image, sound, rhythm, synthesis.
In the case of my films, they contain a reality that is entirely taken
from the real. Within this reality there is the echo of the documentary, but
this is documentation that is critically penetrated and put at the service of
the content presented.
B.C.: Unlike many commercial directors, then, you see the cinema as a
whole art, as an art unto itself.
E.O.: Yes, for in a certain sense, it’s a contradiction to use cinema as a
substitute for literature, for music, for the theater. Even when we want to
make a film full of conceptual ideas, it’s obvious we must make choices of
representation from life—choices embodied in image, sound, and
rhythm—to express those ideas. This means that the image, the music, the
action aren’t by themselves sufficient vehicles to express a concept. They
 An Interview with Ermanno Olmi 107

become significant, if at all, all together. And this is why I must express a
concept or an idea through the dialogue between the main characters, shots
of their faces, shots of how they move, in what situations, in what light,
with what rhythm. It’s not that one element repeats the other; but, just as
in literature I choose this word rather than one that closely resembles it, so
too in film I choose precisely that word because only that word can
express the particular thing I want. Then I choose this image because it
can say something better than anything else, and that sound because . . .
You see? It’s as if the cinema were a language that, instead of having only
words, has words, images, sounds—a language, in short, that is the
language of life itself. We speak with gestures, with looks, with the very
sound of the word as well as with its meaning. If I say “Good evening” to
you in three different ways, the sound is different each time, as is the facial
expression and therefore the meaning. This is cinema: nouns, adjectives,
parts of sentences that belong to a special syntax and organization.
B.C.: How does lighting figure in everything you’ve said so far, in your
approach to the filming of reality?
E.O.: Beauty, emotions, must be revealed by indications that most
resemble reality, not by artificial ones; and this certainly includes lighting.
Why? So that the viewer’s approach to the screen isn’t protected or even
deceived by devices, but that instead he succeeds in discovering by
himself certain values, certain atmospheres, certain states of mind, through
indications on the screen that are more those of life than those of
theatricality, in the sense of spectacle.
When I do use artificial illumination, it’s because such illumination is
necessary for the effects of the film stock; otherwise, sometimes the light
doesn’t reach the film. But I also do this at the same time that I respect the
natural environment as much as possible.
B.C.: What about filters?
E.O.: I never use special filters to alter or in some way modify the
tonalities of the natural atmosphere. For instance, when I shoot a close-up
of the female lead in a romantic situation, I don’t use filters that normally
a script would call for in order to make her seem commercially beautiful
or alluring. To give you a technical example from shooting, when I film in
a particular place, I don’t set up the framing and then, on the basis of that
framing, establish the lighting. I first set up the kind of lighting that will
allow me to shoot anywhere in that location.
Since I do the camerawork myself—again, I operate the camera, which
is not the same thing as doing the lighting, for that is the job of my
cinematographer—I know exactly what I have shot, so much so that often
I don’t even have to look at the developed film, the rushes or the “dailies.”
108 Chapter Seven

I just call the developer and if he says the negative is okay, it’s fine for me.
B.C.: I am assuming you do your own editing.
E.O.: Of course. I am one who still works a great deal at the Movieola.
For The Tree of Wooden Clogs, I was there for a whole year. The editing
is the moment when all the emotions I felt when I began to think about the
film, to conceive it, to choose the locations, the faces—all these things—
the editing is the moment when everything comes together. You could say
that during this time, I total my bill, I work out this choice or that
synthesis, I sum up the emotion of all my emotions concerning this
particular film. It’s not administrative work in the sense that I look at the
script and say, “Okay, for this scene we need such-and-such a cut. And
for that scene a close-up is required.” It’s a new creative moment, an
extraordinary moment. This is because I rarely write systematic,
organized screenplays; instead, I scribble lots of notes. When I’m
shooting, I arrive on the set with all these notes—little pieces of paper
filled with jottings about dialogue, atmosphere, faces—and there, on the
set, I begin a new critical-creative phase—not critical-executive—as I
think about the shots I want to take. The editing, naturally, is a
continuation of this critical-creative process.
B.C.: Where, or how, does you writing begin?
E.O.: First I write down the suggestion or indication of a subject or a
story, then I divide it up into many chapters, many moments, like the
movements of a concerto. And everything that comes into my mind
regarding one of these chapters—at any moment when I am scouting
locations or the like—I write down on pieces of paper and incorporate
them into the chapter in question. Then, when it comes time to shoot, I
organize the fraction of the story I am shooting in the most specific way
possible. But when I’m there, shooting, I am often, let’s not say ready to
change everything, but to add or to subtract as I see fit. That’s why I never
have a “completed” script. This is how I like to shoot, how I frame my
shots and film the action.
When I’m at the Movieola, I don’t look at any of the written stuff
again. It’s a new event that is occurring at the editing table. So artistic
creation, like romantic love, is always in the act of becoming; it’s always
in motion, with no real stops. For when there are stops, one isn’t making
love.
B.C.: What do you think of the manipulative aspect of filmmaking, of
how movies manipulate their audiences—all movies, possibly including
your own?
E.O.: Everything is manipulated in a sense, everything: not only the
cinema but the economy, religion, any of man’s activities can be
 An Interview with Ermanno Olmi 109

corrupting—or saving. It really depends on the moral basis upon which

you do these things, both in producing and in consuming them. Even the
automobile can be corrupting or saving. If we use it to dangerously pass
others, to give us a sense of power through the engine’s horsepower
instead of through the horsepower of our own minds and imaginations,
then the automobile can be a negative thing. For example, even
neorealism degenerated at a certain point because it had become a fad, a
fashion, a slick operation, and suddenly it was enough to qualify as a
“neorealistic” director if you made a certain type of film, in a certain
way—never mind its substance. This also happened to the French New
Wave after a while, where if you didn’t make the camera jiggle when you
were shooting a subject, somehow it didn’t seem “real.” But it’s real if
you are real in front of what you are shooting, if the things that you are
filming have an authenticity of their own. If not, you may as well work in
the theater, which has its own aesthetic and reason for being apart from
those of the cinema.
So unmasking the illusion is fine, if that’s what it takes to keep realism
from degenerating into artifice. For, clearly, resemblance to reality is not
reality. This is obvious—or it should be.
B.C.: You are beginning to sound like a Brechtian in the cinema.
E.O.: Yes, but sometimes, even in Brecht’s aesthetic, this attempt to
“disenchant” the spectator, to remind him that what he is seeing is theater,
in itself reinforces the magical component of theater. When the
grandmother tells her grandson a fairy tale, the story of Little Red Riding
Hood with all the emotions inherent in it—the girl, the woods, the wolf—
the grandmother’s face continually reminds the grandson that between the
reality of the fairy tale and himself there is always his grandmother’s face.
Nonetheless, sometimes the grandmother increases, by her very tone and
expression, the fairy tale’s power of suggestion, its forcefulness. So this
attempt to mediate between the magic of theatricality, or the illusion of
reality, and the experience of the spectator—to disenchant or distance—
can be reinforcing instead of the opposite.
In my opinion, however, neither takes away from or adds very much to
the need man has to experience both the emotion of fear, at a child’s level,
and the satisfaction of recognition, at an adult level, through the telling of
the fairy tale. This is because we all want to share the feeling of not
risking our safety, of not being in direct contact with the frightful event,
but instead in the comforting arms of Grandmother, in the armchair at the
cinema, or in our living rooms in front of the television set, which protects
us and guarantees our safety. We even protect ourselves to the point that
sometimes authentic reality—television news or documentary film, for
110 Chapter Seven

instance—becomes transformed, in the safety of our homes, into its own

kind of fairy tale, by means of which we see real events far removed from
our consciences and our responsibility. In such a fairy-tale atmosphere,
these events do not touch us physically or morally; we participate in them
neither in body nor in soul. What we see “enchants” us, and we want to
see it in the context of this enchantment. Indeed, we enjoy the fact that,
yes, theater and cinema—especially the cinema—remind us of reality, but
they remind us even more of the fairy tale. This is why we can watch with
total concentration and excitement as people fight and kill each other on
the screen, at the same time as we self-assuredly stir our coffee or eat our
popcorn.
B.C.: These things are hard to talk about in terms of classifications or
designations—fairy tale, reality, disenchantment, empathy, etc.—this is
something I have learned.
E.O.: Yes, and let’s take Brecht again as an instance. What does Brecht
try to do? To “disenchant” us so that our critical faculty is always active.
Thus he says, “Don’t be taken in by this. Be careful, I am acting; watch
carefully so that you won’t be taken in.” I understand this critical
distance. The spectator in the cinema or the theater feels fear; he tells
himself that what he’s seeing is not real so that he can feel defended
against it; and then he returns back to his fear. Such critical distancing is
like Grandmother’s face: it’s Grandmother who is telling the story, and
this is why her grandson can comfortably feel his fear. Such a theory as
Brecht’s is important for the viewer, but what happens? Brecht doesn’t
always achieve the result that he intended—in fact, he rarely does. Why?
Because if you come with your own ability to critically distance yourself
from an aesthetic event, to analyze it by yourself, sometimes you can be
disturbed by someone who wants to “cue” your distancing or to distance
you from what you’re seeing even more than you ordinarily would be. If,
on the other hand, you don’t have any ability, on your own, to critically
distance yourself from an aesthetic event—if you are over-emotional, let
us say, and feel immediately stirred just by the exterior aspect of
characters kissing or horses galloping—you can feel equally
disenfranchised by someone who wants to pull you back from what you
are seeing. Or the opposite: an emotional spectator can take the distancing
devices so seriously that he becomes nothing but distanced from the
artistic event, to the point that he has completely, and misguidedly,
suppressed his emotional involvement in that event.
Participation in an artistic event, in short, is many-sided and more
complex than most theorists make it out to be. One can participate in an
emotion, for example, but, at the same time, one can force a series of
 An Interview with Ermanno Olmi 111

“postponents” on one’s emotions that cannot be seen with the eyes and
may not even be acknowledged by the conscious mind. People are
different, and so is the camera: the same camera in the hands of ten
different people shooting the same picture will, without question, take ten
different pictures
B.C.: Could you speak a bit now about your early experiences of the
cinema and your contact with American movies?
E.O.: I would very much like to do so. When, as a child, I went out to the
cinema, I always felt good, and I felt especially good when I started seeing
the differences between Hollywood cinema—global Hollywood cinema, if
you will, not just the American variety—and the cinema of Italian
neorealism, particularly the first films of Roberto Rossellini. I was
between fifteen and seventeen years old at the time, and in those years I
passed from the loving arms of my grandmother, who told me wonderfully
suggestive fairy tales, to the bitter embrace of my father, who began to
introduce me to life’s complexities and disappointments. The films of
Rossellini mark this turning point for me. I remember leaving a screening
of Paisan—there were only seven or eight of us in the audience, although
the cinemas were always packed when they showed popular American
movies like I’ll Be Yours or The Man I Love. I went to see Paisan
probably because I had already seen all the other movies around. And
strangely enough, this picture made me realize that it was time to tear
myself way from my grandmother’s bosom. Leaving the movie theater
after Paisan, I continued to experience the strong emotions I had felt while
watching this film, because it was life that I had seen up on the screen—
not movie formulas. And the cinema began to fascinate me, the idea of
making films from a unique perspective but always in collaboration with
others. Film, for me, is a way of being together with other people, both
when I make films and when my films are in the company of their
audience, the viewers.
I loved Hollywood movies very much at the time, but if today my
grandmother came back and wanted to take me on her knee and tell me the
story of Little Red Riding Hood, I wouldn’t like it, of course. This is what
we call becoming an adult viewer.
B.C.: I guess television didn’t enter into the picture for you in the late
1940s.
E.O.: No, not at all: I was too young and the medium was too young. But
I do think that if people today would turn off their own television sets, film
could still hold great value for them. In fact, if it weren’t for the cinema,
contemporary society would be very disorganized. The cinema is a kind
of comfort, especially when it’s a false mirror like that of Snow White’s
112 Chapter Seven

grandmother. We want the cinema, that representation of ourselves which

somehow says we are all fine and good, even when it presents the negative
aspects of life. We are saved, you could say, by this filmic mirror that
continually deceives us; we are its ultimate beneficiaries, we as a society,
as a people, as individual human beings.
As far as I am concerned, however, I could live without cinema if they
took it way from me. But I couldn’t live without my wife, my children,
my friends—without people, especially those near and dear to me. This
may seem like an infantile choice—your family or the flicks! (as you
Americans like to call the movies)—but it’s worth keeping in mind in an
era where much writing about film, and many movies themselves, seem to
have less and less to do with human life as most of us experience it from
day to day.
B.C.: Well, there are a lot of businessmen who would disagree with your
choice of family and friends over the cinema.
E.O.: Naturally. Since ours is a society—a global or international one at
this point—that strains to achieve certain objectives, among which profit
towers above all others, it’s obvious that the cinema as a mass medium, as
a means of popular communication, is strongly and even intensely utilized
to such an end: the attainment of profit, which need not be of the
exclusively monetary kind. It could be ideological “profit” as well.
Whole economies themselves initiate their own strategies for profit, by
means of which the masses, within a grand design constructed by just a
few, fall into a financial trap. But there comes a time when the economy
revolts and turns against not only its protagonists, the industrial giants, but
also against the workers themselves. Then there must be some kind of
reckoning, some taking into account, if not a revolt itself, and this must
involve everyone, including the “organizers of profit.” So it is with the
cinema. At the beginning, when the audience saw a train on the screen
rushing towards them, they hid under their seats; they were afraid, given
film’s power of visualization. Today, to give only an inkling of what has
happened since, you have to stab a man in the stomach nine times to get
the same effect. And everyone is paying a very high price, figuratively as
well as literally, for this kind of exploitation. But I think that any event—
social, political, economic, or artistic—produces certain negative effects
that were meant to be produced by betraying certain ideas or principles.
The only question is how long it will take for a revolt on the part of those
who produce as well as those who consume such cinema. I am not an
optimist at all cost, but I do believe in the will to survive of life itself, and
that when we have come to the end of our cunning and cleverness to trick
the good earth, and with it saint cinema, into producing more and more,
 An Interview with Ermanno Olmi 113

the both of them will rebel against us. Film art—cinematographic

suggestion, if you like—will refuse at a certain point to participate in its
own corruption and even prostitution. This is not just a discussion
involving the cinema, however, as I have tried to make clear, because the
cinema is only one element in the general economic noise that surrounds
us.
B.C.: It is certainly true today that many an auteur—one who has the
talent to make quality films—is strongly influenced by an anxiety for
commercial success.
E.O.: Yes. For example, if their film doesn’t make millions more than
another movie released at the same time, lots of directors feel inferior and
even disconsolate—so much are they influenced by this logic of
exaggerated profit. But the moment will come when we become so pained
by the economic and artistic choices we have made that we will go back to
looking at ourselves in the mirror, to looking into each other’s eyes
sincerely, and finding there the reality we have sacrificed to the bitch-
goddess of capitalistic success.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

MARRIED TO THE JOB:

ERMANNO OLMI’S IL POSTO
AND I FIDANZATI RECONSIDERED

BERT CARDULLO

One of the most unusual aspects of the Italian cinema of the late ’50s
and the ’60s is the way in which it affords us multiple perspectives on the
same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar recovery.
Whereas the directors of the French New Wave each created a unique
poetic universe, Italian cinema of the same period feels like a series of
moons circling around one planet. Again and again, one encounters the
identical sociological material, whether filtered through Michelangelo
Antonioni’s exacting nihilism, Luchino Visconti’s luxurious emotionalism,
Dino Risi’s comic exuberance, or Valerio Zurlini’s stirring sobriety. Over
and over, one sees the same construction sites, quick-stop cafés, barren
roadsides, and cramped apartments (owned by noisy, nosy landladies) that
were constants of postwar Italian society. Most strikingly of all, these
films feature a parade of young men outfitted in regulation white-collar
attire yet betraying their essential inexperience—of the world itself as well
as the work-world. That is, they are ill-equipped for a life of work and
responsibility in a mechanized, high-efficiency world, and consequently
they are lonesome for the nurturing comforts of home.
Of all the talented filmmakers who visited this particular terrain, none
responded more soulfully than Ermanno Olmi (born 1931). His seldom-
cited début feature, Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still, 1959), for
example, is itself a wonderful film that, with warmth and humor,
meticulously chronicles the daily routine of two men who, isolated high in
the mountains during the long winter months, guard an unfinished hydro-
electric dam until the workers can return to complete it in the spring. Olmi
116 Chapter Eight

manages in the course of this semi-documentary to perform the neat trick

of portraying tedium without being tedious. But it was the one-two punch
of his second and third pictures, not the impact of his first, that put Olmi
on the international movie map. Il posto (The Job, 1961) and I fidanzati
(The Fiancés, 1963) are often bracketed together, and, although they are
substantially different, it does make a kind of sense to regard them as
bookend works. Think of them, if you will, as two estuaries growing out
of the same large river: Il posto flows north to Milan, while I fidanzati
flows south and across the channel to Sicily.
These two films, like most of Olmi’s oeuvre, are job-oriented in one
way or another (his Leggenda del santo bevitore [The Legend of the Holy
Drinker, 1988] being a touching exception to this rule). All of his movies
are also documentary-based, in the sense that their narratives are
structured around unspectacular dilemmas reflecting ordinary lives. And
they are all shot in actual locations, with almost all of them featuring non-
actors (two notable exceptions: Rod Steiger as Pope John XXIII in Olmi’s
only real failure, E venne un uomo [A Man Called John, 1965]; and an
unexpectedly moving Rutger Hauer in The Legend of the Holy Drinker,
which is also one of this director’s rare literary adaptations [from the 1939
novella by Joseph Roth]). Olmi’s heroes themselves are always poised
between human solitude and membership in some kind of community, be
it that of family, village, or office. Similarly, from Il tempo si è fermato
onwards, he has consistently focused on elemental work situations
positioned between the charm of apprenticeship and the regret-cum-relief
of retirement, in which everyday concerns are held up against a long view
of the not-too-distant future.
But Olmi’s second feature, Il posto, ushered something new into world
cinema: a sense of intimacy between director and characters that surpassed
anything in the canon of Italian neorealism. In the intervening years, this
film has had a profound effect on directors as diverse as Wu Nien-jen,
Abbas Kiarostami, and Martin Scorsese (whose Raging Bull [1980]
contains more than one visual quotation from Il posto). And if it has not
achieved the same legendary status as three movies released only one year
earlier, in 1960—Antonioni’s L’avventura, Visconti’s Rocco and His
Brothers, and Fellini’s La dolce vita—this is probably on account of Il
posto’s intimacy, its refusal to distance itself from its characters or subject
in an age where detachment, irony, and objectivity are valued above all
else. To wit, Olmi has almost always filmed people on the lower end of
the economic ladder, leading unexceptional lives, yet he treats the details
of these lives with the care or close attention—but without the
embellishment—that a Quattrocento master would have lavished on an
 Married to the Job: Olmi’s Il posto and I fidanzati 117

episode in the life of Christ. The result is that his great films (Il posto, I
fidanzati, L’albero degli zoccoli [The Tree of Wooden Clogs, 1978]), The
Legend of the Holy Drinker, the first half of Genesis [1994]) lack the
aesthetic, even romanticized, luster that attaches to the aforementioned
classics.
Moreover, these pictures by Olmi also lack the kind of charismatic
sweep we have come to associate with grand artistic visions whereby, in
the work of an Antonioni, a Visconti, or a Fellini, the artist’s sensibility
acts as a kind of majestic, all-encompassing umbrella over the characters
and the action. Olmi, like the Frenchman Robert Bresson, paints on a
smaller canvas, where his passionate humanism can completely infuse his
cinematic art. His films thus feel like one-to-one exchanges between real
people; indeed, you have the impression that the director is walking hand-
in-hand with each of his characters. “The sensation is that these choices of
mine are not only mine but that others have [made] them too,” Olmi told
me in an interview. “I really don’t feel exclusive, that I exclude anybody.
. . . My ambition instead—perhaps because of my peasant/worker
background—is to look at the world with others, not as an aristocratic
intellectual.”
Il posto, for its part, looks at the world through the eyes of a young
man who is entering the deadening, overly regimented, oppressive world
of the white-collar work force, with only the romantic prospect of a
charming fellow worker named Antonietta offering a measure of hope. I
fidanzati, made two years later, is about a skilled blue-collar worker
during his long and lonesome displacement (at the behest of his company)
down south. Giovanni is at least ten years older than Il posto’s Domenico,
and he is leaving his relationship with Liliana, his fiancée of some years,
in a state of flux and uncertainty. Giovanni is therefore constantly drawn
back to memories of his relationship with his girl, the sweet ones and the
sad ones as well, while the young Domenico himself is continually
pondering the future.
Both films are shot—by Lamberto Caimi—in a beautiful, almost
lustrous black and white, but where Il posto is more of an interior,
nighttime film (with its daylight effectively nullified by the windowless
offices at company headquarters), I fidanzati is largely an open-air,
daytime experience, in which Giovanni spends long stretches meandering
through the Sicilian landscape. Which brings up a fascinating contrast:
Domenico is constantly looking around, quietly absorbing every detail of
the room or office in which he finds himself, while Giovanni is continually
caught up in a reverie, his attention swept away from his exterior
surroundings as the screen of reality dissolves into the image of doubt
118 Chapter Eight

concerning his romance with Liliana. This is why, with one moving
exception, Il posto proceeds in a straight line, whereas I fidanzati keeps
slipping into the past tense.
Perhaps the principal reason these two films are always thought of
together is much simpler: they both feature extended dancehall scenes,
which have different outcomes yet are remarkably similar in tone and
build-up. The company New Year’s Eve dance in Il posto is that picture’s
anti-climactic climax, while I fidanzati opens at the dancehall where
Giovanni and Liliana have a melancholy, even strained, date just before he
is supposed to leave for Sicily, and where we later learn they first met
several years before. In both movies, the dancehall is empty at the start,
and that emptiness is at once comical and sad. Every seemingly
disconnected detail there—such as the Buster Keaton-style hat that the
grim-faced Domenico wears at the New Year’s office party, like the
throwing of sand on the floor at the beginning of I fidanzati as the couples
sit in chairs waiting for the music to begin, or like the gigantic pill Liliana
swallows before refusing to dance—carries a surreal (which is to say a
reality beyond mere “realism”) overtone, not to mention a deep poignancy.
Let me deal now, individually, first with Il posto and then I fidanzati.
In Olmi’s second feature film, a youth, scarcely twenty, comes from a
suburb to Milan for a job with an immense corporation and takes the
obligatory application exam along with the other candidates, including a
girl. He, Domenico, is shy, solemn, awkward; she, Antonietta, is
somewhat more assured because she is pretty and female. They pass the
test, are sent for physical examinations, then are assigned jobs in different
buildings of the same enormous concrete establishment. The two meet
only rarely. He is an assistant porter at a hall desk. In time, an accounting
clerk dies in one of the offices. The boy is subsequently moved to a rear
desk in that office and will work his way up, through the years, to a front
desk. Ahead of him, as Il posto ends, is the rest of his life—as well as his
death.
To say that Olmi identifies with this young hero on the verge of a “job
for life” is to put it mildly. Indeed, Il posto is probably this director-
screenwriter’s most autobiographical film. Like Domenico, he clerked in
a Milanese company for over ten years. During this time Olmi began
making his very first films, documentary shorts for the Edisonvolta
company, in whose building in Milan Il posto was shot, and whose
employees made up the “extras” in his cast. All of this accounts for an
interesting subtext in the film, something unique to the tone and feel of Il
posto among Olmi’s twenty or so features. So pervasive is this
autobiographical subtext that the pull of its narrative seems closely fitted
 Married to the Job: Olmi’s Il posto and I fidanzati 119

to Domenico/Olmi’s inner turmoil, to his incessant curiosity and romantic

longing, like two pieces of wood joined by an expert carpenter. Even the
section in which the story appears to veer off course to examine the private
lives of some of Domenico’s future (and older) office mates feels like a
poetically synoptic illumination of Domenico’s own perceptions. (There
are oddly similar tangents in this sequence to two films made around the
same time as Il posto, Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us [1960] and
Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders [1964].) For these hushed vignettes
represent the lay of the adult land, as well as a set of possible futures—
delimited though they may—for this young office worker.
Olmi’s mise en scène is just as finely tuned to Domenico’s wavelength
as the film’s narrative, in that Il posto’s cinematography, though it may not
be as gorgeous as anything in Fellini’s 81/2 (1963) or Antonioni’s
L’avventura, is devoted simply, nay gracefully, to defining him and his
fellow characters in space, giving them—through its near lustrousness—a
fine-honed sense of line and volume. (Both Fellini and Antonioni, by
contrast, harmonize shapes, shadows, and movements into the art of an
abstract whole.) Olmi’s delicately attentive soundtrack (Il posto’s sound
track, not necessarily the film’s musical score), moreover, is as carefully
built as anything in the work of Bresson but less rhythmic and percussive,
its many stretches of quiet prompting a meditative state seemingly shared
by the protagonist, the director, and the audience alike. In this Olmi
appears to have taken to heart less Bresson’s super-naturalistic use of
sound than his gnomic declaration that, in a sense, “the soundtrack
invented silence.”
Il posto is thus a film handcrafted from the most subtly elusive things,
among them its moments of silence: the precise way in which Domenico
maintains a safely respectful distance from the lovely Antonietta and as a
result loses a chance to make headway with the girl (played by Loredana
Detto, Olmi’s own wife-to-be), whose own shining presence offers a
dramatic contrast to the numbing atmosphere of the office; the strange
sensation of standing in a room filled with rival job candidates before
undergoing the collective indignity of a “psychological test” (administered
by Olmi’s close friend and sometime co-writer, Tullio Kesich); the
awkward feeling of waiting for the dancehall to fill up for the big New
Year’s Eve party. At the heart of this miraculous little movie, precisely
because it is made up of such precious and carefully gathered fragments of
experience, there is an abiding feeling that, for Olmi, everybody is a hero,
or a hero is everyman.
What makes Il posto so special in Olmi’s oeuvre, however, is the rare
intelligence of its hero, played by Sandro Panseri (who himself later
120 Chapter Eight

became an office worker in real life). Though, in general, the characters of

Olmi’s films pay great attention to body language and seem to rely on
other people’s gestures and expressions rather than their words as a more
trustworthy guide to human behavior or motivation, nowhere is this truer
than in Il posto. While Panseri’s Domenico is halting and shyly retreating
(always pausing to gather courage before he speaks, his sentences
eventually losing steam and winding down into silence), he is at all times
attentive to whatever is going on around him, stealing glances at everyone
and everything as he privately sizes up this strange new world of work into
which he has stepped. It follows that there are no grand speeches in which
Domenico is permitted to deliver his opinion of his co-workers or his
feelings about the nature of existence; but his silent, thoughtful “size-ups”
run throughout the film and imbue it with a sense of quiet, unmediated
uplift. In the end, as he is filling the position created by the recent death of
an accountant, this young man is delivered into a potentially Kafkaesque
future, yet one has the sense that his questing temperament may later
(perhaps ten years later?) lead him in another direction—even as just such
a temperament led Olmi himself into the wondrous world of filmmaking.
But Domenico is not Olmi, and, however reticently lyric, Il posto may
in the end be no more (or less) than a film about a youth disappearing into
the maw of a giant Milanese corporation—and pathetically happy to be
swallowed, at that. In theme, of course, there is little new here, for the
protest against dehumanization has been a steady—and, alas, ineffective—
note in the Western world ever since Marx first sounded his warning
against industrial alienation. In films, René Clair and Chaplin repeated
it—in A nous la liberté (1931) and Modern Times (1936), respectively—
and there are hints as well in Olmi’s picture of the flat, millstone-ground,
pedestrian horror that one finds not only in German expressionist plays
such as Georg Kaiser’s Gas (1918) and Ernst Toller’s The Machine
Wreckers (1922), but also in the naturalistic drama that preceded them
(like Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers [1892] and Drayman Henschel
[1898]). Il posto’s particular triumph—small but firm—is that it surpasses
the demand for mere novelty. It is so strongly felt, and so directly built on
those strong feelings, that we do not care whether we have seen other
treatments of this subject, on screen or elsewhere. All that matters is the
passionate concern, the utter conviction, and the consummate artistry of
Olmi’s protest.
That is one of the film’s most chilling aspects: the protest is Olmi’s,
not his characters’, as this auteur inverts Italian cinematic neorealism by
studying the human accommodation to social and economic
circumstances. As I suggested above, Domenico accepts (as does
 Married to the Job: Olmi’s Il posto and I fidanzati 121

Antonietta) the state of things completely: the herd treatment, the

company-policy politeness like an airline hostess’s smile, the snuggling
into a life-long cubbyhole, the obligatory end-of-service ceremony before
retiring to the grave. It is Olmi himself who is sad and angry. He sees that
the corporate syndrome is especially poignant in Italy, not because Italy
has a long tradition of personal freedom—it hasn’t—but because it has a
long tradition of personality. (Which, it’s worth emphasizing, Olmi
himself continues in this personal film, which we feel was made by a man,
and not by a syndicate.) The company party in this picture thus becomes
the thin rinse on what was once a full wine barrel. And the last sound in Il
posto is not of loud and insistent trumpets (as in the brassily ironic retitling
of the film for American audiences, The Sound of Trumpets); it is the
monotonous slickety-whirr, slickety-whirr of a mimeograph machine.
Olmi’s next picture shows an enrichment of style and furthers his
theme. His story is a familiar one in Italian life during this period: an
engaged Milanese couple, in their late twenties or early thirties, is unable
to marry for lack of money. The man, Giovanni, is a skilled welder, and
his company assigns him to a new plant in Sicily. He must accept the job
because it is a rare opportunity, even though, for these two lovers, it means
being apart from each other for almost two years. The young woman,
Liliana, is desolate because she fears his departure means the end between
them. He assures her that this will not be the case, that in fact the
separation will be good for their relationship. Most of I fidanzati, which
could hardly be simpler, is then taken up with the facts and feelings of
their long separation. (It’s never clear in the film, though, just how long
Giovanni has been in Sicily, how many of the nearly twenty-four months
have actually passed—which is part of the point, or one of the ways in
which Olmi underlines the “eternity” of Giovanni and Liliana’s wait to be
reunited.)
We go with Giovanni to Sicily—which, to a northerner, is almost like a
foreign country. The place is a company town, and, though nothing is bad
there, everything is cheerless: the antiseptic company hotel where he first
stays, the bus every day to the plant, the pensione where he later rents a
ply-board cubicle. In his busy but lonely routine this man fights quietly
and without conscious heroism to maintain his person: as he does his
work, plays boyish pranks with other grown men in the hotel, strolls on
Sundays through the hot, flat countryside, sits on a curb and stares,
wanders (like the lone dog we see) into a church. Through all of this,
Giovanni’s sustenance is Liliana, in her letters as well as in his thoughts.
One Sunday afternoon, he goes to the expense of telephoning the girl, but
her response is one of alarm: “What’s wrong?” she wants to know. Then
122 Chapter Eight

Giovanni goes for a walk and is caught in a summer storm. He shelters

himself in a doorway, alone but, we feel, alive—to the world, to himself,
to his love. And the film comes to a sudden end: sudden but complete,
mysterious yet powerful.
Since so much of I fidanzati is thus devoted to solitary longing in, and
acclimation to, a new and unfriendly place, it’s natural that Giovanni’s
attention should be riveted by images of wonder: the unexpected lyricism
of showers of sparks cascading from steel at his worksite; the unearthly
beauty of mounds of salt raked up by workers on some flats; the storybook
windmills in the fields set against the drabbest of domestic dwellings on
the streets. These moments, which would doubtless prompt the same kind
of rapt attention they get from Giovanni and Olmi’s camera, were we to
encounter them in real life, prepare us for the final images of this strangely
haunting and ineffably gentle film, where both affirmation and uncertainty
seem to come pouring down from the sky in equal measures.
Giovanni’s reserve (the product, at once, of affirmation as well as
uncertainty) and his rough-hewn elegance; Liliana’s loving yet wounded
dignity and her plain, dark appeal: these are the film’s visual and
emotional constants, and they function like two different instruments
sharing one theme in a piece of modal jazz. I fidanzati is made in what I
shall call Olmi’s time-slipping register, and it is by far his most beautiful
foray into modernist territory, simply because it feels so homegrown.
While a number directors at the time (Alain Resnais prominent among
them) were trying their hands at fractured temporal structures in the same
way that one might try on a new and fashionable coat, Olmi employs such
a structure to convey, not the relativity of time or the subjectivity of all
human perception, but something very simple, and very precise (as well as
very old)—longing. The result is that the past and the present, desire and
work, offset each other in I fidanzati not only with great precision and
simplicity, but also with great beauty and eloquence. We are thus able to
take in the mundane details of Giovanni’s exile from his northern
homeland—the Sicilian heat, the arduous work, an uninviting TV room at
the company hotel, the flimsily constructed bedrooms with tiny
bathrooms—in their full, sterling measure because Giovanni is reacting to
them with the same, entirely realistic mixture of curiosity and abstraction,
his attention continually drawn away to Liliana even as ours is drawn to
the abstract notion that what we are watching is not life itself, but a film.
By the same token, the force of Giovanni’s emotional “abstraction” or
dual perspective is reinforced by the very concreteness of his strange new
surroundings. And that abstraction, that double vision, is at its most
emotional during those episodes that depict the exchange of letters
 Married to the Job: Olmi’s Il posto and I fidanzati 123

between the lovers. The first letter that Giovanni receives, he reads in
silence, with no clichéd soundtrack of the woman’s voice. With other
letters, we go in Giovanni’s imagination to dream scenes where he sees
Liliana speaking the words of her letters, as well as to re-creations of
things she describes, all touched with delicacy, all conveying a sense that
the director himself is on the verge of tears. But on the verge, only. It is
such subtle or understated suggestion—maintained exquisitely throughout
(as in the taut, short sequence in which, because he is leaving for Sicily,
Giovanni puts his elderly father in a home)—that makes Olmi’s film so
extraordinarily affecting.
All of this, of course, would be for naught without the eternal freshness
of I fidanzati’s acting. “I don’t use a fig to make a pear,” Olmi declared in
his interview with me:
These people . . . bring to the film a weight, really a constitution of truth
that, provoked by the situations in which the characters find themselves,
creates palpitations, those vibrations so right, so real, so believable, and
therefore not repeatable. At the twentieth take, the professional actor still
cries. The real actor, the character taken from life, won’t do more than
four repetitions. It’s like capturing a light: either you get it at that moment
or you don’t get it at all.

Carlo Cabrini as Giovanni and Anna Canzi as Liliana themselves give off
authentic, and now everlasting, light.
Cabrini, for his part, has a stolid but sweet face, capable of the kind of
self-concern that is assurance to a woman that she is getting a man, not a
sop, yet without the consuming egotism which would only derogate her.
He does carry himself with a stiffness that no professional actor would
ever be able to make believable, but this is something we may all
recognize from life: the stiffness of polite reserve. The same could be said
of Canzi’s lifelike worry and lack of composure, one step away from
emotional dishevelment. She has a face that ranges in expression from the
long-nosed, headachy opening shots, where she looks like a young lady
with perennial indigestion, to the robust bloom of her natural Italian
beauty during the scenes in which Giovanni “envisions” her. She is, of
course, both persons; and Olmi has, in the best sense, put her as well as
Cabrini at ease, thereby easing their essences onto film.
Descriptions of the acting in Olmi’s movies, together with summaries
of those films themselves, may make them sound a bit sketchy and arty,
but they are in fact strong, warm, continuous. His perception of reality is
intense—never arty or affected—yet he treats it with a fertile imagination
not satisfied with mere documentation. And in this third feature of his,
Olmi’s imagination seems less concerned with the enmity of the machine
124 Chapter Eight

age toward the human spirit, more with the way in which humanity
endeavors to persist through it. (Much is made, for example, of the
slowness of the “natural” Sicilians’ adjustment to industrial life. When the
plant first opened, the Sicilian workers—used to farming—stayed home on
rainy days. And when a Sicilian girl comes for a job interview, her entire
family accompanies her.)
Olmi is presumably saying, then, that the concrete runnels exist and
these men must traverse them; but, from the supervisors to the workmen,
there is some consciousness of this fact, which was not true of the
characters in Il posto. The betrothal protracted by indigence, the couple
separated by conventions of the era—these are not twentieth-century
inventions (see, for one, the novels of Alessandro Manzoni), nor is
industrialization itself for that matter. It was possible to endure difficulties
and hardships before, and it may still be possible. In this way, Olmi seems
to be telling us that the grim industrial plant, with its modern technology,
is being sanctified if not softened by the spirit of the men who pass
through it. Whatever the case, and however one finally interprets I
fidanzati or Il posto, this is a man who moves through film like a bird
through the air. With this singular difference: unlike the bird, Olmi leaves
an imprint.
 CHAPTER NINE

BEYOND NEOREALISM:
PRESERVING A CINEMA
OF SOCIAL CONSCIENCE:
AN INTERVIEW WITH GIANNI AMELIO

FROM CINEASTE, SEPTEMBER 22, 1995

The Italian director Gianni Amelio (born 1945) is known for the
incisive social commentary in his films. Amelio has made several films
portraying individuals and families suffering under fascist oppression, and
believes that the cinema should be artistic even as it communicates
important themes. Moreover, since he works with limited budgets, Amelio
frequently makes use of non-professional actors and minimal sets.
Although much of Amelio’s work—primarily films commissioned by
Italian television—has not been screened in the United States, the four
features that American filmgoers have had access to provide indisputable
evidence that he is a significant figure who deserves more critical and
popular attention. Amelio’s films display a rare combination of political
acumen and psychological acuity. His first two features were inspired
reinventions of the political thriller, while his most recent theatrical
releases abandon tight narratives for a looser, almost picaresque style. All
of Amelio’s films, however, are distinguished by brilliant performances by
such actors as Jean-Louis Trintignant, Gian Maria Volonté, and Enrico Lo
Verso, and are noteworthy for a compassionate engagement with
sociopolitical issues that never degenerates into strained didacticism.
Blow to the Heart (1982; Italian title: Colpire al cuore), Amelio’s first
film to be widely screened in the U.S. (although it was never commercially
distributed), was an unusually austere thriller; the genre’s traditional
preoccupation with frantic suspense is exchanged here for a measured
narrative tempo that allows for an introspective consideration of political
126 Chapter Nine

as well as ethical quandaries. The film focuses on Dario (Jean-Louis

Trintignant), a left-wing academic who is suspected of involvement with
terrorists. The narrative’s fascination—as well as its deep-seated
ambiguity—stems from the fact that the decision of Dario’s fifteen-year-
old son, Emilio (Fausto Rossi), to inform on his father to the police can be
ascribed to either political conformism or perverse Oedipal resentment.
Blow to the Heart’s mood of subtle paranoia has certain affinities to the
scandal engendered by the trial of Toni Negri—an Italian Marxist
philosopher and activist who was arrested in 1979, wholly on the basis of
his writings, for supposedly inciting “armed struggle” among extra-
parliamentary groups such as Potere Operaio and the Red Brigades.
Open Doors (1990; Italian title: Porte aperte), Amelio’s adaptation of
Leonardo Sciascia’s celebrated novella, looked back to the fascist era for
parallels with contemporary political repression and intolerance. This
cerebral courtroom drama reversed the premise of American melodramas
such as Fritz Lang’s Fury and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident,
in which innocent men are subject to the wrath of angry mobs or vengeful
juries. Open Doors, by contrast, features a particularly repulsive murderer,
Tommaso Scalia (Ennio Fantastichini), whose grisly crimes elicit little
sympathy from audiences. The struggle of Judge Vito Di Francesco (Gian
Maria Volonté) to prevent this unsavory defendant’s execution is his quiet
rebuke to a fascist regime that employs the death penalty as the ultimate
form of intimidation. Viewed as a multilayered historical allegory, the film
becomes a metaphor for the eternal collision between principled
individuals and seemingly intractable bureaucracies. Although Judge Di
Francesco’s unfailing integrity makes him a slightly idealized paragon of
virtue, Open Doors is remarkable for both its admirable refusal to
sensationalize a potentially lurid scenario and one of Volonté’s most
restrained and intelligent performances.
The tough-minded, unsentimental humanism of Stolen Children (1992;
Italian title: Il ladro di bambini) served as a reminder that, despite years of
supposedly unfettered affluence, Italy is still plagued by many of the same
social problems that inspired neorealist classics such as De Sica’s Bicycle
Thieves and Shoeshine. Amelio observed that Stolen Children reflects the
crisis of an “ailing Italy, with a ruined environment together with degraded
human relations,” and this idiosyncratic road movie poignantly gives
evidence of the despondency that accompanies the erosion of social and
political responsibility. Loosely based on a scandal that pricked the
conscience of the Italian public, the film examines the ostracism suffered
by an eleven-year-old girl, Rosetta (Valentina Scalici), who was tragically
coerced into prostitution by her mother in Milan. Antonio (Enrico Lo
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 127

Verso), a well-meaning if occasionally exasperated policeman whose

tireless search for an appropriate home for the traumatized girl and her
brother yields unexpected consequences, emerges as Rosetta’s unlikely
savior. When a surprisingly uncharitable Christian children’s home treats
Rosetta with unforgiving coldness, Antonio feels compelled to “kidnap”
his young charges; and the trio’s subsequent, long trek to Sicily emerges
as the only humane alternative to a heartless society’s indifference.
Lamerica (1994) is Amelio’s most ambitious work and one of the few
serious cinematic attempts to assess the political and economic devastation
that followed the end of the Cold War. Lamerica offers a fictionalized
account, alternately horrifying and amusing, of the opportunities for
brazen plunder seized by unscrupulous Europeans in the wake of Albanian
communism’s speedy demise. The film’s simple premise—the brutal
comeuppance experienced by two con men, Fiore (Michele Placido) and
Gino (Enrico Lo Verso), after their corrupt business scheme goes awry—
allows Amelio to intermingle epochal political events with a meticulously
intimate consideration of human folly and squalor. Here the sheer scope
of human suffering experienced by impoverished Albanians, and inflicted
by cynical Italians, is enough to test the limitations of Amelio’s qualified
optimism. Yet the character of Spiro (Carmelo di Mazzarelli), a wizened
and apparently senile man whom Fiore and Gino install as the “chairman”
of their bogus corporation, leaves audiences with more than a glimmer of
hope and a considerable amount of untreacly sentiment. Spiro, an elderly
Italian who spent decades in the dictator Enver Hoxha’s prisons for
unspecified political crimes, provides the narrative glue that fuses
contemporary Italians’ fuzzy memories of wartime privation under
Mussolini with the all-too-tangible suffering of the Albanians, who have
been forced to bear the brunt of untrammeled capitalism with the same
fortitude that enabled them to endure years of Stalinism.
Lamerica is Amelio’s first wide-screen film, and this larger canvas
allows him to depict the epic pandemonium of a society that has lost its
moorings, without relinquishing his passion for dramatizing the more
mundane horrors of everyday life. While Amelio is obviously indebted to
neorealism’s legacy, his Bosch-like, near-hallucinatory portrait of
Albanian chaos merges a respect for the contours of reality with a more
stylized approach that acknowledges the constrictions of undiluted
realism.
Cineaste interviewed Gianni Amelio during the American premiere of
Lamerica at the 1995 New York Film Festival. We subsequently caught
up with him for some follow-up questions at Manhattan’s Italian Cultural
Institute. Amelio impressed us as a genial interviewee who answered our
128 Chapter Nine

questions with exemplary thoroughness. Thanks to Barbara Nonas for

simultaneous translation.

Cineaste: You’ve said that Lamerica is not so much a film about Albania
as it is a film about Italy.
Gianni Amelio: It’s a film about two Italys, really—the Italy of my father
and the Italy of today in which I live. My father’s Italy was poor but full of
hope. Today my Italy is very cynical and arid. These two Italys could only
meet in a neutral territory, a foreign country. In my film, two businessmen,
who represent the new Italy, meet the old Italy in Albania, which is the
neutral territory. I chose a country like Albania because I believe Albania
today is like Italy used to be. Historically, Italy and Albania are very close
and, in a way, Italy has invaded Albania twice—militarily in 1939 and
today, or more recently, by television.
I have to explain the presence of Italian television in Albania. Until the
death of the dictator, Enver Hoxha, Albania was completely cut off from
the rest of the world. They couldn’t even listen to the radio. After Hoxha
died in 1985, his successor extended some liberties to the people,
including making it possible to see TV broadcasts from nearby countries
such as Italy, which is seventy miles from Albania. Although Italy is very
close to Albania geographically, in terms of their cultures the two nations
are as far apart as Italy was from the United States fifty years ago.
Cineaste: Is the archival footage of the 1939 Italian invasion seen under
the opening credits intended to suggest a link between Italy’s experience
under Mussolini and Albania’s experience under Hoxha?
Amelio: You could say that there’s a subtle analogy, but maybe it’s also
very obvious. At one point, for example, the two main characters, Spiro
and Gino, are sitting at the base of a mountain with “Enver Hoxha” written
on the side. The old man, Spiro, asks Gino what’s written there, then,
thinking he’s figured it out for himself, he says, “Oh, I know what’s
written there—Mussolini.” I don’t want to say that the Mussolini and
Hoxha regimes were the same—they were very different—but both were
totalitarian regimes. Whether it’s Spiro, the old man who came out of
fascism, or the Albanian people who are emerging from a communist
dictatorship, they are both looking to find something different.
Cineaste: So in a way the film serves to revive the historical memory of
fascism in Italy through the experience of Stalinism in Albania.
Amelio: Actually, I want Italians and anyone else who sees this film to
remember something simpler but deeper and more important. In fact, if I
were to explain the meaning of the film, I would say it is the ability to
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 129

understand the importance of a piece of bread, which is a theme repeated

throughout the picture. I think that the memory of history is important to
all of us—not to remember the date of a battle, let’s say, but to remember
who we were, to understand who we are today and where we’re going. A
person who was hungry once will always be able to understand the
feelings of someone who’s hungry today.
Cineaste: In that regard, Italians were probably very shocked by news
reports on the condition of the Albanian emigrés arriving on their shores
because they had forgotten what poverty was like. How did Italy deal with
this unexpected flood of refugees?
Amelio: It was a real problem because Italy didn’t have any laws about
immigration. In fact, only about ten years ago, for the first time since
World War II, did we begin to see people in Italy who have dark skin.
Cineaste: From Morocco . . .
Amelio: From Morocco, Senegal, all of Africa, and then, following the
collapse of communism, from countries throughout Eastern Europe. In
1991, when two Albanian ships arrived carrying 20,000 refugees each,
nothing like that had ever happened in Italy before. When 20,000 refugees
all of a sudden arrive in a city of 100,000 people, that creates a big
problem. Italians were shocked, of course, and even people who saw these
events on TV felt a profound sense of shock and tremendous sympathy for
the Albanians. People began to ask what the government was going to do
about this situation.
What do you do with 20,000 people who have suddenly arrived?
Where are they going to live? Where are they going to work? So at that
point there was a—I don’t know how to describe it—a strange sense of
anguish because all these people were being held in a big soccer stadium
while decisions were being made. Some of them escaped because they felt
as if they were in prison. Unbelievable things then happened. The next
day, for instance, twelve Albanians were killed trying to cross a highway.
Until 1985 there weren’t any private cars in Albania, so they didn’t know
you couldn’t cross the highway because cars would be coming. They had
only seen Italy on television, so they were shocked by the reality on
arriving in the country.
After about a week or so, most of these people were sent back to
Albania under an agreement that Italy would provide them with economic
assistance. In fact, Italy sent military contingents to Albania to distribute
food, clothing, and other basic necessities. What was very unusual was
that no Italian soldier sent to Albania was allowed to walk in the streets
with any kind of weapons, and, after a certain point, they were prohibited
from appearing in the streets at all in order to avoid giving any impression
130 Chapter Nine

of a military invasion.
Cineaste: How extensive is the situation that the film portrays, with two
Italian con artists arriving in Albania to set up a phony business?
Amelio: Before 1991 or 1992, Albania was a no man’s land and, in a
situation like that, there’s always someone trying to make a profit out of it.
I made a film about Italians going to Albania, but a lot of others—
Germans, Swiss, and so on—went there as well. Some went to set up real
businesses, while others went to set up phony corporations. To establish a
legitimate business, you need laws and cooperation between the
governments. As an Italian, I cannot go into Albania and set up a factory
unless there is an agreement between the Italian and Albanian
governments. But it’s during a period when there aren’t any laws that
scoundrels like those in the film arrive. The older businessman, Fiore,
talks about a similar situation he’d set up in Nigeria. The one thing all
these business people have in common, though, is that they only care
about making money. They’re like vultures; they don’t care about people.
Cineaste: Of the two business partners, Gino seems somewhat more
sympathetic, perhaps because he’s obviously the junior partner and doesn’t
seem quite as mendacious as Fiore.
Amelio: Yes, Fiore is definitely more dangerous because he’s older, he’s
done this before, and he has more experience. What’s scary is that he can
appear to be a good person. When he gives a speech to the workers in the
factory, for instance, what he’s saying seems so wise and good, but
actually he’s just a big liar. The younger character, Gino, is really guilty
only of being ignorant. He’s about twenty-five or twenty-six years old, so
he grew up in an Italy where he never experienced any of these problems.
In one scene, he sees graffiti on a wall that says, “Twenty-five years of
socialism!” and he makes a stupid comment to the old man, Spiro, asking,
“What did you have here—socialism or communism?” That’s because in
Italy there are two different parties, the Socialist Party and the Communist
Party, so the question just reveals his ignorance. Although Gino is the one
who yells and appears to be a racist, at the end of the film he’s the one
who undergoes a transformation and changes. Fiore, had he gone through
the same experience, never would have changed.
Cineaste: Once Gino realizes that Spiro is also a Sicilian, he seems more
sympathetic, and we as viewers become more sympathetic to him as well.
Amelio: Yes, you could say that Spiro gives Gino an idea of an Italy of the
past, an identification of where he comes from, as well as an opportunity
to understand the Albanians. Gino realizes that the Albanians of today are
like his father. He loses everything—his money, his car, his clothes, his
passport—and he becomes an Albanian. It’s bizarre to think that on this
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 131

boat full of Albanians going to Italy there are two Italians.

Cineaste: How did you conceptualize that final sequence on the boat? The
montage of the various faces of the passengers is very impressive.
Amelio: In that scene and throughout the film, I was trying to show in the
relations between the Italians and the Albanians that, in a symbolic sense,
we’re all Albanians. Even if today Gino is rich and can live the way he
wants, he can’t forget that at some point he could become destitute and
need help. It doesn’t take much. All you have to do is lose your car, your
clothes, and you, too, can become destitute. Gino is overwhelmed at the
end when he says, “How can I live without a passport?” and the Albanian
official responds, “But none of us have passports.”
Cineaste: Would you talk a bit about the experience of working with the
non-professional actor who portrays Spiro—including why you chose
him—and the differences or similarities between that experience and the
one of working with the non-professional child actors in Stolen Children?
Amelio: I wanted specifically to work with a non-professional actor
because he’s a character who changes his identity during the course of the
movie, and I didn’t want him to be portrayed by someone the audience
could readily identify.
Cineaste: But wouldn’t an Italian audience be able to recognize his Italian
accent?
Amelio: No, because he’s not an actor. Besides, in the beginning he
doesn’t speak. Other people talk to him in Albanian and he understands
and replies in Albanian. For an Italian audience, it is a surprise the first
time he speaks Italian, which isn’t until about forty minutes into the film.
I also went to the South of Italy to find a non-professional because I
wanted someone with a southern accent. That way, when he finally speaks
Italian, he would have the same accent as Gino, who discovers that this old
man is also from Sicily. I met and chose Carmelo very quickly. I didn’t
audition a lot of other non-professionals before I met him, so it wasn’t a
very difficult task. I was very anxious, however, about the work we would
be able to do together. I consoled myself somewhat with the knowledge
that old people in front of a movie camera become innocent like children.
Children are less innocent than old people but they’re more used to
playing games, whereas old people are a little bit embarrassed about
playing.
In Stolen Children, I would ask the little boy sometimes to do certain
things and he would say, “No.” So I would say, “OK, what do you want?”
and he would say, “I want chocolate” or “I want a soda.” In that respect, I
had to bribe him. With the old man it was a whole different ball game.
One day he was having a lot of difficulty doing a scene. He kept having to
132 Chapter Nine

do it over and over again before I finally found out that the problem was
that he had to go to the bathroom but was too embarrassed to say anything.
The problem of working with a non-professional actor is to try to create
some kind of rapport between yourself and the performer, and once you
have that you can move forward. But you can never, ever give a script to a
non-professional actor to read.
Cineaste: How was Lamerica received in Italy?
Amelio: It’s been well received, although with a certain amount of
embarrassment. My previous films had positive characters and a very clear
message, showing someone doing the right thing, as in Open Doors or
Stolen Children. This film was received in a similar way to an earlier film
of mine, Blow to the Heart, which was accompanied by some controversy.
The characters in these two pictures have both dark and light sides, with
maybe a bit more emphasis on the darker side, so it was harder for viewers
to identify with the characters. It’s very difficult for Italians to identify
with the two businessmen in Lamerica. It’s easier for them to identify with
Spiro, the older character, because he’s more of a symbol. But because
he’s more of a symbol than an actual person you can relate to, he also
remains somewhat distant from the audience.
Cineaste: Although Open Doors is a historical film, did you intend its
debate about capital punishment to have contemporary relevance?
Amelio: Nobody makes a period film without thinking that the film’s
argument is relevant today. I wasn’t making a film about the death penalty
in Italy, though, because it doesn’t exist anymore. I wanted to make a film
about the idea of tolerance in general. I’d like to point out that many films
have been made about the death penalty, especially in America, but in all
of those films the concept is the following . . .
Cineaste: The prisoner is innocent.
Amelio: Yes. We can’t give him the death penalty because maybe he’s
innocent. I made a film for the first time about the death penalty in which
the protagonist did kill somebody—three people, in this case—who admits
to having done it, who has no remorse, and who says, “If you let me go,
I’ll do it again.” People find this very difficult to accept but what I wanted
to emphasize is the principle of having respect for human life. It’s not a
question of whether or not a person is guilty or innocent; it’s the idea that
I, as a human being, don’t have the right to put to death another human
being. In other words, if I kill an assassin, a murderer, I also become a
murderer, even if it’s legal. This is a very difficult concept for most people
to accept.
Cineaste: How did you go about adapting the Leonardo Sciascia story?
Amelio: It was a very interesting voyage that I took in adapting it. The
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 133

events actually took place. They were written up in newspapers, and

Sciascia gathered all the clippings and created this pamphlet. The story
focuses on the conscience of the judge who is part of a jury that must
decide what’s going to happen to the defendant. From the very beginning
until the end, the judge is against the death penalty and he never has any
doubts about it. For the film I took a slightly different course because I
wanted to show what even an enlightened judge would have to go through
to make this difficult decision. Towards the end, in fact, the judge almost
gives up the battle. At one point, he puts his hand over his mouth, as if to
say, “I can’t deal with this anymore.” What happens then is that a jury
member, not a professional judge, takes over and continues the battle. In
my film, it’s the juror who says, “We must continue to fight this,” and who
ends up saving the man, although later, after an appeal of the decision, the
prisoner is eventually executed.
What I wanted to say in the film is that this is not just a matter of law,
it’s also a matter of conscience. It’s not just law that has to exist, but the
conscience of law written into every citizen, so that law is something
which exists if we as individuals feel it’s necessary. The idea of being
against the death penalty must come from each one of us.
Cineaste: Your adaptation involved some other interesting changes to the
Sciascia story. In Sciascia’s version, the juror is more of an intellectual
and in the film he’s a farmer.
Amelio: All of the characters in the film are different from Sciascia. In the
film the judge’s father is a baker, so he comes from a very low social
class, whereas in the Sciascia story he’s middle-class. The juror in the film
is a farmer, as you point out, whereas in the Sciascia story he’s a
landowner of refined culture—he knows French, he has traveled. In the
film he’s a farmer who almost by a miracle finds himself in possession of
this incredible library. And he starts reading the books, which is how he
comes to read Dostoyevsky.
Another thing that’s very different in my film is the prominence of the
assassin, the accused, whose personality I reveal in great detail. He does
have his own sense of passion and of humanity about certain issues.
Cineaste: He’s a committed fascist.
Amelio: I also emphasize his crude and evil side. I wanted to show
someone who was a monster because I wanted to emphasize just how
difficult this whole idea about whether or not to condemn someone to
death—even a monster—was.
Cineaste: Why did you make the changes in the class origins of the judge
and the juror?
Amelio: I think these are somewhat unconscious decisions, because I
134 Chapter Nine

don’t necessarily do it on purpose; but what happens is that I end up

making the characters as close to what I know, or as close to myself, as
possible. I’m from a background even lower than working class because
my father was unemployed and had to leave Italy in order to find work.
The more conscious choices involved making the judge someone who
risks everything that he has in order to make this decision. I thought it
made for a much stronger argument to focus on someone who really
worked hard to get where he is. The judge’s family in the story is not in
the film. I wanted to show the judge as probably the only person in his
family who was able to go to school, who had come from a low place in
society to become a judge, and therefore what a risk this particular judicial
effort entailed for him.
Cineaste: The juror, on the other hand, seems to function as a contrast to
the courtroom audience and the mobs of people shown demonstrating for
the defendant’s death.
Amelio: A person is able to distinguish himself from the crowd only if he
has some kind of education, some kind of culture. So the only difference
between the juror and all the people yelling in the streets is that the juror
has read books. Another difference in this character between book and
film is that in the Sciascia story the juror is guided by the church
commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” and this is never said in my film.
Instead of referring to the Catholic Church, the film refers to the
Dostoyevsky book that describes the horror of execution, of actually
seeing somebody’s head cut off. I didn’t want the film to suggest that only
religious people who believe in the commandments won’t kill, but
everyone else might. I didn’t want the movie to have anything to do with
religion; I wanted it to have to do with humanity.
Cineaste: What was it like to work with Gian Maria Volonté, who
unfortunately died of a heart attack in December 1994?
Amelio: He was like a coauthor of the film. It was very different working
with him than with most other actors. He really challenges himself in the
way that he gets involved in his role and the overall production. There are
a few other actors who do this, like Robert De Niro, who become
thoroughly involved in their work, whereas many actors just leave this
work to the director. Volonté had to achieve a total identification with the
character, for example, both his good and bad sides, and that caused him a
lot of pain. He took on the personality of the character so intensely that it
was almost as if he were putting himself in prison.
During the production of the film, for example—and this was very
characteristic of Volonté—he lived in a hotel but he never left it, and he
never even opened the window of his room. During production, he didn’t
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 135

go out at night, he didn’t meet with other people, and he didn’t even want
to socialize with anyone who played an enemy of his in the film. He
remained like that throughout the shooting of the film so that, in essence,
he wouldn’t get out of character at any time.
Cineaste: Did he develop “backstory” for his character?
Amelio: I always do this when I work with actors, but in this case we
worked on it together. I spend a lot of time with actors, retracing or
creating the biography of their characters, including everything that
happened to them before the film’s story actually begins.
Cineaste: It’s not quite clear whether or not Judge Di Francesco is
antifascist. There’s an interesting encounter in a café between him and the
juror during which the latter refers to the “difficult times” they’re living
through, and Volonté challenges him by asking, “What do you mean by
‘difficult times’?”
Amelio: He’s afraid the juror may be a spy. The story is set in a very
specific historical period of fascism, so when the juror refers to the
difficult times in which they’re living, that is an expression which could
have a variety of meanings—including that this could be someone who’s
trying to entrap you.
Cineaste: Although the film depicts quite a bit of violence by the
murderer, Tommasso, your cinematic portrayal of that violence is quite
restrained. The rape, for example, is filmed in long shot.
Amelio: I find scenes of violence very difficult to do; I get very
embarrassed when filming such scenes, although I know that violence
exists and every once in a while it has to be shown. I wanted the film to
include this type of violence, which doesn’t exist in the Sciascia story,
because I really wanted the killer to be repulsive to people. I felt it was
possible to do this and to convey the horror of the scene in a long shot,
however, and that it was not necessary for the viewer to be right on top of
it.
Cineaste: Some of the violence occurs offscreen.
Amelio: I think showing his actions afterwards—he goes home, goes to
the bathroom, then lies down on his bed—is even more horrible than
showing the details of the killings.
Cineaste: Stolen Children itself was inspired by an actual news event, but
what was the relationship between that incident and your screenplay
adaptation?
Amelio: An event like that happens every day in Italy, and probably a
hundred similar events happen every day in the United States. But what
happened was really just a departure point for me. The first part of the film
is shot almost as if it’s a TV movie, showing an incident that really
136 Chapter Nine

happened, but it’s only after the title credits and the filming-style changes
that my story begins.
Cineaste: Many of the film’s scenes rely on shots that focus on faces, that
explore the emotional geography of the human face, such as the opening
shot of the little boy’s expression, or the marvelous scene later in the film
after the carabiniere has apprehended the robber and he’s being
interviewed by a superior. You use a slow tracking shot into Lo Verso’s
face throughout the interview, and the viewer can trace the character’s
shifting emotions as he’s unexpectedly humiliated and then realizes he’s in
trouble. Lo Verso is a terrific actor and you use the camera in that scene,
as you’ve previously described it, “like a pitiless machine that X-rays the
actor’s mind.”
Amelio: I agree completely with you. I feel at the height of my directorial
powers when I am filming just one person’s face and can see the battle that
he is undergoing just by looking at his face. That’s when I feel like Cecil
B. de Mille, who directed big battle scenes and a cast of thousands, but I
need to see only one face and the emotional battle that it is going through.
Cineaste: Over the years, many Italians have made the journey from the
South to the North, but in this film we have a journey from the North to
the South. Was that a conscious strategy?
Amelio: Nowadays the immigration from the South to the North, à la
Rocco and His Brothers, doesn’t take place anymore. Today these sons of
Rocco have to return to the South because of the economic situation, but
when they return they don’t recognize it. Sometimes they think maybe
they should go back and try to live there, but they immediately realize that
their life really isn’t there in the South anymore. A major conclusion of
Stolen Children—although perhaps a conclusion the characters themselves
don’t realize—is that there really isn’t a difference anymore between the
South and the North, that everyone is the same today, and that ugly things
happen everywhere.
In Stolen Children, then, we’re still looking at internal migration, five
decades after the end of the war, and we’re looking at the landscape of
Italy. This is not a landscape where passion is bringing people together out
of attraction, or even out of anger; it’s a landscape that seems empty,
indifferent to the drama that’s going on among the characters who are
traveling through it. Buildings are either collapsing, like the housing
project outside Milan where the eleven-year-old girl is forced by her
mother to be a prostitute, or the historical landscape is under construction,
invisible because it is covered with scaffolds. This seems to be a different
visual palette than that of neorealism, yet one that is looking at some of the
same social problems.
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 137

Cineaste: How much criticism are we to understand from the scene where
the children are rejected by the Catholic institution? This seems to be a
remarkably un-Christian attitude.
Amelio: In my films I don’t make underlying criticisms of institutions—
that’s too Manichaean—it’s just that people make mistakes and then other
people have to live with those mistakes; but I’m not making generalized
criticisms. Above all, in Stolen Children, the characters are extremely
complex. The title in Italian, by the way, actually translates as “The Thief
of Children,” but the thief is a policeman, so there are a lot of
contradictions in the characters.
Cineaste: Some critics, in writing about the film, drew parallels between it
and neorealist works, particularly because of its use of children. After all,
you were born in 1945. Your life corresponds to the resurgence of modern
Italian cinema. Rome, Open City, the beginning of that resurgence, was
made in 1944.
Amelio: The first thing you have to understand is that “postwar Italian
cinema” is not something that we saw in Italy, especially not in the town
where I was born and where I grew up. When we talk about films like
Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D., or Paisan, you have to realize that these
films did not find an audience in Italy; they did not even reach the
audience. The opening shot of Bicycle Thieves is emblematic in this
regard. There you have workers putting posters on the streets, and the
poster that they’re putting up is for Gilda [Charles Vidor’s 1946 love
triangle, with a fiery Rita Hayworth]. Gilda is the film that I saw. It’s the
American movies that I saw then that formed my education, my dreams,
and my expectations as a person and as a filmmaker. And I’m not alone.
The truth is that neorealism was an elite phenomenon in Italy.
What I’m going to say may seem very bizarre, very unusual, but when
I was growing up as a kid, I saw only American movies; and, again, if
there’s anything that influenced me to become a filmmaker, it was
American movies. This was inevitable because American cinema was at
the time the most influential in Europe, as it is today. The Italian public
never went to see neorealist movies, and the only reason they even know
such films exist is that scholars have defined the period.
Thinking about Open City, perhaps the only thing that the public
wanted to see was two actors who came from the world of varietà [The
rough American equivalent for “varietà” is “vaudeville”]—I’m talking
about Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizzi—because the audience went to the
film in the hope that the actors would make them laugh. In the despairing
Italy of the postwar years, people went to the movies because they wanted
to dream; they didn’t want reality.
138 Chapter Nine

For foreigners, the biggest impressions made by neorealism were made

by its themes, especially the glimpse that it gave you of the people who
had been excluded from society, the people who had been rejected by
society, the poor, the marginalized. But I think this is only one aspect of
neorealism, and perhaps not the most important one. Neorealism is really
all about the gaze, and it’s in the eye of the person who gazes on the world
through the movie camera, and not the subject who is at the other end of
that movie camera. Neorealism can mean being there with the camera
when major and urgent things happen, things that are of the greatest
concern to us. But perhaps even that wouldn’t be enough.
It’s not just the neorealist themes, it’s this gaze, it’s the way the
director looks through the camera at problems, at people, at their faces. It’s
the morality that is thereby created. It is this adherence to what is being
seen—this wish to make sure that the exploiter does not have the upper
hand, the wish that somehow some day, the exploited will come out on
top. One of the great paradoxes of neorealism is that one of the films that
best expresses this sense of utopia or universal brotherhood is Miracle in
Milan, Vittorio De Sica’s most fantastic and imaginative movie.
Cineaste: To get back to Stolen Children, I see this film as a work of
realism, powerfully dramatic, but a work of realism. How would you
differentiate your realism from the realism of neorealism?
Amelio: I think it’s better to talk about realism than about neorealism,
because neorealism is something that’s very circumscribed. It takes place
in a very short number of years. If we’re talking about realism, then it is
appropriate to use that word when talking about Stolen Children. Yes,
realism is the key to the language of that film; I wouldn’t use any other
word.
First, we have to understand what we mean by realism. It’s important
not to confuse it with naturalism, or with fake verismo, not to confuse it
with investigative journalism, with reality television, or even with the
television news. The job of realism is to find the connections between one
problem and another—not to indicate solutions to these problems, but to
dig inside these connections between various aspects of reality. Coming
out of a film like Stolen Children, the audience should have questions, not
consolations, not simple and banal solutions to problems.
In all my films, including Stolen Children, it looks at if the action is
improvised, as if the scenes are stolen from the street, but that’s not at all
true. They’re highly constructed films, very elaborate, but I try to make all
of that invisible. Take this detail from Stolen Children: in any road movie,
you’re always going to get a seemingly random shot of a landscape, seen
from a car or from a train, but seen by no one in particular; it’s just a
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 139

landscape, shown mostly for pictorial or ornamental reasons. But this is

something that you’re never going to find in my movies. What I show in
Stolen Children, starting from the housing projects that you see in Milan at
the beginning, to the outskirts of Rome, to Calabria, to the sea surrounding
Sicily, to the final city in the film—these aren’t environments that I chose
because of their aesthetic value. If it’s there, I’m showing you these things
for a reason, which is in concerted opposition to the Italian movies that
have recently won Oscars.
Looking at my films, people might say that my master is De Sica. But
instead, I would say that I’m more inspired by Antonioni, his earlier films
in particular. During my most formative years, during the sixties, when
Italian cinema was something other than neorealism, if I had to say which
Italian director influenced me the most, I would have to say Antonioni.
He influenced not only me, but everyone really, including the filmmakers
of the French New Wave. Antonioni’s films stimulated all of us to study
film, to examine its language. I prefer the Antonioni of Il grido. I also
prefer the Antonioni of L’avventura, because of his ability in this film to
place actors in spaces, whether it’s in a house, a train, or a landscape,
where they become a unified part of that landscape, while at the same time
the landscape takes on the expressive qualities of the characters’ souls.
Cineaste: The use of empty spaces in Stolen Children is very much like
Antonioni.
Amelio: Absolutely. In Stolen Children there are some very explicit
references to Antonioni, like the ending. I went to film in this place in
Sicily called Noto because I learned about it from Antonioni’s films.
When I was filming Stolen Children, I would tell everyone on the crew,
“Monica Vitti walked here” and “Antonioni put the camera here.”
Let’s take the part of L’avventura that occurs in the city of Noto—the
baroque city in Sicily where you have those extraordinary churches. In
Stolen Children, my characters are living in the same places as
Antonioni’s characters, but unlike them, Antonioni’s characters are
bourgeois. Mine are an agent of the carabinieri and two children, but
they’re grappling with the same deep issues—the impossibility of
connecting on a human level, the impossibility of communicating, the
inability to solve mankind’s problems. In this sense, I’m closer to the story
that Antonioni is telling, and my characters are closer to the characters that
you find in Antonioni’s films.
In neorealism, things are always close-ended, whereas in Antonioni’s
films, they’re suspended or open-ended. For example, a classic neorealist
film, Bicycle Thieves, ends with that famous image of the son taking his
father by the hand, which is a conclusive image; and you get the feeling
140 Chapter Nine

that the whole film was working its way toward that one image, toward the
son reaching out to the father, toward the father and the son being able to
connect to each other. When I made Stolen Children, by contrast, this was
a period when we Italians were already completely disenchanted. We
didn’t any longer believe in this ability to connect. We didn’t look at life
filled with confidence and filled with optimism. And so you see that the
ending of Stolen Children is an ending that’s filled with despair.
In any event, a discussion of neorealism should not be oversimplified.
Neorealism belongs to a very specific time in history, and the classic
period of neorealism extended only from the end of the war to the
beginning of the fifties. When we talk about neorealism, three directors are
always cited—De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti—but, personally
speaking, I don’t know any directors who are more different than these
three. Yet all of them have made so-called neorealist films, so which one
is the real neorealist? Is Miracle in Milan neorealist or not? Everyone has
his own opinion. Beyond that, is Fellini a neorealist?
So, again, I think that in the end to say that Stolen Children is a
neorealist film doesn’t apply. What is clear is that I am a son of
neorealism. As an Italian who was born and grew up when those movies
were being made, I’ve been influenced by them and they have affected my
work.
Cineaste: You have said that your style of realism, for its part, is carefully
assembled and refined. You’ve referred to the use of non-professional
actors in your films. How does that fit in to your approach to realism? Are
they easier for you to use as instruments? There’s a myth about the
authenticity of non-professionals, as you well know.
Amelio: To use a term that I don’t like using, but I think that conveys a
message, I “use” professional actors the same way that I use non-
professional actors. What I look for in actors with training and technique,
like Gian Maria Volonté and Jean-Louis Trintignant, is a weak point in
their armor. I have a method that I use with all actors, which is not to force
anything in terms of acting. What you in America call acting is something
I like the most in a theater, but something that I try to keep the farthest
away from cinema. When I made Open Doors with Volonté, I chose him
not only because he was able to act that part, but also because on a
physical level he embodied the part. A propos of this subject, Leonard
Maltin wrote critically about The Keys to the House, saying the problem
was that the actor who played the father was weak. He was confusing the
character with the actor. The character is supposed to be weak, and I chose
the actor for this weakness. He was an actor who represented the
childishness of some adults, their inability to rise to the occasion to be the
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 141

person that their children need them to be.

Before I even start shooting a film, before I choose the actors, the film
is highly elaborated, very carefully constructed. But once I’ve chosen
those actors, whether they’re professionals or people I’ve chosen off the
street, like the eighty-year-old man who plays the Italian immigrant in
Lamerica, I try to steal something from them, something that is
unpredictable, something that is unexpected. What I try to seek, what I try
to get out of them, is what actors are able to give, not what reality shows
us, because the reality that I see around me is something that itself is
highly constructed, and it’s something that I don’t trust entirely. Reality
often hides its true face. Actors never can. I love the fragile side of actors.
I love their lapses, their gaps, and this is something that the camera also
likes the most.
Alfred Hitchcock used to say his films were so carefully constructed
before filming started that by the time he delivered the shooting script,
there was nothing else to do. And there was certainly no room in that
process for spontaneity, wherever it came from. He understood the
weakness of actors. His films are built on the weakness of actors, and on
the weakness of the characters they played, but spontaneity was
completely excluded. He would not allow the unexpected to intrude into
the filmmaking process. He was making mysteries, it’s true, but
everything in them was planned.
Even in the most mediocre director, you can find a little bit of the
teaching of Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a director who always worked
within genre films. And whenever you’re making a genre film, you’ve
already established a pact with the audience even before you make that
film. However far apart Italian cinema may be from Hitchcock’s cinema,
there is a certain aspect of Hitchcock’s art—independent of whether you
like his films or not—there is something that he knew better than any other
director: you use a movie camera to do an X-ray of a scene, a situation, or
a character, not just a photograph.
Cineaste: Would you tell us something now about your political
formation?
Amelio: That is a very complex subject. When you hear “Italian
Communist Party,” you probably think of something very different from
what it actually is. I don’t know how knowledgeable you are about the
Italian political left. You might describe the Italian Communists as a
radical political party that wants to change the present system of power in
order to create something better for people. At the end of the war, after
fascism, we had democracy and free elections and all the things that
weren’t possible before. But for forty years we had a government that was
142 Chapter Nine

entrenched and practically immovable because everyone was so

intertwined there was really no way of creating change. People had their
positions and were never removed. In this context, the Italian left was the
most important force that tried to battle this regime.
I come from a very difficult social background—as I explained, one
even lower than a working-class background—and I’m also from the
South, which makes me even more “underdeveloped,” and because of this
background I’ve always aligned myself with the left wing. The left has
been very important culturally and intellectually. It’s hard to find any
Italian intellectuals in the last fifty years who have come from the right.
Cineaste: When you were younger, were you more involved with Il
Manifesto—the breakaway faction from the Italian Communist Party
during the seventies that espoused an anti-Stalinist position?
Amelio: I’m very far from them today—sometimes I don’t even
understand them—but in the 1970s that was the newspaper I bought every
day and that for the most part espoused my political position.
Cineaste: Speaking of the seventies, is it true that Blow to the Heart was
inspired by the Toni Negri case?
Amelio: The subject was in the air; this film was certainly inspired by the
climate of Italy at that time. There wasn’t only terrorism, there was a
neurotic obsession with terrorism, a demonization of terrorism, which was
a very big mistake, I believe, politically as well as in every other way.
Since terrorism was being demonized, no one understood the reasons
behind it, and there were actually very concrete reasons why it was taking
place. If people had only looked at those reasons, terrorism would have
been understood. Blow to the Heart talks not about terrorism but about the
obsession with terrorism itself. In the movie, the son denounces his own
father, who probably isn’t even a terrorist.
Cineaste: You have collaborated with different screenwriters on each of
your films. Would you describe the nature of your work on the
screenplays?
Amelio: I choose the story, the subject matter, of my films, and I
personally write a lot. When I choose collaborators, it’s a question of
discussing with them the subject that I’ve chosen. And when I change
screenwriters, it’s not as if I’ve put all my faith in this new person. I’m just
looking for a new person with whom I can exchange ideas. I have a good
rapport with screenwriters but a very conflicted relationship with the
screenplay itself because, for me, the screenplay is just a series of notes
about how to make the movie. In that sense, the script is much more useful
for the producer who needs to make all the plans. It also provides a
reference point for everyone who’s involved in making the film so that
 An Interview with Gianni Amelio 143

they can calmly go about their work.

I usually write the scripts quickly, in a very short period of time. Then
I let myself be very free in terms of changing my mind, of changing the
script while I’m making the movie. In fact, I usually change almost
everything that I’ve written. For example, I almost completely rewrote the
screenplay of Stolen Children with my assistant during the shooting. And
all the dialogue was written during the shooting itself.
The experience was different for Lamerica. We had a very specific
screenplay but one of the screenwriters, who paid very close attention to
the daily shooting, would rewrite the script with me every day. I like to
have someone right next to me with whom I can discuss the subject
throughout the entire shooting of the film.
Cineaste: You also do a lot of improvisation on the set, don’t you?
Amelio: Yes, I shoot a lot that is improvised, but you can only do that if
the script has been thoroughly prepared first. I would be unable to go to
the set completely unprepared, with nothing. So I prepare very well and I
have something with me when I arrive, but then I often change it. A lot of
times, for instance, I change the dialogue between one shot and the next.
That’s why I like very much to work with actors who are able to
improvise.
Cineaste: Music is used quite sparingly in your films. What is your
approach to music in the cinema?
Amelio: I’ve been collaborating with the same composer, Franco
Piersanti, for more than ten years. We share the same ideas about music in
films, and every time we make a film we search together for solutions. I
don’t want the music to “comment” on the images; I want the music and
the images to be created at the same time, to be born together. I think
music is so important in films that it’s also important to know when not to
use it. In my first film I didn’t use any music, but I think it’s a very
musical film nonetheless because to me the sound and noises in a movie
are music.
Cineaste: What are the greatest needs of the Italian film industry today?
Do you believe the government should play a greater role in supporting
Italian film production?
Amelio: Yes, I think it’s important that the state help in a country like
Italy, especially by helping young people make their first films. But the
film industry doesn’t need charity; above all it needs a strategy that would
enable people to know, to understand, and to love movies. Italy knows
how to produce films, but they still haven’t figured out how to encourage
the public to see them. The real problem is distribution and exhibition in
theaters. There should be more support for showing national cinema in the
144 Chapter Nine

nation of its origin: Italy.

There are many ways the state could regulate this business—not by
impeding or prohibiting the import of foreign films into Italy, which
would be stupid and ridiculous—but, to give just a few examples, by
putting a tax on the dubbing of foreign films, by lowering the tax for
someone who’s making a film in Italy in the Italian language, or by
lowering the tax on a movie theater that shows Italian movies instead of
always showing foreign movies. We’ve been waiting twenty-five years for
new laws for the film industry because the Italian government is much
more interested in the future of television than the future of the cinema.
After all, it’s much easier for them to use television than the cinema for
propaganda and power.
Cineaste: Do you think the cinema can play a role in social and political
change?
Amelio: The cinema plays a role in every part of life, but a political
message shouldn’t be the reason to make a good film. The problem for all
of us, as filmmakers, is not the argument, it’s the language. If you don’t
work on your cinematic language, you can make a politically correct
movie that is at the same time a bad movie.
Cineaste: So the film grammar must be there, no matter what the message
is.
Amelio: Yes, but I think a bad message—that is, a Manichaean or
propagandistic message—will always be delivered badly.
Cineaste: How do you avoid being ponderous or didactic in delivering
your “messages”?
Amelio: I try to be honest, to not cheat myself—or others.
 CHAPTER TEN

FORBIDDEN GAMES:
GIANNI AMELIO’S STOLEN CHILDREN
AND LAMERICA

BERT CARDULLO

From the beginning, film developed in two distinctive directions: the

realistic and the fantastic. The Lumière brothers, in such shorts as The
Arrival of a Train (1895) and Workers Leaving the Factory (1895),
represented the will to reproduce physical reality on screen, while Georges
Méliès, with such titles as The Man with the India-Rubber Head (1901)
and A Trip to the Moon (1902), typified the urge to create a world of
purely imaginary people, things, and events. Of course, the realistic and
the fantastic frequently merge: realism is, after all, not reality itself but
rather a style or convention that requires as much imagination in the end as
any other; and even the directors of fantasy films often take their subject
matter from the photographable world, the surface of concrete reality,
which each then transmutes according to his particular vision.
Nonetheless, the terms “realistic” and “fantastic” can be helpful when used
to suggest a tendency toward either polarity, as in the case of the recent
film Stolen Children (1992).
In subject and style, Stolen Children resembles the films of Italian
neorealism, which employed contemporary stories, focused on
recognizable characters taken from daily life, and treated pressing
problems—resistance during the war to Nazis and Fascists alike, after the
war to unemployment, poverty, and social injustice. (Indeed, the Italian
title, Il ladro di bambini—literally, The Thief of Children—seems designed
to recall that masterpiece of neorealism, Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle
Thieves, 1948]). Perhaps most important, neorealist films replaced the
traditional cinematic emphasis on the psychological complexities of the
146 Chapter Ten

exceptional individual with a desire to investigate ordinary human beings

in their social, economic, and political context. The essential theme of the
neorealist film, then, was the conflict between the common man and the
immense societal forces that were completely external to him yet
completely determined his existence. The most pitiful victims of such
forces, because the most innocent, are children, and thus it is no accident
that important neorealist films featured them: The Children Are Watching
Us (1943), Shoeshine (1946), and Germany, Year Zero (1947), for
example. It is also no accident that neorealist directors frequently used
non-professional actors—children prominent among them—in order to
give their films an authenticity and a spontaneity not associated with the
performances of stars.
Authenticity and spontaneity, not preciosity and calculation, are what
Valentina Scalici and Giuseppe Ieracitano, non-professionals both, bring
to the roles of Rosetta and Luciano in Stolen Children, Gianni Amelio’s
second film to be shown in the United States. His first, Open Doors
(1990), was based on the novella by Leonardo Sciascia; Stolen Children,
by contrast, was suggested by a newspaper story about an eleven-year-old
girl whose mother had prostituted her (for two years!) in order to support
their impoverished family. Had this film been made in America, it would
have focused on the lurid details of Rosetta’s prostitution. Amelio, who
co-wrote the script as well as directed, focuses instead on the aftermath of
the mother’s arrest and the turning over to Milanese authorities of the girl
together with her nine-year-old brother, Luciano. They live in Milan but
are Sicilian, which is to say that they are the equivalent of poor blacks—
especially those who have migrated from the South—in any major
American city.
Stolen Children begins with the apprehension of the mother and
Rosetta’s male pimp by police, but Amelio immediately announces his
intentions by placing emphasis far less on the suspenseful confrontation
between cops and criminals than on the effect of his sister’s prostitution on
the boy, who is isolated in medium close-up in the film’s first shot, and
with whom the camera remains as the pathetic (not demonized) adults are
taken away. The asthmatic, taciturn Luciano and the sullen, suspicious
Rosetta are ordered to a Catholic children’s home in Civitavecchia, outside
Rome, where they are to be escorted, not by social workers (who have
turned down the job), but by two carabinieri. En route by train, the older
of the two officers takes off to see his girlfriend in Bologna, which is its
own comment on civic responsibility. He leaves the two children in the
hands of his colleague, the gentle but awkward Antonio, who changes into
civilian clothes in order to put a human face on his endeavor.
 Forbidden Games: Amelio’s Stolen Children and Lamerica 147

What follows, however, is not a sentimental tale of bonding between

two children and a substitute for the father who long ago abandoned them.
A kind of bonding does occur in Stolen Children, especially between
Antonio and Luciano, but it is not one that leads to the children’s
redemption; in fact, one could argue that their orphans’ lot will be made
more painful by the relatively happy, untroubled time they spend with the
caring carabiniere. Amelio’s aim in this film is not to fulfill our wishful
thinking about neglected or abused children and those who are given the
task of watching over them, but rather to take a hard, veristic look at
imperiled young lives caught up in a social system, and by extension a
physical world, that seems indifferent, insensate, inhumane, even
inhuman.
The home at Civitavecchia refuses to accept Rosetta and Luciano on
the grounds that they have no medical certificates and are Sicilian, which
ostensibly would make their fitting in with the other children difficult. But
what we sense is that the priests and nuns of this orphanage want nothing
to do with an eleven-year-old ex-prostitute and her uncommunicative,
nearly anorexic brother. So Antonio has to take them to a second
children’s home in distant Sicily, which means that along the way he can
stop at his sister’s new restaurant in Calabria. It is here that he grew up
and here that he again experiences the warmth of familial relations—with
his sister, with his loving grandmother—from which his job has separated
him, and which will forever be denied to Rosetta and Luciano.
Nonetheless, Antonio and the children begin acting like their own little
family at the restaurant, where one of his young relatives is celebrating her
first Holy Communion. Indeed, Rosetta and Luciano are treated as family,
and behave like real children for perhaps the first time, until one of the
celebrants recognizes the girl from a picture in a tabloid that reported her
mother’s imprisonment. Rosetta runs away from the restaurant in distress,
to be consoled by Antonio along the side of the road with traffic whizzing
noisily by, traffic that recurs like a numbing leitmotif throughout Stolen
Children.
This location—a restaurant right beside a busy road, in a once-scenic
coastal area that is now dotted with colorless, sometimes unfinished
cinderblock buildings—is representative of most of the settings in the film
in its coldness, impersonality, and harshness. The carabiniere and his
charges, both of whom require the most private attention, must pass their
journey in the most public and dispiriting of places: ugly new railroad
terminals, characterless police stations, garish fast-food joints, seedy motel
rooms or dingy public housing, people’s parks that should be oases in the
midst of bleak urban landscapes but instead have become havens for
148 Chapter Ten

derelicts, criminals, and deviants. It is against these sad backdrops,

usually photographed by Tonino Nardi and Renato Tafuri so as to drain
the life from or cast a bluish pall over what little color they have, that the
narrative of Stolen Children unfolds. And one cannot help but draw the
conclusion that such vacant public spheres—which surely extend far
beyond the catalogue contained in this small-scale film—have had a
pernicious influence on those who inhabit them, private citizens and public
officials alike. In his compassion and concern Antonio is the exception, as
are selected members of his family, but how long can he remain one under
these conditions, and at what price?
Amelio poignantly saves the carabiniere’s best moments with the
children for last. With more freedom now that they’ve rented a car, the
three stop at a beach in Sicily, where Antonio teaches Luciano to swim,
Rosetta plays in the sand, and they eat a relaxed meal at an outdoor
restaurant. The fun continues with some sightseeing in Noto, until a thief
snatches the purse of a French tourist who has befriended Rosetta.
Antonio catches the man and takes him to the local carabinieri
headquarters, only to be strongly reprimanded—even suspected of
kidnapping and child molestation—for dawdling with his charges during
the journey from Civitavecchia to Sicily.
The three then proceed by night to the children’s home, pulling off to
the side of the road for some rest but oversleeping until morning. Antonio
remains sleeping at the wheel as the sun comes up, but Luciano and
Rosetta awaken and go sit by the side of the highway, their backs to the
camera, watching traffic zoom by. The girl puts a jacket around her
brother’s shoulders—not the first time she has exhibited solicitude toward
him—and the two of them continue sitting and staring out, in a long take
of a long shot, as the film ends. All they have is each other, Antonio has
sincerely told them and the camera tells us; the carabiniere himself, for all
his good intentions, is asleep at the wheel, and soon will depart from these
children’s lives forever despite his promise to visit them. They know
they’ll never see him again, and they also know that life at the “home”
won’t be considerably better than the life they’ve led up to now, which is
one reason Amelio doesn’t bother to show their arrival there. In a sense,
these two will forever be transient, hence quietly embittered, obdurately
remote, and insufferably forlorn.
Notwithstanding several unions in two-shot during the film, Rosetta
and Luciano have more often been separated in his or her own frame in
order to indicate each one’s essential isolation. And the soundtrack, cued
by the terse screenplay, has been careful to stress the long silences that
these children observe by selectively eliminating Franco Piersanti’s
 Forbidden Games: Amelio’s Stolen Children and Lamerica 149

melancholy if not mournful score for bongos and flute. Antonio himself
ceases to talk from the time the threesome leaves Noto, finally silenced,
like the judge in Open Doors, by a system that leaves little room for query,
detour, or genuine society. Like the two naval petty officers in the
American film The Last Detail (1973), assigned to escort a young recruit
convicted of petty thievery from his base in Virginia to prison in New
Hampshire, Antonio has struggled to break down his charges’ defenses, to
win their confidence and show them something resembling a good time,
and in return for his efforts he’s left feeling as empty, as helpless, as small
as they are. Enrico Lo Verso’s acting of the part gradually reveals the
openhearted, loving child that has been father to the man: a child whose
face, in a photograph given to Luciano by Antonio’s grandmother, is
viewed with a mixture of envy and wonder by Rosetta and her brother. As
for the faces of Valentina Scalici and Giuseppe Ieracitano themselves, I
shan’t soon forget them, nor do I want to, which, looks aside, is surely one
good definition of film acting—and film directing.
Nor shall I forget soon Amelio’s next film, Lamerica (1994), which
does not feature children but does employ non-professional actors in most
of its roles. The themes of communism, neorealism, and illusion conjoin
in Lamerica, which, like Stolen Children, sends its protagonist on a literal
as well as spiritual journey. The difference in this neorealistic journey, if
you will, is that neorealism not only has influenced Lamerica’s cinematic
style and thematic substance, it is also something of a subject or
proposition itself. In this, Amelio’s film resembles II bidone (1955), the
stark and bitter social drama that was Fellini’s answer to criticism from the
Left that he had betrayed neorealist principles in La strada (1954). Like Il
bidone, Lamerica is about an attempted swindle; unlike Fellini’s movie,
however, it focuses not on the relationship between the crooks (nor, as
would the typical American picture, on the story of the scam itself) but on
the connection between a con man and those he would con.
Lamerica opens with newsreel footage of Italian armed forces invading
Albania in 1939. Then we cut to Albania in 1991, after nearly fifty years
of isolation under the Communist dictatorship headed by Enver Hoxha and
his successor, Ramiz Alia. Post-Communist Albania, Europe’s poorest
country, is in turmoil, led by a Socialist regime that will hold power for
only one year; the landscape is alternately barren and strewn with rubble,
the populace devastated and anarchic. Moreover, no amount of bunkers—
built along the coast by the Communists to guard against another military
invasion—will protect the Albanians from economic invasion by Italian
carpetbaggers. Lamerica thus makes an implicit connection between
Albania in the early 1990s and postwar Italy: both nations were physically,
150 Chapter Ten

spiritually, and financially in ruin as well as reeling from the deleterious

sociopolitical effects of dictatorship; and even as many Italians (Amelio’s
grandfather among them) left their country after World War II, when it
needed—or perhaps did not need—them most, one out of eight Albanians
emigrated from his homeland during the period the film describes. Out of
such conditions Italian neorealism emerged—and has reemerged in the
capable hands of Gianni Amelio.
One such ordinary human being is Gino, the young business associate
of Fiore, a middle-aged entrepreneur. These two Italians have arrived in
Durazzo with the aim of turning Albania’s misery into their private gain:
they intend to set up a shoe factory that will pour government subsidies
into their pockets without producing the requisite shoes for the Albanian
people. The prosperous Fiore has pulled this sort of scam before—in
Nigeria, for one place, by making bogus television sets; the slick Gino, for
his part, dreams of getting rich quickly and easily through this latest
hustle. In order to do so, he and his boss must not only bribe a corrupt
official, they must also find an Albanian to be the figurehead of their
dummy corporation, preferably someone who suffered under Hoxha’s
regime. From a ghastly-ghostly looking labor camp that once housed
political prisoners, the two partners commandeer eighty-year-old Spiro
Tozai, a withdrawn, confused, and sometimes tearful illiterate who can
write his name, which is all that the Italians require of him. Fiore returns
to Italy at this point, leaving Gino to escort Spiro from Durazzo to the
capital of Tirana, where the helpless old man has to sign the papers that
will enable the Italians to do business in Albania. And it is here that
Lamerica takes the same turn as Amelio’s Stolen Children, where the
carabiniere Antonio was left by his fellow officer to escort the children
Rosetta and Luciano on a journey from Milan to an orphanage in Sicily.
Gino’s journey with Spiro immediately stalls, however, when the old
man runs away from the orphanage in Durazzo where he has been stowed
overnight and boards a train that he thinks will take him back to Sicily.
For Spiro Tozai, his guardian learns, is not Albanian but Italian: a Sicilian
(like Gino himself) named Michele Talarico. He was one of the Italian
soldiers in the opening newsreel, many of whom defected and assumed
Albanian identities. Imprisoned for half a century, apparently on suspicion
of anti-Communist activity, Spiro-Michele kept his real nationality a secret
out of fear of reprisal. Now he wants to return to the wife and young son
he left behind for service in Mussolini’s army, in the muzzy belief that
only a few years have passed since his jailing and that they still await him.
Traveling by jeep, Gino catches up with him in Baqel, where Michele has
wandered from the train at its station stop and been stripped of his jacket
 Forbidden Games: Amelio’s Stolen Children and Lamerica 151

and shoes by a horde of assaultive, ravenous children (only one of a

number of such systematically deprived, and therefore determinedly
malevolent, hordes we see scurrying throughout the film). In one of those
silent moments that eloquently speak—moments with which both
Lamerica and Stolen Children are filled—Gino gets another pair of shoes
for Michele from a corpse at what passes for the local hospital, where the
younger man has gone to retrieve his octogenarian charge from treatment
for shock.
They continue by jeep on the road to Tirana but its wheels are stolen
when the two men stop to rest at a café. Not only are there no toilets and
no refreshments—much to Gino’s surprise—there is also no telephone in
this place, so he can’t call for help. Just as the vulnerable Michele had
been stripped of his clothing in Baqel, the careless Gino has now been
stripped of his vehicle, with all the freedom and “direction” that it
represents; furthermore, what money he has is useless here, since there’s
almost nothing to buy. He is forced to experience Albania’s upheaval
from the ground up, so to speak, which means from the same vantage
point or eye-view as everyone else—a perspective whose uncertainty or
instability is occasionally accentuated by a handheld camera.
Gino and Michele resume their trip, but this time by mass
transportation: first on a crowded bus and next, when the bus is detained
by brutal police in search of deserting Albanians, on a mobbed truck for
which they’ve had to wait for hours. The old man is still lost in the reverie
that he’s on his way back to his family in Sicily, to which the young one
can only respond in anger, “The war ended fifty years ago! Your wife’s
probably dead.” Michele’s wife may be dead, but for him together with
the Albanians, the “war”—Communism’s war against humanity—has just
ended and they are struggling to make their way in a strange and harsh
new world. Gino’s own reverie, as previously noted, is that he will exploit
the economic possibilities of that world, just as the dream of most
Albanians he meets—a dream fueled by the opulent idiocy of the Italian
television they watch in bars and shelters—is to achieve wealth by moving
to the paradise of Italy.
The Albanians, of course, will be disabused of their illusion if they
ever cross the Adriatic Sea, where, Gino tells those who will listen, they
can look forward to lowly lives as car- or dishwashers. The Italian is
disabused of his illusion, too, however, when he is fired by Fiore over the
telephone at a barracks-like hotel near Tirana, then arrested by Albanian
officials for his part in the shoe-factory scam. Released from jail on the
condition that he leave the country at once, a ragged Gino boards a ship
for home that is packed with Albanian refugees. He had paid the owner of
152 Chapter Ten

the flophouse near Tirana to lodge and feed Michele for the rest of his
days, but now he finds his fellow Sicilian among the boat’s throng of
hopeful passengers. The two men had grown close through their shared
travails (hunger and fatigue chief among them), and for this reason, the
smiling Michele’s first words to his dejected friend are, “We can travel
together.” They have experienced a role-reversal of sorts since Gino’s
dismissal and arrest, with the old man taking charge and offering solace,
even bread. Except that now Michele is possessed of a new fantasy: that
this ship, named Partisans, is taking him to America (the film’s title is
meant to be an illiterate Italian’s spelling of L’America), to which he says
his parents had immigrated before World War II.
“Partisans” naturally refers to the Italian Resistance during the war.
And this not so ironic a reference where Michele and the Albanians are
concerned, since he could be said to have resisted Mussolini by deserting
the Fascist army, while he and the Albanians are both partisan-like in their
blind adulation of the new if noxious Italy. The reference is highly ironic
when applied to Gino, however. For him, “the war ended fifty years ago,”
which is one way of saying that, interested only in his own prosperity, he
is oblivious to the lessons of that war and its aftermath for humanity. He
has learned them the hard way, nonetheless, by experiencing firsthand the
helplessness, despair, and poverty of the Albanians in the wake of the
dissolution of yet another empire: not the Holy Roman one and not the
Third Reich, but rather the Soviet Union. Undeceived yet disconsolate,
Gino sits speechless and shivering at the end amidst the stinking reality of
a ship full of dreamers—headed, thinks Michele, for the ultimate dream
state of America, especially as it has been represented in Hollywood
movies. The last images we see in the film, after a two-shot of Michele
asleep on Gino’s bowed shoulder (“keep heart” were among the elderly
man’s final words to his silent, staring companion), are numerous close-
ups of the weathered but determined faces of young as well as old
passengers aboard this ship of fools. These shots lend the Abanians
dignity, even beauty, at the same time that they poignantly, if not bitterly,
suggest—together with a bird’s-eye view of the ship’s teeming deck and a
closing dissolve to blinding white—the sudden, suffocating fate that
awaits them in Italy.
Giuseppe M. Gaudino and Luca Bigazzi have photographed the
Albanian faces, here and elsewhere in what could be called a fugue of
faces, in desaturated color, the type that Amelio also used in Stolen
Children This process appropriately drains the life from the images at the
same time that—at least in the cases of these two Italian films—it casts a
cryptically beautiful blue-green pall over what little color they have. Such
 Forbidden Games: Amelio’s Stolen Children and Lamerica 153

cinematography is especially effective at quiet or dialogue-free moments

such as those at the end of Lamerica, where the life force and the death
mask seem commingled. Two other such moments stand out in my
memory: as the truck jammed with would-be immigrants crosses rugged
terrain at twilight on the way to Tirana, a young Albanian man sits dying
next to Michele yet doesn’t once ask for help; and in the hotel-barracks
close to the Albanian capital, a feverish, famished Gino awakens to find a
hip-hopping wisp of a girl in the hall, wildly energized by the onslaught of
popular music-and-dance via Italian television.
This waif, as you might guess, is played by a non-professional actor, as
is the part of Spiro-Michele. The piecemeal procedures of film, combined
with the fact that many roles can be non-speaking, make such casting of
complete amateurs possible; nevertheless, these procedures and
circumstances do not explain the miracle of such a performance as
Carmela di Mazzarelli’s in the role of Spiro-Michele. True, this character
doesn’t say much, but he is on screen much of the time, and he does do
things—he does exhibit behavior or perform actions. Mazzarelli’s own
experience surely helped him: a retired fisherman whom Amelio found in
a Sicilian harbor, he had in fact been a member of the Italian army in
Albania. Amelio the director, himself a Southern Italian (from Calabria),
must be given some credit, however, both as empathetic acting coach and
as shrewd editor (in concert with Simona Paggi).
Complementing Mazzarelli’s guarded impassivity is Enrico Lo Verso’s
supple acuteness in the role of Gino. Lo Verso, as Stolen Children
showed, is a professional, and he reveals again that the right pro need not
interfere with a director’s search for the truth in ordinary people—indeed,
he can enhance it. Having played the policeman in charge of the neglected
brother and sister in Stolen Children, in Lamerica Lo Verso establishes the
same prickly intimacy with Spiro-Michele as he did with Luciano and
Rosetta in the earlier film. The result, once again, is not a sentimental tale
of bonding between a father and the substitute for his long-lost son, but a
subtle fiction that reveals the touched and touching child in the wizened
man, as well the wise man in the touchy and tactless child.
Left out of the above equation, of course, is the powerful Michele
Placido in the role of Fiore, whose early and at first unexpected exit from
Lamerica may become as famous as Lea Massari’s sudden departure from
another Italian film about an actual as well as inner journey: Antonioni’s
L’avventura (1960). Left out of Lamerica as a whole, I would add, is any
sense of humor; but this is a film whose view of the world and history is
complex enough not to require one.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

COMEDY, COMMUNISM, AND PASTRY:

AN INTERVIEW WITH NANNI MORETTI

FROM CINEASTE, JANUARY 1, 1995

Nanni Moretti (born 1953) emphasizes the freedom that comes with an
unconventional method of filmmaking and an equally non-traditional
relationship with producers, crew, and audience. That is to say, a
filmmaker has more freedom when he knows that the film he is shooting
will not be for a specific audience or according to a producer’s
expectations. Therefore, the film is freer in form and tone. As to comedy,
Moretti defines his own peculiar style as understated, not overdone as in
classical Italian comic films.
Indeed, the films of Nanni Moretti, the Italian actor-writer-director, are
almost perversely unclassifiable. That Moretti makes comedies which are
only intermittently funny, and political films which can never be reduced
to doctrinaire platitudes, probably accounts for the fact that he has long
been a cult figure in Europe but has, until recently, remained practically
unknown in the United States. Some critics have maintained that the
overweening “Italianness” of Moretti’s films renders them inaccessible to
American audiences. Moreover, the quasi-minimalist approach of films
such as Ecce bombo (1978) and Palombella rossa (1989)—works
distinguished by a deliberately flat visual style and a bare-bones
conception of character—contrasts sharply with the stylistic flourishes and
intricate narratives of Visconti and Fellini. Moretti’s idiosyncratic
aesthetic stance was probably as responsible as any parochial references
for his earlier failure to acquire an American art-house following.
Although the 1994 American release of Caro diario (the film that won
Moretti a prize for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival) has rescued
the director from American obscurity, this work’s eccentric compendium
of mock confessional acerbity and playful social commentary has
discernible links to the earlier films. Although he claims to speak only for
156 Chapter Eleven

himself, Moretti emerged in Italy during the late seventies as a somewhat

unwilling spokesman for his decidedly disaffected generation. His early
films, particularly Io sono un autarchico (I Am Self-Sufficient, 1977) and
Ecce bombo, both skewered his generation’s pretensions and expressed its
anguish, especially the frustration of floundering activists (and, in some
instances, incipient yuppies) who yearned to return to the glory days of
’68. It was in these films that Moretti first started to embellish the
eccentricities of his cinematic alter ego, a mercurial protagonist who was
prone to devouring pastry and expressing his irascibility by barking
frenzied comic remarks to characters who inspired his wrath.
In addition, Ecce bombo gave Moretti an opportunity to express his
distaste for an earlier, more flamboyant Italian comic tradition, since his
alter ego views the venerable comic actor Alberto Sordi as the
embodiment of middle-class complacency. Although this view of Sordi
was in many respects unfair—Sordi’s ebullient brand of commedia
all’italiana was often politically acute as well as indisputably hilarious—
this ad hominem attack on an Italian icon gave the novice director a
chance to symbolically slay a comic patriarch and clear the ground for the
more ascetic and morally ambiguous satire of a younger generation. In
fact, films of Moretti’s such as Bianca (1983) and La messa è finite (The
Mass Is Ended, 1985) were almost devoid of what is traditionally known
as comedy. These austerely ironic tales—which featured, respectively, a
punctilious, and eventually, homicidal mathematics teacher and an angst-
ridden priest who finds himself increasingly alienated from his less
religious cohorts—held a fun-house mirror up to an Italy that was rapidly
embracing consumerism and rejecting the values embraced by the
generation that had survived fascism and economic hardship.
Several films Moretti directed in the eighties went on to toy subtly with
autobiographical elements, although the personal allusions in films like
Sogni d’oro (Golden Dreams, 1981) and Palombella rossa are eventually
overwhelmed by multilayered fictional invention. Golden Dreams even
gave Moretti ample opportunities to lampoon his own style of filmmaking.
The gangly comic actor plays a director who resembles the protagonist of
a poor man’s 81/2: an ineffectual cineaste who is shooting an incongruous
bio-pic based on the life of Freud’s mother. Palombella rossa, on the other
hand, is Moretti’s most extended attempt to examine the validity of his
own deeply felt political convictions. Unlike certain young Italian radicals
who came of age during the late sixties and seventies, he did not embrace
the “ultra-left” but instead remained loyal to mainstream Euro-
communism.
By 1989, however, even many diehard militants viewed an increasingly
 An Interview with Nanni Moretti 157

vacillating Communist Party with jaundiced detachment, and Palombella

rossa employs absurdist humor as an analytical tool to dissect the Party’s
internecine struggles. The film’s central comic premise features Moretti’s
befuddled impersonation of an amateur water-polo player and Communist
activist who suffers from amnesia as the result of an automobile accident.
A crucial water-polo match then becomes the stage for Moretti’s fraternal
critique of the Italian Communists’ historical amnesia. The tragicomic
antics of activists who are struggling to contend with the imminent end of
the Cold War are ironically juxtaposed with excerpts from David Lean’s
adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, a film that reduces a more cataclysmic
revolutionary crisis to Hollywood kitsch. The decomposition and eventual
realignment of Communist ideology, presciently intimated in Palombella
rossa, are concretely explored in Moretti’s 1990 documentary, La cosa.
Caro diario heralds the emergence of a mellower Moretti, and the
film’s essayistic format allows this iconoclastic director to unabashedly
explore his personal and political obsessions with a series of interrelated
digressions. In fact, this film is nothing but a string of digressions, and
Moretti’s amalgam of memoir, semi-documentary, and political
commentary succeeds in being both witty and insightful despite what
initially seems like a suspiciously narcissistic vantage point. The film’s
three discrete chapters allow the actor/director to offer often scathing, and
sometimes gentle, indictments of his fellow Italians. Otherwise unrelated
topics such as the current vogue for nihilistic film violence, the self-
absorption of baby boomers, and the inefficiency of the medical
bureaucracy are united under Caro diario’s far-ranging satirical umbrella.
The film also includes a moving visit by Moretti to the site of Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s murder, and despite the fact that it is difficult to imagine two
more dissimilar directors than Moretti and Pasolini, the younger director’s
ambivalent view of popular culture has a surprising kinship with the views
espoused by the man responsible for Salò and Porcile. Caro diario’s final
chapter is a fictionalized account of Moretti’s own bout with cancer, and
the upbeat conclusion to this narrative of medical woe provides a
cautiously optimistic conclusion to the film’s bemused account of Italy’s
recent political and social travails.
In recent years, Moretti has moved in several new directions. His
production company, Sacher Films, has produced pictures by important
young directors like Gianni Amelio and Daniele Luchetti. Moretti also
starred in Luchetti’s incisive attack on Italian political corruption, Il
portaborse, and has expressed a desire to star in additional films by other
directors.
Bearing gifts of local Manhattan pastry, Cineaste interviewed Moretti
158 Chapter Eleven

last fall during Caro diario’s American premiere at the New York Film
Festival. During the discussion, he periodically checked on the New York
audience’s response to his film, and was an animated interviewee who
delighted in snapping photographs of his questioners. Simultaneous
translation was provided by Julia Panely.

Cineaste: Self-reflexive films like Caro diario and your earlier Golden
Dreams are part of an influential cinematic tradition. Were you always
interested in making films that deal with the process of making films?
How does this component of your work influence your preparation for a
film?
Nanni Moretti: I carried certain things with me from my first short films
in Super-8mm. I was always the director and the star, always making fun
of my surroundings. In my early scripts, I became fond of a horizontal
structure without a strong dramatic core. This was especially true of I Am
Self-Sufficient, Ecce bombo, and Golden Dreams. Then, at a certain point,
it became more important to me to develop the story. Finally, I went
beyond this and tried to recount stories in a non-realistic manner.
For example, in Caro diario I wanted to tell a story with great narrative
freedom. I began to make Caro diario without really realizing it. I had a
different script ready and was planning to make another film. I was alone
during the summer and came up with the idea of making a short film about
my travels around Rome on my Vespa. I filmed for two weekends and
then looked at the unedited footage. When I saw it, I said to myself that I’d
like to preserve this freedom, this irresponsibility I had when I thought I
was making a short film that very few people would see. It wasn’t a film
that had the burden of being anticipated by the public and the critics. I had
already decided to tell the story of my disease and had the idea of
“Islands” in my head, so I began to prepare these three stories as one
omnibus film, if you will.
Cineaste: You obviously had complete freedom when you made your
Super-8mm films. Are you returning to that situation?
Moretti: It’s possible when you don’t have a traditional relationship with
a producer. I have my own production company and a partner who
understands me completely. This structure gives me a great deal of support
but also allows for flexibility. I’ve always felt free to make the films that I
wanted to make. When a producer (such as the person who produced Ecce
bombo) suggested that I make a film, he knew my way of working. I’ve
also had the pleasure of producing other people’s films and giving them
creative freedom. Certainly, I couldn’t have made Caro diario without my
own production company.
 An Interview with Nanni Moretti 159

In my early films, I liked to keep the camera stationary because I

wanted to remind the spectator that he wasn’t seeing reality, but a
reconstruction of reality from the director’s point of view.
Cineaste: That sounds like a Brechtian perspective. Were you influenced
by Brecht?
Moretti: Yes, perhaps. But from a cinematic perspective I’ve been most
influenced by the Taviani brothers. I used to like to move characters
around within the frame of one shot, rather than following them with a
moving camera. I didn’t like banal camera movements. In the last few
years, I’ve become much less rigorous about this because sometimes rigor
can transform itself into rigidity. I’ve always liked to use popular songs in
my films, for example. But sometimes—just to keep myself honest—I’ve
used songs as ironic counterpoint, contrasting them with the general
feeling of a scene.
Cineaste: It is interesting that Caro diario is a “diary film,” and, in many
respects, resembles a documentary. Many of your films could almost be
considered “first-person” narratives, and the characters that you play often
comment upon the action. Since you dispense here with the alter ego
character of your previous films, would you consider this diary format a
natural evolution of the autobiographical strain in your previous work?
Moretti: Caro diario is not a documentary. Even the third part, which has
nothing fictional in it at all, is not a documentary. Although surely it’s the
faithful chronicle of one year of my life and there is nothing invented,
there is very definitely the choice of a style and of a form and a tone.
There is also a way of acting, a way of framing, a way of editing, and the
choice of music that is not documentary-like. One of the three parts,
“Islands,” is completely invented. There are some things that are
reminiscent of my previous films, but in the earlier films I was more
aggressive and hysterical in my confrontations with other people. Instead,
in “Islands” I listen and smile in silence. Surely in Caro diario, for the
first time, I appear completely in the first person. Until a few years ago,
my work took one road. I made films as a director that were
“autobiographical.” They were films about my world—my social and
political environment. I played the part of the protagonist, but interpreting
the part of a fictitious character in a fiction film.
Then my work took two separate roads. On the one hand, the
autobiographical aspect of my work became more autobiographical, and I
finally arrived at Caro diario. On the other, another part of my work is
new and different. I’m also a producer now, but I don’t just list my name
as the producer. I really involve myself in the making of films. I have a
movie theater in Rome. I made a documentary film, La cosa. These are
160 Chapter Eleven

two roads that are parallel to each other.

Until a few years ago, including the views of Rome in the first part of
Caro diario would never have occurred to me. In the last part, “Doctors,”
there is a glimpse of my own chemotherapy session shot in 16mm. At that
time, I didn’t know I would incorporate this footage into a fiction film.
Every once in a while I film certain things, either events in my personal
life or public events, not knowing how they will be utilized in the future or
whether they will be utilized at all. Sometimes this footage remains in the
Moviola because it’s not interesting. When I began to make Caro diario, I
remembered that I had shot this chemotherapy session, and it seemed right
to insert it in the film.
Cineaste: Did La cosa, your film on the Italian Communist Party, emerge
from these impromptu filming sessions?
Moretti: I started this documentary film on the downfall of the
Communist Party somewhat by chance. After the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the secretary of the Communist Party suggested that we change the name
and also the nature of the Communist Party in Italy.
Cineaste: It suddenly became the Party of the Democratic Left.
Moretti: At that time, nobody knew that it would be called that. As a
matter of fact, in the meetings I filmed, everyone is talking about this
Party that we will create but, since we didn’t know what this entity would
be, it was referred to as “this thing.” Appropriately, “La cosa” means “the
thing.”
One day I found out that there was a meeting scheduled for the next
day to discuss the ICP secretary’s proposal. I told my partner in my
production company, Sacher Films, that we would have to find a camera
and a sound man for tomorrow. I filmed this meeting and found it very
interesting.
Then I started traveling around—I went to Bologna, Naples, and Turin.
I went to visit various meetings of Communist Party chapters around the
country, and I saw people, some of them very militant Communists,
talking about the secretary’s proposal for the first time. It was a unique
moment, because hundreds of thousands of people were talking about the
same thing at the same time, not only in the official forum of the
Communist Party but also on the streets. La cosa is a documentary that
consists of talking heads; I’m not in the film handing people the
microphone and asking them questions.
Cineaste: What is the relationship between your satirical look at the
Communist Party in Palombella rossa and the nonfictional treatment of
the Party in La cosa? Has your own view of the Party evolved over the
years?
 An Interview with Nanni Moretti 161

Moretti: First of all, I have to state some premises. I, like millions of other
people in Italy, voted for the Communist Party. Nonetheless, I never
registered and have never been a card-carrying member of the Party. From
the middle of the 1970s to the middle of the 1980s, an average of one third
of the population voted for the Communist Party. If the Communist Party
had taken power, it certainly wouldn’t have created a regime like the
Soviet Union’s—at least that’s my opinion. Italian Communism was very
different. For many years, many regions of Italy have been governed by
the left.
Filming La cosa from the outside of the Communist Party, I didn’t
think that there would be such a strong sentimental attachment between
the Italian militants and the Eastern bloc. We’re talking about the end of
1989, the year in which everything exploded. I thought that the older
militants in their sixties and seventies who had lived through the Cold War
would still be fond of the Eastern bloc countries. Instead, I found that even
the youngest militants felt a strong identification with the Eastern
countries. I really didn’t expect this, because I never identified with the
Eastern countries, not even for a minute in my life. Maybe for many of
these militants, this bond wasn’t rational. Certainly, they didn’t look at
these countries as a model for Italy, but there was an undeniable emotional
affinity.
Palombella Rosa and La cosa complement each other. Palombella
Rosa was released in Italy in September 1989; two months after that the
Berlin Wall came down, and I started to film La cosa, which was finished
in March 1990. The protagonist of Palombella rossa has amnesia because,
for me, he seemed to individualize a problem of the Communist Party in
Italy—a problem of memory.
Cineaste: Historical memory?
Moretti: Yes, a problem with the Communists’ relationship with their
own past. I wanted to tell the story of the crisis and confusion of the
Communist Party, but not in a realistic film. Not in a film where the
protagonist wakes up in the morning with a headache or where he’s
divorcing his wife, as if to say that political crisis always goes hand in
hand with existential crisis.
The public really responded to this movie, Palombella rossa. This
problem of memory, both public and private, that I expressed through a
metaphor became a concrete reality with the crisis inside the Communist
Party. It was as if the Communists had a desire to cancel out their own
past, both the good parts and the bad parts, in order to make themselves
accepted by society so that they could govern.
In my previous films, I had constructed a character with certain
162 Chapter Eleven

constants. He was always on the telephone, he liked soccer, was a little

aggressive, and had a passion for pastry. There were family meals at the
table, and he also had an obsession with shoes. A dynamic was created
between my characters and the other characters that functioned in an
almost automatic way. I was on one side and they were on the other side. I
“aspired” to become the artistic director of their private lives, so I scolded
them and got angry with them. As a director, when I told these stories of
rage, I didn’t want to tell about my strengths; I wanted to recount my
weaknesses. I considered my characters and the other characters to be
complementary, like two sides of a coin. Instead, the words that I said as
an actor came to be seen as my views as a director. There’s frequently this
misunderstanding, but it is more common when the director is also the
protagonist of the film. I didn’t want the public to root for me, as if I were
triumphing over the other characters. Now, a few years after Palombella
rossa, maybe I see my previous films with a different eye.
Perhaps I told a story about amnesia because I wanted to close the door
on the character that I had played in my previous films, and start all over
again with a new character that had to be completely constructed from
scratch. This new character doesn’t exist, because in Caro diario I play
myself and not a new character. In Palombella rossa, I remember things in
my life through people in the film whom I encounter—the journalist, my
daughter, the people that bring me sweets, my old friend from school. It
was almost as if they were viewers of my film that remind me of what my
old character was like. In Caro diario, it would have been absurd to hide
myself behind a fictitious character because in the third part, “Doctors,”
there’s nothing that’s invented.
Cineaste: You’re gradually stripping layers of excess away from film to
film. The metaphor of amnesia in Palombella rossa is also a metaphor for
the increasing simplicity of your artistic approach.
Moretti: Palombella Rosa and Caro diario have something in common.
This is the desire to avoid the conventions of the script, the so-called rules
of cinematic storytelling. Instead, I unfortunately noticed—I don’t know if
this is only an Italian phenomenon—that there’s a return of academicism.
There are certain first films that seem like thirtieth films. New directors
who don’t want to take risks are content to tell stories in a neat little way,
stories that were already told, and told much better, thirty years ago.
Above all, these directors are very obedient scholars, following the
conventional rules of scriptwriting. Some first films have neither the good
qualities nor the defects that first films usually have. They’re very cute and
antiseptic.
Cineaste: Your attack on conventions within the Italian cinema can be
 An Interview with Nanni Moretti 163

traced back to Ecce bombo, a film in which your alter ego attacks Alberto
Sordi and his brand of comedy.
Moretti: We’re talking about two very different types of cinema. I just
spoke about first films that aspire to success, and Alberto Sordi already
had power within the world of cinema when I made Ecce bombo. He
created a whole style of Italian comic acting in the fifties and sixties. Like
many actors, he wanted to be a director, and the films that he directed I
didn’t find interesting. Even as an actor, he became much more
conventional. The only great actor who never wanted to be a director is
Marcello Mastroianni. It’s exactly for this reason that he can be considered
a great actor. He’s happy to be an actor, he’s good at it, and, above all,
he’s a good person.
Cineaste: Do you feel completely detached from an earlier tradition of
Italian comic cinema, or do you feel any affinities with that tradition?
Moretti: Sometimes directors don’t understand their own work very well.
I don’t feel very close to that type of cinema. And I don’t want to get into
a discussion about the merits of films. I like a type of comedy that
subtracts. My type of comedy doesn’t overdo things. [Moretti places
crockery, glasses, and ashtrays together in a pile and says, “This is
traditional Italian comedy, putting everything in and overdoing things.”
After dispersing the objects, he proclaims, “This is my comedy.”] Just as
my style is different from the one you find in an older tradition of Italian
comedy, so is my relationship with the public. The most important
difference is this: I make fun of my own milieu because I think that, when
you make fun of yourself, you have more of a right to make fun of others.
Instead, the older Italian comedy reached its most well-known and perhaps
best results when it dealt with subject matter the scriptwriters and directors
weren’t personally familiar with. They didn’t show us their own world, but
talked about the lumpenproletariat or workers who tried to become
bourgeois or even to emulate aristocrats. I’m not talking about merit here,
I’m talking about method. My films are more personal, both in style and
content.
Cineaste: Many of your films seem imbued with a spirit of self-irony,
particularly in reference to the travails of the post-1968 generation. This is
particularly true of Ecce bombo.
Moretti: I Am Self-Sufficient is also a film in this vein. I Am Self-Sufficient
was an earlier success, but it was designed for a very specific public—a
film-oriented public. The success of these two films, in two different
circuits of distribution, was due to the fact that for the first time a
generation made fun of itself in public. For me, public transparency was
very interesting. Long before glasnost came along, I wanted to criticize
164 Chapter Eleven

my world in public, because the left in the past always had a politics of
double truth. Among ourselves, we would talk about things that weren’t
working. But, then, in public, we had to appear to be completely and
monolithically in agreement. It was thought that we shouldn’t criticize
ourselves, because we shouldn’t appear weak for fear that our adversaries
might profit from our weakness.
Cineaste: Most factions of the left do not want to appear vulnerable to the
other side.
Moretti: This adherence to what I call double truth was a Stalinist form of
politics. I don’t care if the right profited from seeing the left’s confusion in
a film. You always have to start with the truth, in order to go on and make
things better.
Ecce bombo, for its part, talked about the middle-class left of a big
city. My friends called and told me that they liked the film. After a week
had passed, they called me again and said, “Even my parents saw the film,
and they liked it, too.” My friends told me they were bothered that their
parents had liked the film. This is an example of washing your dirty linen
in public, which is what I wanted to do. If people who were not part of the
left liked the movie, I thought that was fine. This generation weaned on
the mass media came to be seen as a dull public that was unable to
laugh—very dogmatic and rigid. Finally, with Ecce bombo, they were able
to laugh at themselves.
Cineaste: Many of your films reflect a somewhat ambivalent view of
popular culture. In Caro diario, for example, the professor character
initially hates television and constantly quotes Enzensberger, but
eventually becomes a soap-opera addict.
Moretti: In Caro diario, I wanted to show what happened to intellectuals
between the seventies and eighties. They passed from a complete disdain
for television to a complete acceptance of it. Naturally, this is an
intellectual journey that people take over the course of many years, but the
section of the film called “Islands” lasts for a few days. At the beginning
of this chapter in the film, Gerardo, the professor, says truthfully that it’s
been thirty years since he last watched television. Then he starts to watch
it again and soon can’t live without it. I wanted to tell the story of this
phenomenon, but naturally I’m not in agreement with him. Nonetheless, I
wanted to recount the story of this change because I thought the story of
the extremes of complete acceptance or complete refutation of the mass
media had comic potential.
Cineaste: Of course, either extreme is silly, and the inhabitants of the
various islands are all mired in rather absurd behavioral patterns.
Moretti: I wanted to tell about this world of islands. Although they’re
 An Interview with Nanni Moretti 165

very near each other, they don’t succeed in communicating. All the islands
are content with their own mania. Maybe it’s a metaphor about how we
live in society today.
In Caro diario, I discovered that I didn’t want to yell anymore. This
doesn’t mean that I feel like resigning myself to my situation. Maybe it has
more to do with maturity. I accept that the other characters live as they
desire and not as we think they should.
Cineaste: Could you tell us about the anti-fascist film project in which you
participated during the Italian electoral campaign?
Moretti: Before the election, some other directors and I made a
collaborative film. It was about twenty minutes in length and consisted of
nine very brief sequences by nine different directors. Some of them had a
great deal of influence in the mass media. We didn’t want to submit the
usual petition that intellectuals sign, or even participate in interviews. We
wanted to convey our uneasiness with the situation through our own
medium. We did this in a hurry, and had the cooperation of many of the
younger Italian directors such as Marco Risi and Carlo Mazzicurato. The
climate during the electoral campaign was poisonous, so the film was
highly criticized. The film, titled L’unico paese al mondo or The Only Country
in the World, was shown as a short before selected feature films. There
were certain theaters in Italy that we called because we knew they were
interested, and there were other theaters that called us because they were
interested. The film had a very limited release, however.
Cineaste: After the Cannes Film Festival, the neofascist sympathizer (and
film director) Pasquale Squitieri claimed that your prize (for Best Director)
was “politically motivated.” Since this incident was only sketchily
reported in the American press, could you explain it a bit more for us?
Moretti: When Caro diario won the prize at Cannes, this director,
Squitieri, who is now a deputy in the Parliament representing the extreme
right, denounced the award. Until a few years ago, he claimed to be from
the extreme left, but now he’s come to a better self-understanding and
realizes that he belongs to the extreme right. This was political
capriciousness on his part, silly and stupid. I think he said that my film
won at Cannes because of political pressure. But I don’t really understand
by whom jurors like Catherine Deneuve or Clint Eastwood could have
been politically pressured. They’re not exactly leftists! In any case, the
whole thing was a moronic incident and I’m glad to be past it. I like real
politics, in as well as outside the cinema—but Squitieri’s is the fake, self-
aggrandizing, finally self-defeating kind.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

EPIPHANIES: MORETTI’S THE MASS IS ENDED

AND THE SON’S ROOM

BERT CARDULLO

The Mass Is Ended, the third feature by the Italian director Nanni
Moretti (born 1953) and the first to be released in the United States, is
simple but subtle, aggressive yet winning. The Mass Is Ended was made
in 1985; it took three years to get to the United States and left quickly,
after receiving a lukewarm to negative response from the New York press,
which never knows quite what to do with new works from unheralded
directors.
The Mass Is Ended is a comedy-drama in which Moretti himself plays
a priest in a modern-day, citified Italy not as smitten with priests and the
Catholic Church as it once was—if it ever was! (Moretti has played the
lead in all his feature films, in addition to directing them and writing or co-
writing their scripts.) He’s known as Giulio in the film, and our first
glimpse of him, in the opening shots, is in ordinary clothing, not in his
habit. In this sequence he walks alone, fishes alone, then swims alone in a
long shot that emphasizes his solitariness. We don’t discover that he’s a
priest until, in the next sequence, we watch him perform a marriage.
Moretti the director has thus established from the first—and established
visually, not through language—that this will be the story of a man who is
also a priest, not of a priest whose character as a man is more or less
beside the point.
Right after marrying the couple, Giulio leaves his island parish with
them for Rome, his hometown, where they will honeymoon and where he
will take over a small church on the outskirts of the city—a church that has
fallen on hard times after losing its former priest to marriage and, insult to
injury, to a home right across the street. The first shot in Rome is of
Giulio’s back as he sits on a wall overlooking the city, and it sets the tone
168 Chapter Twelve

for what follows (we will get several more shots of his back during the
film): his growing frustration in an urban world over which he in particular
and the Church in general have less and less influence.
To be sure, The Mass Is Ended is a comic as well as a serious look at
Giulio’s frustration, and one excellent example of both strains occurs on
his first day at his new church. He is napping on a cot in his stark quarters
when a soccer ball comes flying through the window. Giulio sullenly
picks it up and walks out the door to find a courtyard full of boys. He
moves toward them and they back off—all of this in nearly choreographed
movement. Then he kicks the ball into their midst and joins in the game.
Soon, however, he trips, hits the asphalt, and doesn’t get up; the boys,
whom one would expect to rush to his aid, completely ignore him and
continue playing. Moretti has given us a small comic ballet in this scene,
but he has also told us that Giulio’s priestly authority is largely symbolic
and very vulnerable to the hazards—nay, the heedlessness—of modern
existence. To emphasize his point cinematically, he includes a number of
overhead or high-angle shots, of Giulio on his cot and of Giulio playing
soccer, which make the character appear smaller and weighed down.
Giulio’s sphere of declining influence begins, or perhaps it would be
better to say ends, with his family. He is happy to be able to see his
parents and sister again regularly, but he is angrily unhappy at what he
learns: that Valentina, his sister, is pregnant by her nonentity of a
boyfriend, Simone, and is determined to have an abortion; that his father is
about to leave his mother and move in with a woman named Arianna,
whom he has been seeing for a year and who is young enough to be his
daughter. Is Giulio able to change the minds of his father and sister, like a
good priest? Absolutely not. Not only does he not change their minds,
but he reacts to their willfulness with a willfulness of his own and even
with violence.
Giulio tells Valentina that he’ll kill her first and then himself if she has
an abortion; he roughs up her boyfriend in an attempt to convince him that
he should try to talk Valentina out of aborting her child; and Giulio bodily
throws his father out of church for declaring both that he wants to have a
child by Arianna and that he wants his son to hear his confession—in other
words, that he wants to continue sinning at the same time that he is
absolved of his sins. (When I was a boy, my non-Catholic friends thought
that this was the greatest, and the most damning, part of being Catholic.)
Such a zealot is this priest that he can tearfully tell his newly deceased
mother how much he loves her at the same time that he says he’ll never
forgive her for having committed the mortal sin of suicide.
Giulio has very little to do in the film with his parishioners. This is not
 Epiphanies: Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended and The Son’s Room 169

only because he doesn’t have many (he celebrates his first mass before a
totally empty house!) but also because, as I suggested earlier, Moretti is
interested less in the sacrament of the priesthood, in the priest as servant
of/example to his congregation, than in the character of a man attempting
to join his role as priest with his roles as son, brother, and friend.
(Compare Moretti’s seriocomic treatment of a priest attempting in this way
to bring the Church to the world with Robert Bresson’s somber Diary of a
Country Priest [1951], in which a curate attempts to bring the world to the
Church. Bresson is interested in the sacrament of the priesthood, and his
film is about the martyrdom of a priest both to his own unmitigated piety
and to his parishioners’ befuddlement in the face of his exhortations that
they imitate it.)
Giulio would be a priest in the world, then, as well as in the church,
and what he learns in the course of the film is that modern, urban Italians,
and perhaps modern, urban Catholics in general, would rather keep their
religion separate from their lives. They would rather turn to religion as a
last recourse from life than as a first resource in it, or would rather use
religion simply as a means of marking life’s stages: baptism in infancy,
communion and confirmation in early adolescence, marriage as an adult,
death in old age.
Before he became a priest, Giulio had run a political newspaper with
his friend André, who later became a terrorist; Giulio’s goal, as his sister
reveals, had been to improve the world. This is still his goal, except that
now he believes the first step to changing the world is awakening the
spiritual lives of its inhabitants. (Who said that Marxism and Christianity
couldn’t be reconciled?) And the first spirits he attempts to rekindle are
those of his family and friends, because he knows them best, cares most
about them, and wants desperately to make a difference in their lives. But
he fails with his family, and he fails with four of his friends from pre-
priesthood days: André the once-imprisoned terrorist, who wants nothing
to do with Giulio or his religion and who is resigned to the failure of his
own, political mission; Saverio, whose unluckiness in love has turned him
into a recluse for whom life has no meaning; Gianni, an unrepentant
homosexual who is otherwise Giulio’s closest friend; and Cesare, who
converts to Catholicism as an escape from the trials of modern existence
and who even wants to become a priest, but whose hyper-religiosity causes
Giulio to deny him the opportunity.
At the end of the film, Giulio officiates at the wedding of Cesare and
Antonella, at which are present his father (without Arianna), his sister
(without Simone), his three additional friends (one of them, Saverio, with
his ex-wife, Astrid), and stand-ins for himself as a little boy and his
170 Chapter Twelve

mother as a young woman. After Giulio declares, “The mass is ended. Go

in peace,” the bride and groom begin to dance and are joined by more
couples. The last shot of Giulio shows him smiling beneficently upon his
congregation. But this is a bittersweet comic reconciliation, a qualified
“dance of life,” for Giulio has declared his intention to leave his Roman
parish for an isolated, windswept one in Tierra del Fuego, where he feels
he will truly be needed and where he will be less a priest to the people than
their friend.
Giulio, you see, has given up trying to integrate religion into modern,
urban existence, with all its distractions and temptations, and will once
again become a priest on an island, where his office will be as much to
mirror the natural simplicity of his parishioners’ lives as to mediate
between them and their God. Only the unadorned life, challenged by the
elements, leaves room for the growth of the spirit and the recognition of
God. Anything else just gets in the way: this is what Giulio has come to
believe.
What’s not in a film is often as important as what’s in it, and what’s
not in The Mass Is Ended is the seduction of our handsome young cleric;
in a lesser work on the same subject you can be sure that you’d get at least
a scene of temptation. Moretti gives us something far subtler: we do see
Giulio’s temptation, but it occurs over the telephone. Four times during
the film he calls a woman, and in each instance one of three things
happens: he gets her answering machine; he gets no answer; or he hangs
up shortly after placing the call. I assume that this is a woman Giulio
knew in Rome before he became a priest and hasn’t seen since taking his
vows, just as he hadn’t seen any of his four friends since taking them,
either (one friend, Saverio, didn’t even know that he had become a priest).
Moretti thus shows us that Giulio is fighting the temptation of female
companionship (a temptation that he can’t avoid in a large city like
Rome?), not being pursued by some beauty anxious to bed a priest: you
choose which scenario is more realistic. After the last telephone call to the
woman, he sits down in a café next to a little girl, who reads to him a
loving letter she has just written to her father. Giulio then tells her that he
loves her and everyone else in the café, and this incident seems to call him
back to his duties as priestly father.
Moretti shows Giulio fighting womanly temptation in instances other
than those on the telephone. Several times Antonio, the former priest of
Giulio’s Roman parish, talks lustily of sex and naked women, and in each
instance Giulio cuts him off with a vehemence that springs from more than
simple priestly modesty. Let me explain. Antonio had wanted to remain a
priest after he got his Lucia pregnant and then married her; he argues that
 Epiphanies: Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended and The Son’s Room 171

his love for his wife and son would have enhanced his vocation, not
detracted from it. Officially, Giulio disagrees with him; unofficially, he
seems to sense that the marriage of priests could become a model for the
combining of a religious life with a worldly one, and his “protesting too
much” in the face of Antonio’s bawdy talk implies as much.
Everything about The Mass Is Ended is good, from Nicola Piovani’s
music, which manages to be at once wistful and inspiriting, to Franco di
Giacomo’s cinematography, which uses the Italian sun as a warm
backdrop for its color and not as a bleaching element in it. This is a
gentle, embracing sun, not a harsh and piercing one. There is no harsh
light in the film, just as there is no darkness: there is not a single night
scene (we find characters sleeping or about to go to sleep, but always
during the day). In this way, Moretti has chosen to play out what is for
Giulio essentially a dark drama against the brightest and most serene—and
therefore seemingly the most indifferent—of backgrounds. And he has
played his own dark, brooding character to perfection, even when—
especially when—that character is the object of comedy.
This man who would be a priest in the world is forever running up
against opposition to his mere existence as a human being, some of it
physical or violent, as in the incident cited earlier that took place during
the boys’ soccer game, and as when he suffers a sort of murderous baptism
in a public fountain at the hands of a Roman whom he has accused of
stealing his parking place. Giulio doesn’t plead for mercy here on the
grounds that he is a priest, and his assailant does not once acknowledge
him as one. This is wildly funny, because completely unexpected. It also
rings terribly true, because Moretti plays it absolutely straight. He milks
no laughs, he tries to elicit no pity: he simply remains his character’s
angry, searching, persistent human self, and he wants the self recognized
before the collar. Giulio is inspired, not prideful, and his story is fantastic
to the extent that he is probably the priest that many an ex-seminarian (like
me) wishes he had become.
Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), which comes much later than The
Mass Is Ended, is nonetheless comparable, not because it is a domestic
drama triggered by the recent or impending death of a family member, but
because it features a stereotypical screen figure, stereotyped particularly in
the United States, and treats him credibly, sympathetically, perceptively—
without caricature, on the one hand, or romanticization, on the other. In
The Mass Is Ended, that figure is the devoted priest; in The Son’s Room,
he is the scientific or secular equivalent of a priest: the psychiatrist or
psychoanalyst. The Son’s Room is the third film by Nanni Moretti to
reach the United States. The second Moretti film to be shown in America
172 Chapter Twelve

was Caro diario (1994), in which this writer-director actually appeared as

himself, in a seriocomic collection of vignettes that dealt with his
problems as a director and as a patient undergoing (an ultimately
successful) treatment for lung cancer.
At one time in his career, Moretti was even known as the “Italian
Woody Allen” because he writes, directs, and stars in movies that
frequently feature autobiographical threads in addition to mixing humor
with pathos. (The “thread” in The Son’s Room is that Moretti got the idea
for the film when he learned that his wife was expecting a son.) But there
is none of Allen’s (rapidly vanishing) physical comedy in Moretti’s work;
there is no physical resemblance between the two men (the Italian is tall,
slim, bearded, and good-looking); and, for all its comic touches, Moretti’s
cinema is predominantly, uniquely serious in modes much deeper than
Allen could ever hope to explore. Moreover, the central position of
psychoanalysis in Allen’s life and films is replaced, in Moretti’s, with
politics. Palombella rossa (1989), for example, was about the problems of
a politically radical water-polo player—which the leftist Moretti himself
once was, on the Italian national team—while Ecce bombo (1978)
concerned a disillusioned student’s struggle to recover the fervor of his
erstwhile political militancy.
The Son’s Room (which Moretti co-authored with Linda Ferri and
Heidrun Schleef) clearly marks a departure in his career in several ways.
It is more straightforward than his other pictures, with none of the long-
windedness and tendentiousness (not to mention the political topicality)
that mar his lesser work; it was not filmed in his native Rome; and
Moretti’s character lacks the numerous (untreated) neuroses, as well as the
absurdist vigor, for which his sometime cinematic alter ego, Michele
Apicella, has become known. In The Son’s Room, those neuroses can be
found in his character’s patients, for here he plays Giovanni Sermonti, a
middle-aged psychoanalyst who doesn’t have a hint of Allenesque
ridiculousness about him, but who does have a highly successful practice
(conducted in a consulting room at the back of his house) in Ancona on the
Adriatic, a nice-looking wife named Paola, who runs a small art-gallery-
cum-publishing-house, and two well-adjusted teenaged children, Irene and
Andrea. This family is close, balanced, and loving without being
cloying—something one cannot say about Nicola Piovani’s tinkly,
italicized score, which gives new meaning to the term familial harmony—
so much so that they can actually sing together while driving with no trace
of irony or goofiness. For well over half an hour, it turns out, we simply
follow the Sermontis’ lives in all their dailiness, and we are interested
because they are interested in one another.
 Epiphanies: Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended and The Son’s Room 173

It’s an unspoken rule, of course, that dramatic or cinematic stasis,

especially when there is a state of unadulterated bliss, cannot last. Yet this
family’s bliss has some small taints to it, for Moretti has no heavy-handed
Hollywood desire to set up one cozy, loving goody after another, only
patently to knock them all down in one fell swoop. As a professional, for
example, Dr. Sermonti presides with creeping, mid-life ennui over a
querulous clientele to whom he gives little more than amused compassion,
much of it arising from his own seeming lack of problems. To all these
patients (only one of which, a kind of sex monster, appears to be seriously
ill), he dispenses a variant of the calming advice that will ultimately come
back to haunt him: “We can’t control our lives completely. We do what
we can. Just take a more relaxed approach to life and the world.”
This is just the approach Irene’s pot-smoking boyfriend takes, as does
Andrea in his refusal to become a competitive tennis player despite
superior athletic ability—and both young men earn the disapproval of
Giovanni, who holds up the model of the aggressive basketballer Irene to
each of them. (Giovanni is pointedly introduced, on the street at the end of
his morning run, as he gazes in smiling disbelief at a group of dancing,
chanting Hare Krishnas, whose ability to live unencumbered in the
moment turns out to be the opposite of the careful, deliberate manner in
which he himself conducts his life and work.) Andrea’s “relaxed
approach” includes stealing a fossil from his school’s science lab, as a
prank, and then lying about it.
Still, this rent, together with the other ones in the Sermonti family
fabric, is relatively minor and hardly elicits any overreaction from the
paterfamilias, who, for the most past, is a model of paternal grace and
spousal solicitude as well as professional concern (for his patients and for
his own detachment from, or boredom with, their problems). The essential
happiness of Giovanni and his family’s bourgeois existence, then, is the
happiness that in the Russian phrase writes “white on the page,” its
unassuming contentment being all but invisible.
It is into this scenario that a horrible destiny, or a random disaster,
intrudes itself, the kind that most of us know too well (especially in light
of the events of September 11, 2001) can strike out of nowhere, leaving
surviving family members stunned, grief-stricken, angry, and desperate
both to find a reassuring answer and to regain some measure of stability.
One Sunday Giovanni decides, in compensation for his growing
conviction that he is not doing his patients much good, to make an
unprecedented house call to an analysand who has telephoned in panic to
reveal that he has just been diagnosed with lung cancer—despite the fact
that he has never smoked. In order to serve his patient (who lives some
174 Chapter Twelve

distance outside Ancona), Giovanni must cancel a proposed jogging

session with his son, thus freeing the boy to go scuba diving in the
Adriatic with several friends. Andrea subsequently drowns in an
offscreen, underwater accident that is never fully explained.
Before he does so, in what at first seems to be a curiously, even
clumsily edited piece of montage (by Esmeralda Calabria), Paola has a
collision at an outdoor flea market with someone apparently running away
from the scene of a theft; Irene nearly collides with another biker during a
road race; and Giovanni himself narrowly misses being hit by an
oncoming vehicle as he drives to see the man precipitously diagnosed with
cancer, while all the while the blissfully unaware Andrea heads out to sea
in an inflatable dinghy. Fate or chance can suddenly strike down any of
us, the conjunction of these shots makes clear, but in this case it is Andrea
who gets struck, leaving the Sermontis bereaved and Giovanni consumed
by guilt. The dead son’s room itself is left untouched, almost as a means of
maintaining his presence –a presence suggested by the title of the film in
its original language, La stanza del figlio. For a “stanza” in Italian is both
a room and a unit of verse, part of a poem or part of a family unit left to
stand forever.
Andrea’s “personal space” may remain untouched, but his tragedy lays
waste to everything it touches, and there’s nothing connected with the
Sermontis that it doesn’t affect. However, unlike the family in Todd
Field’s typically American In the Bedroom (2001), which also concerns
the death of a beloved son and makes effective use of a parent’s halting
venture into the dead child’s inner sanctum, the surviving family members
in The Son’s Room simply have to endure their paralyzing pain, almost in
a vacuum. Field’s movie externalizes grief and loss by turning the father
into a handgun-wielding tough guy who exacts revenge on his son’s
murderer. Moretti’s film, by contrast, has Paola, Irene, and Giovanni
retreat into themselves, without knowledge of the exact circumstances of
Andrea’s death, let alone the consolation of a revenge fantasy. (The Son’s
Room stands out for its simplicity and restraint in comparison not only
with In the Bedroom, but also with at least two other films that have dealt
with the corrosive effects of grief and the irrational feelings of guilt that at
often go with it: Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me [2000], also
from the United States, and Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka [2000], from Japan.)
Again, you tell me which scenario is more convincing and therefore more
moving, if less “thrilling.”
The Sermontis’ retreat into themselves is effectively underlined by the
camera’s frequent isolation of each family member in his or her own
frame. That retreat is also highlighted, ironically, both by the
 Epiphanies: Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended and The Son’s Room 175

cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci’s shooting of this picture in almost

continuous, ordinary daylight, and by the production designer Giancarlo
Basili’s creation of a series of unobtrusive, unassuming, pastel-colored
interiors furnished with muted good taste. (Giovanni’s one venture alone
into the night, shortly after his son’s death, lands him in an opposing
environment: a garishly colored amusement park where the noise is loud
and the rides are rough.) Like The Mass Is Ended, The Son’s Room is a
drama of internal darkness and disquiet, and these elements are all the
more apparent for being juxtaposed—in something approaching real time
for much of the picture—with interiors (not to speak of daylit exteriors)
that are themselves visibly unadorned or indifferent. I’m thinking of
Paola’s art gallery, for instance, to which she stops going after Andrea’s
death, preferring instead to howl her pain unnervingly from her bed; or of
Irene’s basketball court, from which she is banished for fighting during a
game in what can only be a displacement of anger at her brother’s
untimely, if not senseless, demise.
Giovanni, for his part, turns into a more aloof version of his former self
as he begins to confront the biggest practical question posed by Moretti’s
narrative: how can a well-meaning psychoanalyst simultaneously analyze
his patients with empathy and cope with a devastating personal loss of his
own? Particularly when one such patient celebrates his literal aliveness,
oblivious to his doctor’s spiritual deadness, while another mentions his
distaste for children despite the recent death of Giovanni’s son. During
one session, this therapist goes so far as to lose his composure and sob
when an older woman expresses her regret at never having been able to
conceive a child. Eventually Giovanni answers the above question by
suspending his practice, but he may also be rejecting psychoanalysis itself
with its ceaseless, self-indulgent amplification and dramatization of
ordinary anxieties or mild disorders. (The doctor himself has a mild case
of obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
And Giovanni’s apparent repudiation of psychoanalysis or
psychotherapy points to the larger, spiritual question posed by The Son’s
Room. Moretti’s analyst embodies so many of the qualities admired by the
culture of secular humanism—intellect, empathy, humor, and irony—only
to discover that no amount of reason or feeling or knowledge is enough in
the face of death (particularly of the sudden, unexpected, familial kind),
even for the most scientifically objective among us. By making his
protagonist a psychoanalyst and a non-believer (like the rest of Giovanni’s
family), Moretti thus puts on the line a distinctly contemporary way of life
that premises itself on the promise of earthly fulfillment in what can only
be termed a post-religious age. Irene may ask that a mass be said in
176 Chapter Twelve

Andrea’s memory, but for her and her parents this is a farewell ritual, not
an act of religious devotion; neither of the three receives communion at the
church, and Giovanni bitterly complains afterward that the priest who gave
the sermon was “full of shit.” For the Sermontis, Andrea’s life
unquestionably ends with the sealing of his coffin, which they and we
watch in an overwhelmingly powerful scene. These people cannot or will
not allow themselves the comfort, the balm, that the boy’s soul lives
eternally.
But they get a surprise when a letter arrives from a girl named Arianna,
whom Andrea had met the previous summer on a camping trip, whose
existence his parents knew nothing about, and who writes in the hope that
she can meet her friend again. Desperate for even indirect contact with
their dead son, Giovanni starts to write a return letter (which he never
completes) to Arianna and Paola telephones the girl (who is unreceptive).
Then a few months later, in a kind of epiphanous coda, she visits the
Sermontis unannounced, not disconsolately but in the company of another
boy with whom she is hitchhiking west to France, and bearing photos
Andrea had sent her of himself in various happy poses in his room.
Giovanni, Paola, and Irene offer to drive Arianna and her new friend to a
highway rest-stop, where they can continue hitchhiking west to France.
But when they get to the rest-stop, the hitchhikers are both asleep in the
backseat and Giovanni does not want to wake them. So they all drive the
entire night to the west coast, where the traveling pair can catch a bus at
the border between Italy and France.
After the bus leaves at dawn, the analyst and his wife suddenly begin
to smile and even laugh. Their daughter, puzzled, asks them why they are
laughing, but they do not reply: they just keep on laughing. We know
why, however. They have learned, through the instrument of Arianna
(who is no angel of reconciliation, as she would have been in a
Hollywoodized version of this story), that life is irresistibly, almost
brutally, continuous. This girl has recovered from her attraction to Andrea
and found another boy; Irene worries about how the long drive back to
Ancona may cause her to miss basketball practice; while Giovanni and his
wife have found, through their unintended, all-night drive to the Ligurian
Sea, that they are still able to respond to each other with affection and
hope. Their lives—as husband and wife and father and mother, if not
doctor and curator—will move forward despite Andrea’s drowning.
(Literally as well as figuratively, they have crossed or come to a border at
the conclusion of this film; the past is another country.) Similarly, in W.
H. Auden’s great poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938), Icarus may fall
into the sea but farmers still plough their fields, “dogs go on with their
 Epiphanies: Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended and The Son’s Room 177

doggy life,” and ships sail ever on to their appointed destinations.

Yet has the death of their son begun to become a fact of their lives that
Giovanni and Paola will carry with them, instead of staying in one place
with it? As this couple and Irene stand near the sea (a sea of life as well as
death) in the final scene of The Son’s Room, we simultaneously observe
and move away from them in a tracking shot from the bus that carries
Arianna and her companion into France. As we do so, we hear a plangent,
nearly morbid soft-rock number called “By the River,” by Brian Eno, from
his compact disk Before and After Science (1976), which is playing on the
soundtrack but which Giovanni had earlier purchased for himself in
Andrea’s memory. The words and music of this song contradict the final
behavior of the Sermontis, or at least their laughter, and, along with the
concluding tracking shot that leaves this family on the beach, they render
the ending of Moretti’s film highly ambiguous, indeed.
These are the lyrics of “By the River” in their entirety:

Here we are
Stuck by this river,
You and I
Underneath a sky that’s ever falling down, down, down
Ever falling down.

Through the day

As if on an ocean
Waiting here,
Always failing to remember why we came, came, came:
I wonder why we came.

You talk to me
As if from a distance
And I reply
With impressions chosen from another time, time, time,
From another time.

Are these tuneful words that give The Son’s Room, as well as its
audience, what the therapists call closure? Or are they thoughtful lyrics in
a world “before science,” where the sky is falling, memory and life are
short, time or history is synchronous (“another time, time, time . . .”), and
Catholic or at least Christian religiosity rules? If the latter, then Moretti,
himself a non-believer whose own real first name, like the doctor’s,
happens to be Giovanni, is boldly suggesting at the end of this picture not
only that the Sermontis could be fooling themselves with their smiles and
laughter. He is also suggesting that their spiritual healing in the wake of
178 Chapter Twelve

Andrea’s drowning cannot, will not, take place without the ministrations
of the Holy Spirit—and therefore may not take place at all. La stanza del
figlio, then, may remain just that: an earthly shrine to an idolatrous
attachment.
One of the reasons this deceptively simple movie succeeds is Moretti’s
own reluctance to become, via Method acting, idolatrously attached to his
cinematic character. He is quite credibly Giovanni Sermonti, but, as he
has been before, he is also Nanni Moretti, acting or narrating this character
at one remove—in the third person, as it were. (Woody Allen tries to do
this, too, but he can’t act.) And this presents on screen the kind of duality
of which Brecht was so fond on the stage. Compare Moretti’s
performance with Robin Williams’s as the psychologist Sean McGuire in
Good Will Hunting (1997), and you’ll see the difference between acting
that triggers thought as well as feeling, and acting that wants to do nothing
more than tug at your heartstrings. This is a pity in Williams’s case, since
he has the uncannily comic or objective ability, but not the directorial
authority, to do with a “serious” character like McGuire exactly what
Moretti does with Dr. Sermonti. (Such an ability is not shared by
numerous other actors who have tried to portray therapists in American
movies, from Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound [1945] and Lee J. Cobb in
The Three Faces of Eve [1957] to Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People [1980]
and Barbra Streisand in The Prince of Tides [1991].)
The other featured actors in The Son’s Room, Laura Morante as Paola,
Giuseppe Sanfelice as Andrea, and Jasmine Trinca as Irene, don’t “split”
their characters in the same way as Moretti because, again in Brechtian
terms, too much such division would be excessively “alienating.” But
their performances are sufficiently modulated (particularly Morante’s)—
sufficiently low-key or in a lower emotional register—to be entirely in
keeping, ensemble-style, with Moretti’s. Moretti conceived of The Son’s
Room as an unsparing descent into the otherwise attuned hearts and minds
of a family in emotional free-fall, and, with an actor’s authority as well as
an auteur’s directedness, he pull backs from what he sees at the same time
that he moves forward.
 FILMOGRAPHIES

SELECTED FULL-LENGTH FICTION FILMS

Luchino Visconti (1906-1976)

Ossessione (1942)
La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948)
Bellissima (1951)
Senso (1954)
Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957)
Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960)
Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963)
Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Sandra of a Thousand Delights, 1965)
Lo straniero (The Stranger, 1967)
La caduta degli dei, (The Damned, 1969)
Morte a Venezia, (Death in Venice, 1971)
Ludwig (1972)
Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974)
L’Innocente (The Innocent, 1976)

Federico Fellini (1920-1993)

Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950)
Lo sciecco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952)
I vitelloni (1953)
La strada (1954)
Il bidone (1955)
Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957)
La dolce vita (1959)
81/2 (1963)
Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965)
Fellini-Satyricon (1969)
I Clowns (The Clowns, 1970)
Roma (1972)
Amarcord (1973)
180 Filmographies

Casanova (1976)
Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1979)
La città delle donne (City of Women, 1980)
E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983)
Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1985)
Intervista (1988)
La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990)

Mario Monicelli (born 1915)

I ragazzi della via Paal (1935)
Pioggia d’estate (1937)
Al diavolo la celebrità (1949)
Totò cerca casa (1949)
Vita da cani (1950)
È arrivato il cavaliere! (1950)
Guardie e ladri (1951)
Totò e i re di Roma (1952)
Totò e le donne (Toto and the Women, 1952)
Le infedeli (1953)
Proibito (1954)
Un eroe dei nostri tempi (1955)
Totò e Carolina (1955)
Donatella (1956)
Il medico e lo stregone (1957)
Padri e figli (1957)
I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958)
La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959)
Risate di gioia (1960)
I compagni (The Organizer, 1963)
Casanova 70 (1965)
L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold, 1966)
La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with the Pistol, 1968)
Toh, è morta la nonna! (1969)
Brancaleone alle Crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades, 1970)
La mortadella (1971)
Vogliamo i colonnelli (1973)
Romanzo popolare (1974)
Amici miei (1975)
Caro Michele (1976)
Un borghese piccolo piccolo (1977)
Viaggio con Anita (1979)
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 181

Temporale Rosy (1979)

Camera d’albergo (1981)
Il marchese del Grillo (1981)
Amici miei atto II (1982)
Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno (1984)
Le due vite di Mattia Pascal (1985)
Speriamo che sia femmina (1986)
I picari (1987)
La moglie ingenua e il marito malato (1989)
Il male oscuro (1990)
Rossini! Rossini! (1991)
Parenti serpenti (1992)
Cari fottutissimi amici (1994)
Facciamo paradiso (1995)
Panni sporchi (1999)
Le rose del deserto (2006)

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950)
La signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias, 1953)
I vinti (The Vanquished, 1953)
Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955)
Il grido (The Cry, 1957)
L’avventura (The Adventure, 1960)
La notte (The Night, 1961)
L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962)
Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964)
Blow-Up (1966)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
The Passenger (Professione: Reporter, 1975)
Il mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1980)
Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982)
Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds, 1995)

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)

Accattone (1961)
Mamma Roma (1962)
Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964)
Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966)
Edipo re (Oedipus, 1967)
Teorema (1968)
182 Filmographies

Porcile (Pigsty, 1969)

Medea (1969)
Il decameron (The Decameron, 1971)
I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972)
Il fiore delle mille e una notte (The Thousand and One Nights, a.k.a. The
Arabian Nights, 1974)
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the Hundred and Twenty Days
of Sodom, 1975)

Ermanno Olmi (born 1931)

Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still, 1959)
Il posto (The Job, a.k.a. The Sound of Trumpets, 1961)
I fidanzati (The Fiancés, 1963)
E venne un uomo (A Man Called John, 1965)
Un certo giorno (One Fine Day, 1969)
Durante l’estate (In the Summertime, 1971)
L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs, 1978)
Cammina, cammina (Keep Walking, 1983)
Lunga vita alla signora (Long Live the Lady!, 1987)
La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1988)
Lungo il fiume (Down the River, 1992)
Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Woods, 1993)
Genesi: La creazione e il diluvio (Genesis: The Creation and the Flood,
1994)
Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms, 2001)
Cantando dietro i paraventi (Singing Behind Screens, 2003)
Centochiodi (One Hundred Nails, 2007)

Gianni Amelio (born 1945)

Il piccolo Archimede (The Little Archimedes, 1979)
Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart, 1983)
I ragazzi di via Panisperna (1989)
Porte aperte (Open Doors, 1990)
Il ladro di bambini (Stolen Children, 1992)
Lamerica (1994)
Così ridevano (The Way We Laughed, 1998)
Chiavi di casa, Le (The Keys to the House, 2004)
La stella che non c’è (The Missing Star, 2006)
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 183

Nanni Moretti (born 1953)

Io sono un autarchico (I Am Self Sufficient, 1976)
Ecce bombo (1978)
Sogni d’oro (Sweet Dreams, 1981)
Bianca (1984)
La messa è finite (The Mass Is Ended, 1985)
Palombella rossa (Red Wood Pigeon, 1989)
Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993)
Il giorno della prima di Close Up (Opening Day of Close-Up, 1996)
La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001)
Il caimano (The Caiman, a.k.a. The Crocodile, 2006)
 BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Luchino Visconti
Bacon, Henry. Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
LeMancini, Elaine. Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and
Resources. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Luchino Visconti. 3rd ed. London: British Film
Institute, 2003.
Servadio, Gaia. Luchino Visconti: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1981.
Stirling, Monica. A Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
Tonetti, Claretta. Luchino Visconti. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

Federico Fellini
Alpert, Hollis. Fellini, A Life. New York: Atheneum, 1986.
Baxter, John. Fellini. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Bondanella, Peter, and Cristina Degli-Esposti, ed. Perspectives on
Federico Fellini. New York: G.K. Hall, 1993.
Bondanella, Peter. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Bondanella, Peter, ed. Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978.
Budgen, Suzanne. Fellini. London, British Film Institute, 1966.
Burke, Frank. Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1996.
Cardullo, Bert, ed. Federico Fellini: Interviews. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Costello, Donald P. Fellini’s Road. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1983.
Fava, Claudio G, and Aldo Vigano. The Films of Federico Fellini. Trans.
Shula Curto. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1985.
Ketcham, Charles B. Federico Fellini: The Search for a New Mythology.
New York: Paulist Press, 1976.
186 Bibliographies

Murray, Edward. Fellini the Artist. 2nd, enl. ed. New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1985.
Price, Barbara Anne, and Theodore Price. Federico Fellini: An Annotated
International Bibliography. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press,
1978.
Rosenthal, Stuart. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. South Brunswick,
New Jersey: A. S. Barnes, 1976.
Stubbs, John Caldwell, et al. Federico Fellini: A Guide to References and
Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

Michelangelo Antonioni
Arrowsmith, William. Antonioni: The Poet of Images. Ed. Ted Perry.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Cameron, Ian, and Robin Wood. Antonioni. Rev. ed. New York: Praeger,
1971.
Cameron, Ian. Michelangelo Antonioni: A Study. London: Movie
Magazine, 1963.
Cardullo, Bert, ed. Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985.
Lyons, Robert Joseph. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Neo-Realism: A World
View. New York: Arno Press, 1976.
Perry, Ted, and René Prieto. Michelangelo Antonioni: A Guide to
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 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 187

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Nanni Moretti
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 INDEX
The Abadanis, 6
Abouna, 6
Absurdism, 52
Academy Awards (Oscars), 10
Accattone, 7, 66, 71, 73, 76-78, 80-
85, 91, 98-99
Age: see Agenore Incrocci
L’albero degli zoccoli: see The Tree
of Wooden Clogs
Alia, Ramiz, 149
Alì Dagli Occhi Azzurri, 69, 82
Alighieri, Dante, 95
Allen, Woody, 172, 178
Amarcord, 28
Amelio, Gianni, 7, 125-153, 157,
182
Le amiche, 53
Amici miei atto II: see My Friends
Andreotti, Giulio, 5
Another World Is Possible, 36
A nous la liberté, 120
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 2, 7, 51-
63, 115-117, 119, 139, 153, 181,
186
Aoyama, Shinji, 174
Apicella, Tina, 14-15
The Apple, 6
L’armata Brancaleone: The
Incredible Army of Brancaleone
Arrival of a Train, 145
Arsenic and Old Lace, 35
Astruc, Alexandre, 62
Auden, W. H., 176
L’avventura, 51-52, 54-55, 57-63,
116, 119, 139, 153
Ayari, Kianoush, 6
Babenco, Hector, 6
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 83, 98-99
Balzac, Honoré de, 20
Bandits of Orgosolo, 7
Band of Outsiders, 119
Baragli, Nino, 74
Barry Lyndon, 105
Barthes, Roland, 77, 84
Basili, Giancarlo, 175
Bassani, Giorgio, 68-69
Beckett, Samuel, 52, 56-57
Before and After Science, 177
Bellissima, 10, 12-16, 22
Bellocchio, Marco, 7, 73
Benigni, Roberto, 35, 43, 48
Benoît-Lévy, Jean, 6
Berger, Helmut, 10-11
Bergman, Ingmar, 52, 75
Bergman, Ingrid, 178
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 73-74
Bianca, 156
Bianco e Nero, 2
The Bible, 102
Bicycle Thieves, 1, 5-6, 68, 94-96,
126, 137, 139-140, 145
Il bidone, 30, 149
Bigazzi, Luca, 152
Big Deal after Twenty Years, 44
Big Deal on Madonna Street, 35-45
Bini, Alfredo, 74
Bitter Rice, 35
Blasetti, Alessandro, 4
Blow to the Heart, 125-126, 132,
142
Blow-Up, 63
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 36
Body and Soul, 6
Boito, Camillo, 10
Bolognini, Mauro, 66, 69
Boomerang!, 6
Bosch, Hieronymous, 127
192 Index

Brecht, Bertolt, 52, 80, 84-85, 89, Colpire al cuore: see Blow to the
109-110, 159, 178 Heart
Bresson, Robert, 62, 117, 119, 169 La commare secca, 73, 77
Buñuel, Luis, 6, 92 Commedia all’italiana, 35-49, 156
The Burmese Harp, 72 Commedia dell’arte, 14-15, 37
“By the River,” 177 I compagni: see The Organizer
The Comrades: see The Organizer
Cabrini, Carlo, 123 Conversation Piece, 10
Cahiers du cinéma, 72, 75 Conversations in Sicily, 20
Caimi, Lamberto, 117 Coppola, Francis Ford, 42
Cain, James M., 4, 9 La cosa, 157, 160-161
Calabria, Esmeralda, 174 Crackers, 43-44
Callas, Maria, 12-13 Cristaldi, Franco, 45
Calvino, Italo, 1 Cronaca di un amore, 53
Campanile, Festa, 21 Crossfire, 6
Cannes Film Festival, 11, 51, 60,
101, 155, 165 d’Amico, Suso Cecchi, 21, 35
Canzi, Anna, 123 The Damned, 10-12
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi D’Angelo, Salvo, 13
da, 82 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 9, 68
Cardinale, Claudia, 38-39 Daquin, Louis, 6
Carlini, Carlo, 27 Dassin, Jules, 6, 38
Caro diario, 155, 157-160, 162, Da Vinci, Leonardo, 92
164-165, 172 Davoli, Ninetto, 86-87
Cassavetes, John, 72 Death in Venice, 10-11
Catholicism, 12, 65-66, 78, 80-81, De Laurentiis, Dino, 44
87, 91, 93, 134, 137, 146, 167- Delli Colli, Tonino, 40, 98
169, 177 Delon, Alain, 10, 16
Cerami, Vincenzo, 48 de Mille, Cecil B., 136
Chanel, Coco, 9 Deneuve, Catherine, 165
Chaplin, Charlie, 35, 37, 67-68, 80, De Niro, Robert, 134
120 De Santis, Giuseppe, 2, 9
Chiarini, Luigi, 2 Desert Roses, 35
The Children Are Watching Us, 4, Il deserto rosso, 53-54, 62
35, 146 De Seta, Vittorio, 7
The Children of Heaven, 6 De Sica, Vittorio, 1-7, 15-16, 25,
Cinema Paradiso, 7 29, 35, 40, 54, 94, 126, 138-139
Citti, Franco, 71, 74, 77-78, 83, 85, Detto, Loredana: see Loredana Olmi
98 Diary of a Country Priest, 169
Clair, René, 22-23, 47, 68, 120 Di Venanzo, Gianni, 40-41
Clément, René, 6 The Divine Comedy, 95
The Coach of the Blessed Doctor Zhivago, 157
Sacrament, 13 La dolce vita, 28, 32, 59, 116
Cobb, Lee J., 178 Donati, Danilo, 70
Cocteau, Jean, 52 La donna del fiume, 68
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 20, 133
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 193

Drayman Henschel, 120 Freud, Sigmund, 91, 156

Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 62, 66-67, 80 Fury, 126
Duvivier, Julien, 6
Dymytryk, Edward, 6 Garafolo, Ettore, 82, 99
A Garibaldian in the Convent, 3
The Earth Trembles, 1, 9-10, 19, 22 Gas, 120
Eastwood, Clint, 165 Gassman, Vittorio, 36-39, 41
Ecce bombo, 155-156, 158, 163- Gaudino, Giuseppe M., 152
164, 172 Genesis: The Creation and the
L’eclisse, 52, 59-60, 62-63 Flood, 102, 117
81/2, 25, 28, 30-31, 119, 156 Gente del Po, 55
El Alamein, 45 Germany, Year Zero, 146
Elisei, Marcello, 82, 99 Germi, Pietro, 2, 16, 35, 40
Eno, Brian, 177 Giacomo, Franco di, 171
Eureka, 174 Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 69
Gideon of Scotland, 74, 76
Fabrizi, Franco, 29 Gilda, 137
Fabrizzi, Aldo, 137 Il gobbo, 71
Fantastichini, Ennio, 126 The Go-Between, 11
Fellini, Federico, 7, 9, 25-33, 40, 59, Godard, Jean-Luc, 62, 67, 72-73,
66, 69, 72, 75, 85, 89, 116-117, 119
119, 140, 149, 155, 179-180, Golden Dreams, 156, 158
185-186 Good Will Hunting, 178
Fellini, Riccardo, 29 The Gospel According to St.
Ferraro, Paolo, 78 Matthew, 66, 79, 82, 84, 86, 91
Ferri, Linda, 172 Gozzano, Guido, 80
Ferzetti, Gabriele, 57 Gramsci, Antonio, 20, 65-66
The Fiancés: see I fidanzati La grande Guerra: see The Great
I fidanzati, 101, 116-118, 121-124 War
Field, Todd, 174 The Great War, 35-36, 44-45
Film Culture, 77 Il grido, 53, 139
Fist in His Pocket, 7 Grierson, John, 55
Forbidden Games, 6
Ford, John, 72, 74-75 Haroun, Mahamat-Saleh, 6
For Love and Gold: see The Hauer, Rutger, 116
Incredible Army of Brancaleone Hauptmann, Gerhart, 120
Fosse, Bob, 43 The Hawks and the Sparrows: see
The Four Hundred Blows, 6 Uccellacci e uccellini
Four Steps in the Clouds, 4 Hayworth, Rita, 137
Frampton, Hollis, 61 Headlights in the Fog, 4
Francesco, giullare di Dio, 66, 88- Hirsch, Judd, 178
89 Hitchcock, Alfred, 141
Franciolini, Gianni, 4 Hofmann, Hans, 52
Franciosa, Massimo, 21 The House by the Medlar Tree: see I
French New Wave, 62, 109, 115, Malavoglia
139 Hoxha, Enver, 127-128, 149-150
194 Index

Hugo and Josephine, 6

Il ladro di bambini: see Stolen
I Am Self-Sufficient, 156, 158, 163 Children
Ibsen, Henrik, 52 Laforgue, Jules, 80
Ichikawa, Kon, 72 Lamerica, 127-132, 141, 143, 149-
The Icicle Thief, 7 153
The Idiot, 20 di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi, 10
Ieracitano, Giuseppe, 146, 149 Lancaster, Burt, 10
I’ll Be Yours, 111 Lanci, Giuseppe, 175
The Incredible Army of Lang, Fritz, 72, 126
Brancaleone, 47-48 The Last Detail, 149
Incrocci, Agenore, 40-41, 45 The Last Supper, 92
The Innocent, 10 Lean, David, 157
Interlenghi, Franco, 29 Leenhardt, Roger, 80
Intervista, 33 The Legend of the Holy Drinker,
In the Bedroom, 174 101, 116-117
In the Name of the Law, 35 Leggenda del santo bevitore: see
Ionesco, Eugène, 52 The Legend of the Holy Drinker
Io sono un autarchico. See I Am The Leopard, 10
Self-Sufficient Life Is Beautiful, 43, 48
The Italian, 6 Lizzani, Carlo, 13, 71
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Loach, Ken, 73
72 Lonergan, Kenneth, 172
Long Live the Lady!, 101
Jakobson, Roman, 77 Loren, Sophia, 68
James, Henry, 59 Losey, Joseph, 11
The Job: see Il posto Lost Illusions, 20
Joseph and His Brothers, 20 Lo Verso, Enrico, 125-127, 136,
Joyce, James, 52, 57 153
Lubitsch, Ernst, 72
Kafka, Franz, 120 Luchetti, Daniele, 157
Kaiser, Georg, 120 Ludwig, 10
Kazan, Elia, 6, 72 Lukács, Georg, 66
Keaton, Buster, 37 Lumière, Auguste, 145
Keep Walking, 101 Lumière, Louis, 145
Kesich, Tullio, 119
The Keys to the House, 140-141 The Machine Wreckers, 120
Kiarostami, Abbas, 6, 116 Maddalena, Zero for Conduct, 3
Kierkegaard, Søren, 60 Maggiorani, Lamberto, 94
Kjell, Grede, 6 Magnani, Anna, 13-15, 70, 81-82,
Kluge, Alexander, 66 91-92, 99, 137
Koch, Karl, 9 Mahler, Gustav, 11
Koker trilogy, 6 Majidi, Majid, 6
Kore-eda, Hirokazu, 6 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 6
Kravchuk, Andrei, 6 I Malavoglia, 10, 19
Kubrick, Stanley, 105 Malle, Louis, 43
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 195

Maltin, Leonard, 140 “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 176

Mamma Roma, 66, 81, 83, 84, 92-99 Mussolini, Benito, 2, 4, 9, 43, 127
A Man Called John, 116 Mussolini, Vittorio, 9
Manfredi, Nino, 36 My Friends, 47
Mangana, Silvana, 71
“Manifesto of Italian Cinema,” 5 Nair, Mira, 6
The Man I Love, 111 The Naked City, 6
The Man with the India-Rubber Nardi, Tonino, 147
Head, 145 Naturalism, 70, 78-80, 90, 93, 119-
Mann, Thomas, 11, 20 120, 138
Manzoni, Alessandro, 124 La nave bianca, 79
Martelli, Otello, 27 Negri, Toni, 126, 142
Marx Brothers, 29 Nenni, Pietro, 2
Marxism, 65-66, 75, 87-88, 91, 93, Neorealism, 1-10, 16, 25-26, 37, 40,
126, 129 42, 53, 68, 70, 73, 78-80, 85-86,
Marx, Karl, 120 88-92, 101, 109, 111, 116, 120,
Masaccio, Tommaso, 80 125-127, 136-140, 145-146,
Massari, Lea, 153 149-150
The Mass Is Ended, 7, 167-171, 175 New American Cinema, 11
Master Don Gesualdo, 19 New York Film Festival, 127, 158
Mastroianni, Marcello, 36, 38-39, Nichetti, Maurizio, 7, 48
42, 46, 163 The Nights of Cabiria, 25, 30-31, 69
La Maternelle, 6 Nobody Knows, 6
Mazzarelli, Carmelo di, 127, 153 La notte, 7, 51-52, 55-57, 59-60, 62
Mazzicurato, Carlo, 165 La notte brava, 69
Mean Streets, 42 Le notti di Cabiria: see The Nights
Medea, 13, 91 of Cabiria
Medioli, Enrico, 21
Méliès, Georges, 145 Obsession: see Ossessione
Mérimée, Prosper, 13 Oedipus, 71, 88, 91
La messa è finite: see The Mass Is Oedious Rex: see Oedipus
Ended Oguri, Kobei, 6
Miracle in Milan, 7, 16, 138, 140 Olmi, Ermanno, 7, 26, 74, 101-124,
Mitchum, Robert, 79 182
Mizoguchi, Kenji, 66-67, 72, 80 Olmi, Loredana, 102
Modern Times, 120 Los Olvidados, 6
Monicelli, Mario, 7, 35-49, 180-181 The Only Country in the World, 165
Montreal World Film Festival, 36 Open City: see Rome, Open City
Moraldo in città, 31 Open Doors, 126, 132-135, 140,
Morante, Laura, 178 146, 149
Moravia, Alberto, 1 Ordinary People, 178
Moreau, Jeanne, 57, 61 The Organizer, 36, 44-47
Moretti, Nanni, 7, 48, 155-178, 183, Ossessione, 1, 4, 9
187 The Ox-Bow Incident, 126
The Most Beautiful: see Bellissima Ozu, Yasujiro, 62
Muddy River, 6
196 Index

Pacino, Al, 42 Ray, Nicholas, 6

Padre Padrone, 7 Ray, Satyajit, 7
Paggi, Simona, 153 Realism, 1, 3, 4, 10, 15, 19, 21, 26,
Paisan, 1, 111, 137 38, 41, 45, 53, 78, 89-90, 109,
Palombella rossa, 155-157, 160- 118, 122, 127, 138, 140, 145,
162, 172 158, 161, 170
Panahi, Jafar, 6 Red Roses, 3
Panseri, Sandro, 119-120 Renoir, Jean, 9, 13, 68
Paris Belongs to Us, 119 Renzelli, Gastone, 14-15
Une partie de campagne, 9 Requiescant, 71
Pascoli, Giovanni, 65 Resnais, Alain, 122
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 7, 13, 65-99, La Ricotta, 79, 86
157, 181-182, 186-187 Risi, Dino, 115
The Passenger, 62 Risi, Marco, 165
Pather Panchali, 7 Rivette, Jacques, 119
Pavese, Cesare, 1 The Road to Hope, 16
Peer Gynt, 52 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 52, 66
Piersanti, Franco, 148-149 Rocco and His Brothers, 10, 12, 16-
Pietrangeli, Antonio, 1, 9 22, 116, 136
Pinter, Harold, 52 Roma, 31
Piovani, Nicola, 171-172 Romanticism, 10, 52
Pixote, 6 Rome, Open City, 1, 3, 68, 92, 95,
Placido, Michele, 127, 153 137
Poil de carotte, 6 Rosi, Francesco, 7
Pollock, Jackson, 52 Rossellini, Roberto, 1-3, 9, 65-66,
Poor Cow, 73 69, 73, 79-80, 85, 88-89, 92,
Porcile, 157 111, 140
Il portaborse, 157 Rossen, Robert, 6
Porte aperte: see Open Doors Rossi, Fausto, 126
Portrait of Innocence, 6 Rota, Nino, 28, 31-32
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Roth, Joseph, 116
4, 9 Rotunno, Giuseppe, 40, 44
Il posto, 101-102, 116-121, 124
Pratolini, Vasco, 1, 21 St. Paul, 71
Presley, Elvis, 29 Salaam Bombay, 6
Prima della rivoluzione, 74 Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom,
The Prince of Tides, 178 91, 157
La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, Salvatore Giuliano, 7
88 Salvatori, Renato, 17, 46
Puccini, Giacomo, 9 Sanfelice, Giuseppe, 178
Puccini, Gianni, 9 Sarraute, Nathalie, 52
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 60
Rafifi, 38 Saving Private Ryan, 45
Ragazzi di vita, 66, 68-69 Scalici, Valentina, 126, 146, 149
Raging Bull, 42, 116 Scarpelli, Furio, 40-41, 45
Ray, Man, 52 Schleef, Heidrun, 172
 After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films 197

Sciascia, Leonardo, 132-135, 146 Theorem, 66, 71, 85, 91

Scorsese, Martin, 42, 116 The Three Faces of Eve, 178
Scotellaro, Renato, 20 They Live by Night, 6
The Secrets of Milan: The Ghisolfa Thulin, Ingrid, 11
Bridge, 20 Time Stood Still: see Il tempo si è
Senso, 10 fermato
Shadows, 72 Todini, Amanzio, 44
Shakespeare, William, 48 Togliatti, Palmiro, 66, 86-87
Shoeshine, 1, 5-6, 29, 126, 146 Tognazzi, Ugo, 36
Snow, Michael, 61 Toller, Ernst, 120
Sogni d’oro, 156 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 7
Soldati, Mario, 68 La Tosca, 9
I soliti ignoti: see Big Deal on Toscanini, Arturo, 9
Madonna Street Totò, 38-39, 42, 44, 70, 85-88
I soliti ignoti vent-anni dopo: see Trasatti, Luciano, 27
Big Deal after Twenty Years Trash, 11-12
“Some Ideas on the Cinema,” 3 La Traviata, 13
La Sonnambula, 13 The Tree of Wooden Clogs, 101-
The Son’s Room, 171-178 102, 108
Sordi, Alberto, 29, 36, 156, 163 Trieste, Leopoldo, 29
The Sound of Trumpets: see Il posto Trinca, Jasmine, 178
Spellbound, 178 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 125-126,
Squitieri, Pasquale, 165 140
Stalin, Joseph, 127-128, 142, 164 A Trip to the Moon, 145
La stanza del figlio: see The Son’s Truffaut, François, 6
Room
Steiger, Rod, 116 Uccellacci e uccellini, 66, 73, 82,
Stolen Children, 7, 126-127, 131- 84-89, 91
132, 135-140, 143, 145-149, Ulysses, 52
151-152 Umberto D., 5, 7, 137
La strada, 28, 31-32, 149 Umiliani, Piero, 43
Streisand, Barbra, 178 Una vita violenta, 66
Surrealism, 75 L’unico paeseal mondo: see The Only
The Swindle: see Il bidone Country in the World
L’uomo della croce, 79
Tafuri, Renato, 147
Tale of Impoverished Lovers, 13 Variety Lights, 25, 28
Tati, Jacques, 67 Venice Film Festival, 101
Taviani, Paolo, 7, 159 E venne un uomo: see A Man Called
Taviani, Vittorio, 7, 159 John
Il tempo si è fermato, 74, 115-116 Verga, Giovanni, 1, 10, 19, 80, 90
Teorema: see Theorem Vidor, Charles, 137
Teresa Venerdì, 3 Vigo, Jean, 6
La terra trema: see The Earth Viridiana, 92
Tembles Visconti, Luchino, 1, 4, 7, 9-23, 40,
Testone, Giovanni, 20 115-117, 140, 155, 179, 185
198 Index

I vitelloni, 25-33, 40 The White Sheik, 28-29

Vitti, Monica, 57, 139 Wild Strawberries, 75
Vittorini, Elio, 1, 20 Williams, Robin, 178
Vivaldi, Antonio, 83, 99 Workers Leaving the Factory, 145
Volonté, Gian Maria, 125-126, 134- Wu, Nien-jen, 116
135, 140
You Can Count on Me, 174
Warhol, Andy, 11, 61
Wayne, John, 79 Zampa, Luigi, 2
The Weavers, 120 Zavattini, Cesare, 3, 6, 13-14, 26
Welles, Orson, 71 Zero for Conduct, 6
Wellman, William, 126 Zola, Emile, 90
Where Is the Friend’s House?, 6 Zurlini, Valerio, 115
The White Balloon, 6