SENSO (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

Senso proved as doomed as the mostly one-sided, purplish romance at the center of its plot. Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando agreed to star; but when (under pressure from spouse Roberto Rossellini) Bergman withdrew, Brando followed suit. Cinematographer Aldo Graziati was killed in a road accident during filming. The producer worried that the film’s depiction of Italy’s nineteenth-century Austrian occupation would open old psychic wounds, and more recent ones as a result of the German occupation, and demanded changes. Censors intervened even more drastically, obscuring filmmaker Luchino Visconti’s aim at Italy’s aristocracy, whose sense of privilege, Visconti’s film was supposed to argue, contributed to Italy’s military defeats in its struggle for independence. Visconti’s own roots were aristocratic, but, a Communist, his politics urged an honest confrontation with Italy’s past. This didn’t make it to the screen. In the U.S., an additional half-hour was slashed, but the sensational title slapped onto it suited the result: The Wanton Contessa.
     Venezia, 1866; Countess Livia Serpieri (beauteous Alida Valli, strikingly good) implores Franz Mahler for her rebel cousin’s release from jail following his participation in an anti-Austrian demonstration. She falls in love with the Austrian lieutenant. Their sordid, for her extramarital affair begins the process of her degradation. Her heart urges her pursuit of the lieutenant even after the sexual profligate has cold-shouldered, really, betrayed her, and she ends up betraying the cause that had led to their initial meeting.
     To say the least, this is an unhappy film, with Livia is tears in her carriage and recklessly on foot, attempting to re-meet Mahler after he has moved on. The Visconti film it most resembles would also prove to be one of his worst: Death in Venice (1971). The mangled result, though, necessitated Visconti’s masterpiece about Risorgimento, Il Gattopardo (1963).

OSSESSIONE (Luchino Visconti, 1942)

Aristocrat and also Communist, Luchino Visconti combines elegance and earthiness in Obsession, a languorous melodrama of adultery and murder involving a drifter (Massimo Girotti), an innkeeper and his wife (Clara Calamai, astounding). Visconti had apprenticed in the 1930s to Jean Renoir, whose liberated use of camera Visconti adopted, and whose Toni (1934) is an especial thematic influence. Ossessione is the first great work of neorealismo, here blended with the moody fatalism of French poetic realism.
     Neorealism revitalized Italian cinema. Use of northern landscape, close attention to human behavior, a focus on the downtrodden, the human cost of poverty and economic marginalization: these supply neorealist credentials to Ossessione.
     One of the contributors to the script, Angelo Pietrangeli, would write about it: “Ferrara, its squares, its gray and deserted streets; Ancona and its San Ciriaco Fair; the Po and its sandy banks; a landscape streaked with a rubble of cars and men along the network of highways. Against this backdrop are silhouetted the wandering merchants, mechanics, prostitutes and inn boys who have all the typical innocent exuberances, beset by violent proletarian love affairs, primitive anger, and the sins that flesh is heir to.” The somewhat grandiose nature of this description perfectly suits Visconti’s film, with its operatic sense of spectacle and its grand passions—all, here at least, given compelling form by Visconti’s artistic rigor.
     Unfortunately, trouble with censors and with copyright laws delayed the film’s appearance worldwide, leaving the false impression that others were more instrumental in inventing Italian neorealism than Visconti, and helping to obscure Renoir’s contribution. Ossessione is an “illegal” adaptation of James M. Cain’s American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which Hollywood would badly film twice (1946, 1981), but which György Fehér, in Hungary, would again lift to the level of art in Szenvedély (Passion, 1998).

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1860 (Alessandro Blasetti, 1933)

Risorgimento: the period, 1848-1870, when partitioned Italy was unified, provides the basis for Alessandro Blasetti’s patriotic 1860, which culminates in the Battle of Calatafimi. A Sicilian village, under oppressive Bourbon occupation, rebels. Carmine, a young shepherd, travels to Genoa to solicit support for the local cause from the movement’s leader, Italy’s liberator, Giuseppe Garibaldi. The location shooting, the nonprofessional cast, the focus on an ordinary villager rather than, say, Garibaldi, and the national portrait that Blasetti achieves through Carmine all look ahead to neorealismo and, specifically, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946). But the artful finish Blasetti applies to his film and its grand historical sweep also look ahead to Luchino Visconti’s two treatments of Risorgimento: Senso (1954) and Il Gattopardo (1963).
     The opening is indeed worthy of Visconti: a bare tree, its branches knotted and twisted, symbolizes Italy in foreign hands before unification; soldiers on horseback imperiously gallop, the camera low and tilted upward, with martial music soft, insistent on the soundtrack; one soldier pokes with a pole a dead peasant on the ground; another drags a peasant, his prisoner. The camera surveys the desolate land and shows fire and then water: a rushing stream symbolizing hope. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, villagers appear on foot and attack the mounted monsters. The rebellion has not been extinguished; the people have not been conquered. Perspective on village losses is given, though, by what follows: a tracking shot across the ground—a scene of slaughter. 1860’s opening movement may even have inspired Sergei M. Eisenstein in the making of Alexander Nevsky (1938).
     As perhaps did the Battle of Calatafimi, the tree now in bloom, at film’s end. 1860 isn’t in all respects a great film (its middle is largely pedestrian), but it is bookended by two passages of gripping poetry.

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SIMON OF THE DESERT (Luis Buñuel, 1965)

Its shooting aborted, apparently, when the producer ran out of money, Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Simón del desierto is set in the past. The film skewers organized religion and laments the gap between one man’s asceticism and the grubby self-interest of those purportedly enthralled by him.
     Simon emulates St. Simeon Stylites, the fifth-century fanatic, by standing on a gigantic, narrow column in the desert—on one foot, even, when he feels obliged to do penance. He has been at it for six years, six months, six days when Satan, in the form of a temptress, pops up to taunt and seduce him. At the end s/he takes him by airplane to 1960s Manhattan, where his column has been multiplied into skyscrapers; in a swinging nightclub, when he half-heartedly announces he is going home, s/he informs him that he has already been replaced on top of the column—the implication being, with nobody, including the priests, any the wiser.
     In one of the vignettes way below Simon in the desert, a former thief asks for the restoration of his hands—they were lopped off as punishment—so that he can farm again and support his family. Simon prays while one of the large gathering quips, “Maybe today we’ll see one of Simon’s miracles.” Indeed, the hands are suddenly back on the man, whose nonplussed response, however, wittily robs the moment of the miraculous. There is also the implication that, if need be, he will steal again.
     Buñuel visually plays with the question mark of whether Simon’s being so far above other humans sets him any closer to God, and the turbulent, windswept black-and-white images of Simon recorded by an upwardly tilted camera, beautifully cinematographed by Gabriel Figueroa, suggest an unsettled soul for all Simon’s air of confident faith.

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THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

We all know the feeling; we’re at a party and we want to leave, but can’t. Luis Buñuel employs this premise for his black comedy The Exterminating Angel, in which guests find that they cannot leave their host’s music room. As hours stretch into days, something of a Lord of the Flies degeneration takes hold. Sheep wander in, which the guests eat. After a mind-boggling moment when they realize that they have all inadvertently assumed the exact same positions they occupied some time earlier, the guests are cleared of their paralysis. They attend church. Upon leaving, they are gunned down.
     Many strange, surprising things happen. Early on, for instance, all the posh guests save one have gathered in the music room. The one who has remained in the dining room throws a glass, breaking a window, the sound of which the others hear. Someone tersely explains: “Probably a passing Jew.” Here is the phenomenon of something “outside,” and an outsider, being blamed for what has happened from within. But more: the seemingly crazy explanation, proffered so matter-of-factly, reminds us how irrational sometimes is the basis for social and political statements and actions that the powers that be make appear perfectly rational. In this instance, a shared hatred of Jews makes nonsense seem feasible to the two conversing guests.
     Bristling with irony, like so much Buñuel, The Exterminating Angel is hilarious. It is also a harrowing satire on authority—authority, apparently, that feels threatened by even the most trivial and inadvertent deviation from the norm. Moreover, the film is a cunning allegory on Buñuel’s encounter with Franco over Viridiana (1961).
     Dark, dense, The Exterminating Angel is like a dream. “Its images, like the images in a dream,” Buñuel said, “do not reflect reality, but themselves create it.”

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