100 GREATEST FILMS FROM ITALY, GREECE, SPAIN AND PORTUGAL

This list includes the best films I have seen from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece—or those I consider to be the one hundred best on a particular day. However, at the time I composed the list I hadn’t seen Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth, and film scholar Brooke Jacobson, who teaches film, was kind enough to contribute an entry about it. (I have since seen the film but am retaining Dr. Jacobson’s entry in deference to her kindness and expertise.) The list is chronological, except that multiple entries for a given year appear in order of preference. The list considers films through 2006. (Some of the films on this list also are given fuller consideration in essays categorized as film reviews elsewhere on my blogsite.)

1932
1. LAS HURDES. Luis Buñuel’s Spanish documentary, known in the States as Land Without Bread, is a portrait of backward lives barely surviving in abject poverty. The Hurdanos are mountain villagers in a remote, nearly inaccessible region of Spain near Portugal. This study in “human geography,” though, isn’t what it seems.
     To reach Las Hurdes, Buñuel’s expedition must pass through La Alberca, a village the front of whose church is uninvitingly decked with two human skulls, and where men engage in an annual ritual in which they tear heads off roosters. At the end of the film, an ancient woman tells us, “There is nothing better to keep you awake than to think always of death.”
     The contrast between monotonous voiceover and bold images of human stupidity, as well as dire poverty, alerts us to Buñuel’s ironical method. When the commentary notes how religious the Hurdanos are, but Christian rather than barbaric, but Christian and seemingly barbaric, Buñuel discloses his thematic purpose. His target isn’t the inhabitants of La Alberca and Las Hurdes, nor is he out and about to bleed willing hearts over the difficulty of their lives—although he certainly wouldn’t disparage the amelioration of that as a collateral boon. His target is forward, not backward, non-primitive Spain, whose infatuation with Roman Catholicism, with all its attendant superstition and occult ritual, the more primitive existence of his ostensible subjects reflects. Call Las Hurdes, then, an unmercifully ribbing backdoor satire. It is part of the film’s overwhelming greatness that not one jot of the humanity of the Hurdanos is sacrificed in the process. But part of its causal analysis is that Spain’s allegiance to Christianity maintains its pockets of cruel poverty.
     And what of those roosters that get their heads torn off? How does that reflect on civilization? Think: War.

1933
2. 1860. 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 (see 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 (see 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.

1942
3. OSSESSIONE. 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).

1943
4. PEOPLE OF THE PO VALLEY. Released in 1947, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Gente del Po is a documentary, some of whose material involving a woman’s care of her sick young daughter feels scripted, possibly “reconstructed.” Luchino Visconti’s documentary-like, also nonprofessionally cast La terra treme (1948), about struggling Sicilian fishermen, surely was influenced by Gente del Po, which with its lyrical river barges itself looks back to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), and ahead to Antonioni’s fictional Il grido (1957), also set amidst melancholy gray landscapes in the Po Valley.
     Numerous shots divide the frame, such as the overhead one of a barge, center-left, proceeding forward, displacing water while still untouched water appears ahead. Humanity, even when invisible, is the key; we are conscious of the human activity involved in the barge’s motion and use. In another “divided shot,” a barge proceeds screen-right, with water below and land, including houses, above: a summation of the environment in which people, also excluded here, live and work.
     Human figures appear in both long-shot and closeup, communally and as individuals. In an extreme long-shot from the vantage of the river, a solitary galloping horse projects an otherwise unavailable freedom and possibly reflects on the German occupation. In a bravura shot the camera moves leftward like a barge, but on land, as women rake the ground under large white hats. Down below on the barge “Milano,” the mother feeds her child medicine as an identical hat hangs on the wall.
     The tremendous final movement depicts a gathering storm, with its dire potential for flood. People now move quickly to their homes, disrupting the rhythms to which the film has accustomed us. The storm subsides, but the impression of human vulnerability lingers. This conclusion owes something to the snowstorm in Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922).

1945
5. ROME, OPEN CITY. With Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (see 1948), Roberto Rossellini’s strikingly beautiful Rome, Open City is the signature work of Italian Neorealism. Like Rossellini’s Paisà (see 1946), it is a national epic.
     Rome, 1943-44; the Nazis are in control of the city. The opening shot is of German soldiers loudly marching in goosestep through the streets, singing. Its fearsome echo brings unexpected poignancy to a later shot of rambuctious boys loudly playing in the streets, symbolically juxtaposing the aspiration for freedom and the constriction of freedom that the occupation represents. The film focuses on resistance, both underground and above ground, on the Gestapo’s dragnet efforts to capture members of the Resistance, and on the ordinary citizens of Rome, who embrace resistance fighters as their surrogates as well as countrymen by hiding them and otherwise lending support. Filming began while the Germans were still there; the film itself is a ringing act of solidarity.
     “We shot [the film],” Rossellini would say, “in the same settings in which the events we re-created had taken place.” The film’s realism, its present-tenseness, is potent, demonstrating the affinity for documentary of a certain kind of fiction. Rome, Open City reminds us that fiction and documentary, although opposite poles on a continuum of artistic expression, intermingle and blend their elements in individual works. Even melodramatic chords (to which a Rossellini film at that time was never immune) become a part of the film’s raw fabric—exposed nerves of heightened drama that stress the dire, distorted reality that the German occupation imposed.
     The film is populated by nonprofessionals, but not exclusively. Two professionals contributed legendary performances: Aldo Fabrizi, as the priest, and Anna Magnani as Pina. Both characters, like so many others in the film, exemplify the heroism to which ordinary people can rise.

1946
6. PAISÀ. Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan) is a composite film each of whose six episodes reflects on the Battle of Italy (1943-45) in a different region of the country, among them, Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence and the Po Valley. The result is an epic national portrait. Was Rossellini influenced by the preceding year’s Battle of the Rails, by René Clément, which consists of vignettes of the French Resistance—a rare French neorealist work? Regardless, Paisà’s final episode, which depicts a slaughter of partisans, achieves the sledgehammer force of Rome, Open City (see #5), which very nearly ends with the execution of a priest sympathetic to the Resistance. Paisà shimmers with a tragic sense of the cost of Italy’s struggle against the Germans before, during and after liberation.
     The Naples episode involves an African-American soldier, a military police officer, whose boots are stolen by a shoeshine boy. When he goes to the boy’s “home” to retrieve his property, the young soldier discovers the impoverished world the war-orphaned child inhabits. The soldier has told the boy that his American home is a shack to which he doesn’t want to return; he, too, is familiar with desperate poverty. He leaves the boots.
     Another episode also involves an American soldier. During the liberation of Rome, he meets an innocent girl, Francesca. Later, without recognizing her, he becomes her john. But the film reverses chronology, presenting the earlier time as a flashback, the soldier’s reminiscence, when he is with the prostitute. He tells her how much he wants to meet Francesca again. She tells him she can arrange it—although, in a sense, she cannot. In any case, he doesn’t show up for the arranged reunion.
     Paisà is radical in its formal aim. Rossellini contests traditional “plottedness”; the film’s episodic nature reduces “story” by multiplying it.

7. TO LIVE IN PEACE. Wouldn’t peace be wonderful? But Luigi Zampa’s film takes place during the German occupation, and there is no real peace to be had. Tigna (Aldo Fabrizi, who contributed to the script, excellent), a farmer, somewhat reluctantly hides two American soldiers, one of whom is wounded, in the cellar. Drunk, the wounded soldier, who is black, one night reveals himself to Tigna’s guest, a German official, who, himself drunk, mistakes what he sees as meaning thank goodness! the war is over. Discarding Nazi racism, the official takes to the streets with the American—two instant comrades and noisy celebrants. Their mood is contagious, waking up Tigna’s neighbors; thank goodness! the war is over. Only, of course, it isn’t, and eventually Tigna and the German, attempting to flee, are both murdered by the SS.
     There is no escaping war and its effects. This idea is formally and tonally rendered in an ingenious way: the film’s comedy passes into tragedy; hope for peace resolves into death by war. (Also, one might say that human simplicity is extinguished by the complications that war imposes.) Before this happens, the German expresses his kinship with the protagonist by noting that he, too, if he had his way would be farming back home.
     One can see the influence of To Live in Peace in any number of war-set Italian tragicomedies, including Mario Monicelli’s The Great War (1959) and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1998). But there is still more to Zampa’s achievement—an irony beyond the scope of the action, provided by the world in which the film was first exhibited. The war is over now, but its ravages are residual. Ordinary postwar Italian citizens yet might sigh, Vivere in pace.

1947
8. GERMANY, YEAR ZERO. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #45.

1948
9. CITY STREETCLEANERS. Rome, 1948. Night evaporates as dawn’s light steals in. Human figures are dense shadows and anonymous. A train, marking time and infinity, passes through; substance translates into evanescence beneath a solemn sky. Slight camera movements suggest time’s sweep. An angled overhead shot shows men sweeping steps in a public square. Influenced by Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), the delightful, rhythmic magic of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Nettezza urbana, starkly photographed in black and white and jazzily scored by Giovanni Fusco, has begun.
     With daylight, our view becomes clear. We see the faces of individual streetcleaners, as well as the faces of others in the streets. We also take in the integral role that streetcleaners play—their interaction with the rest of the city. Someone throws something out of her apartment window and it becomes part of what the streetcleaner sweeps up below.
     In the course of the film, we see persons at other mundane work in the streets, with everyone contributing to the great symphony of Rome. Antonioni’s film is poetic, associative, elastic. It purges its glimpse of laboring men of the overt socioeconomic context, relegating this to an invisible realm of inference—the maintenance we observe accumulates into a metaphor for Italy’s postwar reconstruction—and thereby creating a complex double vision of (implicit) economic hardship in the present and (explicit) nuts-and-bolts activity that looks ahead, quietly and without fanfare or heightened rhetoric, to an employed, stabilized Italy in the future.

10. BICYCLE THIEVES. Once voted by critics worldwide the best film ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves still retains a great measure of affection. Scenarist Cesare Zavattini and De Sica focus on Italy’s postwar employment squeeze. In Rome, a poor man, Antonio, finally gets a job posting signs, for which he needs a bicycle to transport him from site to site. When it is stolen, he searches for the bicycle throughout the city, accompanied by his young son; spotting the thief, Antonio pursues the boy to his home. Epileptic, desperately impoverished, the thief is protected by family and neighbors. Outside a sports stadium, Antonio himself steals a bicycle but is caught and then let go. Ashamed, he holds on to his son’s hand for emotional support.
     Famously, the film’s title, which translates in the plural, was changed in the States to Bicycle Thief, thus obscuring De Sica’s social vision. This isn’t an American film touting independence and individual responsibility; poverty and desperation have turned Rome into a city of thieves and potential thieves, charlatans and prostitutes. Ironic: squabbling father and son are able to “steal” a rare moment of contentment dining at a black market restaurant.
     Orson Welles marveled at De Sica’s ability to make his camera disappear. Few today, however, would describe De Sica’s camera as invisible. Rather, there is a gentle sweep of sadness to this mostly gray film, even a trace of melancholy, correlative to the plight of people doing their best to get by with dwindling resources. (It would be left to John Schlesinger, addressing hard luck and squalor in Midnight Cowboy, 1969, to inflate this style into grotesque sentimentality.) A memorable point-of-view shot, in a friend’s truck as windshield wipers tackle rain, maintains De Sica’s sensible aim even while departing from the film’s stylistic procedure.

11. LA TERRA TREMA. The Valastro family of Acitrezza are among Sicily’s hardworking subsistence poor. The two eldest sons fish the sea, to which their father has been lost. They are exploited by canotieri, the wholesale fish merchants who maximize profits by conspiring to offer fishermen little for their catches. ’Ntoni, the eldest son, considers himself an enemy of injustice. He attempts to organize a strike and mortgages the family home to secure his own boat and become independent of the prevailing system. In a storm, he loses the boat; the bank evicts the family, and the canotieri refuse to hire him. When they acquiesce, the proud boy is unwilling to become again a “beast of burden.” Eventually he capitulates, and life goes on; someday, he muses, workers will unite for the common good against such exploitation.
     The Earth Trembles was shot amidst Acitrezza’s rough land and rough waters using the inhabitants rather than actors; an actual canotiero plays a canotiero! They all speak in Sicilian dialect. (Luchino Visconti contributes voiceover commentary in Italian.) Visconti has created a sober, gritty, stormy, powerful Neorealist masterpiece about an environment as oppressive as the name of Mussolini on the wall at hiring headquarters. The film is based on a novel by Giovanni Verga, I Malavoglia.
     The imagery Visconti and his black-and-white cinematographer, G. R. Aldo, achieve is tremendous: long shots of the rocky coast in which people appear as tiny and helpless; faintly luminous dawn, when the fishermen return after a night’s labor; the black ocean at night, as vast nets are dropped and raised, each boat equipped with a lamp to attract fish; upon their return, the men on the ground, appearing trapped in the mesh, repairing the nets; ’Ntoni casting the canotiero’s scale into the sea, inspiring other workers to follow suit.

1949
12. STROMBOLI. A pat, simplistic film in the version released in the States, in the version that Roberto Rossellini surreptitiously shot using RKO equipment, which was distributed in continental Europe, Stromboli is magnificent.
     Again Rossellini took up the issue of postwar dislocation at the heart of Germany,Year Zero (see 1947), only, in this instance, powerfully mining its spiritual fallout. Ingrid Bergman, who had replaced Anna Magnani as his muse, beautifully plays a cultured bourgeois who resists feeling humbled by her camp status as a displaced refugee after the Second World War. To exit her confinement, Karen opportunistically marries a simple island fisherman, and a process of humiliation and rehumanization is begun. Karen comes to embody a paralyzed Europe at a crossroads between selfish material survival and selfless spiritual survival, with no path in sight to strike a balance between the two. Rossellini essays class differences that, persisting even in a shattered Europe, make all the more elusive the task of making Europe “whole again.” Thus the mesmerizing passages of the fishermen at work—it is not surprising that the first of the Rossellini-Bergmans should be the one with deepest Neorealist roots—disclose a world that Karen resists by bourgeois breeding as well as by temperament. The sea is an alien place for her—a fact Rossellini stresses when, making an honest attempt to bridge the gap between them, Karen briefly joins her husband for a work break.
     Unlike Luchino Visconti in La terra trema (see 1948), Rossellini isn’t driven by Marxist principle to ennoble Karen’s spouse or the other fishermen; he sees them straight on, in ordinary light. Crisis can be a great leveler, and neither the traditional villagers nor Karen, who chafes under their conservatism, seem capable of prevailing over the stormy currents to which European lives have been tossed.

1950
13. FRANCESCO, GIULLARE DI DIO. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #46.

1951
14. BELLISSIMA. Maddalena (Anna Magnani, brilliant) enters little Maria in a contest for a movie role. There’s no question who dreams of stardom. The day of the Roman cattle-call at Cinecittà, Maddalena is desperate to find her daughter, who has slipped away. At the initial interview, we see both standing in the same frame, each with her hand on a hip; just who is the one being interviewed? The joke is sealed when Maria gives the wrong family name and her mother steps in to set the matter right: “Cecconi.” Indeed, Maria hardly speaks at all as Mama takes over.
     The Cecconis make ends meet. Spartaco, a laborer, is a wage-slave (note the name). Maddalena herself gives insulin injections. These people aren’t about to starve. But they live in a dreary, dilapidated apartment dwelling, where neighbors are fed up with the couple’s vehement quarrels. While Maddalena plays stage-mother, Spartaco is trying to marshal financial resources so they can all move into their own place. Bellissima is about dreams and how their fervent attempt to remediate unpleasant reality seldom succeeds. Countless children audition for the one available role. Bellissima is an hilarious satire that segues into family—by extension, social—heartbreak before, happily, regaining its comedic foothold.
     Maria’s screen test proves disastrous. The judges laugh at her appearance and inability, unaware that Maddalena is eavesdropping. Maternal instincts kicking in, Maddalena reveals herself and lambasts everyone. Now the men scurry to sign Maria to avert the PR crisis that would result if Maddalena went public with their mockery of the sanctity of Italian children and family; but Maddalena has come to her senses. Her daughter is not for sale.
     Interweaving neorealismo and Maddalena’s fabulous ambitions, sobriety and giddiness, nonprofessional and professional cast members, Luchino Visconti has made one of his greatest films.

15. UMBERTO D. Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. begins with an overhead long shot of a city street, up which moves an orderly mass of people—retirees demonstrating for a raise in their pensions. Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired civil servant, participates. (Umberto was the name of De Sica’s father, a retired bank clerk to whom his son dedicates the film.) Police cars enter, scattering panicking protesters. Organizers had applied for the necessary permit but were denied. Municipal authorities had thus calculated in advance their basis for aborting the march. Claiming the majority’s right to normal traffic flow, they seek to isolate demonstrators from their fellow citizenry, whose sense of justice the demonstrators need to engage in order to marshal the political clout necessary to achieve a raise in their pensions. Authorities, then, seek to contain protestors within the status quo. Interruption of the march hopes to shift public attention from the marchers’ legitimate cause—for Ferrari, who is about to be evicted for being in arrears on his rent, it is a life-and-death matter—to the fact of the disruption. The original message gets lost and another takes its place: the bogus issue of civil order—bogus, because the “disruption” of it was so deliberately contained and limited by the organizers and demonstrators themselves out of a need to strike a precarious balance between getting public attention and not irritating or enraging the public against their cause.
     Almost all of the rest of the film deals with a single individual, “Umberto D.,” but the social and political context De Sica has established accompanies the character throughout the film. De Sica pays close attention to the peculiar details of Ferrari’s individual circumstance—details which speak to the film’s humanity no less than the context that confers on Ferrari a representative identity.

16. EUROPA ’51. See 100 Greatest English-Language Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #48.

1952
17. ROME, 11 O’CLOCK. The splendid Neorealist opening of Bitter Rice (1949) yielded to a flashy, melodramatic result, but Rome, 11 O’Clock, also by Giuseppe De Santis, is the last great work of Italian Neorealism.
     The film is based on journalist Elio Petri’s account of an actual 1951 incident—a tragedy resulting from Italy’s postwar job squeeze. Some two hundred female applicants for a secretarial job crowd an old building waiting for an interview, causing the stairway to collapse. The film essays the fates of five: four of the injured, and the applicant, Luciana, whose rushing movement triggered the event.
     De Santis stresses causality: the consequences of the disaster and its relation to capitalism. Burdened by guilt, Luciana contemplates suicide; her sense of responsibility, as grotesque as it is sincere, throws into relief what she herself is missing: the tragedy’s underlying causes. The same analytical method is applied throughout as characters cope with the immediate hardship of their lives and we contextualize this in light of the film’s argument. Three of the victims—victims of both the system and the event—are trying to “start over”: a prostitute; a servant girl; the pregnant wife of an unemployed factory worker now striking out on her own. The remaining major character is not proletarian, but her marriage to an impoverished artist has set her relatives against her—an exposure of classism that reflects on the sociopolitical boat that all the main characters are in.
     In 1949, Italy joined NATO and passed the Andreotti Law, which aimed to sweep its social problems—the meat and potatoes of neorealismo—away from international view and shift its filmmaking to the political right. In 1952, the effects kicked in, additionally pressured by the U.S., whose Hollywood raged against the financial success of a handful of Neorealist films.

1953
18. VOYAGE IN ITALY. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #50.

19. I VITELLONI. The twentysomething slackers in I vitelloni (literally, The Overgrown Calves) compose an affectionate portrait of provincial young maledom. The point isn’t how bad, but how stunted, these boys are—perhaps for being cut off from The City. Only one, Moraldo, will make it out of Rimini.
     This is Federico Fellini’s most heartfelt film. It opens with one of cinema’s most haunting images: four of the boys, then all five, arms around one another, zigzagging through Rimini’s deserted streets late at night. Trust Fellini to come up with a long shot that locates in imaginative space the point where documentary incident—if you will, neorealismo—yields to recollection and poetic reverie. The odd boy out who belatedly joins the others? That might be Moraldo—Fellini. Moraldo’s being something of an outsider would foretell his singular escape.
     The group’s “leader and spiritual guide,” brother-in-law Moraldo’s voiceover tells us, is Fausto, who is forced by family into marriage and into a job of his father-in-law’s choosing. Fausto, chafing under his conventional collar, will get fired, rob his former employer in retaliation, practice infidelity. We don’t exactly blame him.
     Carnival Time—Fellini Time—comes to Rimini. (Music therein links the film to Chaplin’s Modern Times, disclosing Fellini’s spiritual guide!) Alberto’s sister, who financially supported the family, leaves, enforcing responsibility on her brother and evidencing the possibility of escape. Will Leopoldo, a budding playwright, also escape when, later on, a famous actor visits Rimini and reads his play? The whole strange episode invents the Felliniesque.
     Moraldo’s leavetaking by train is unbearably moving by one less jot than what follows: the boy—symbolically, the part of Moraldo that always will remain in Remini—balancing himself, sometimes falling off, as he walks a rail away from us, accompanied only by Nino Rota’s poignant musical theme.

1954
20. LA STRADA. Federico Fellini’s beautifully acted La strada conveys life on the road and the rootlessness of lonely persons: Zampanò, a circus strongman; Gelsomina, his assistant; the tightrope acrobat called Il Matto, “The Fool.”
     Their itinerant world is worn and strange. Encapsulating it is an early image. Zampanò has abandoned Gelsomina for a night’s pleasure. Sleepless, alone, she is on a dark, empty street down which inexplicably trots a horse, riderless, saddleless, the sound of its hoofbeats, interrupting silence, a measured clock of the soul. This haunting epiphany finds time forlornly blending into vacant eternity.
     How have the three come to live on the road? His nature has led the boy there; his is the congenital homelessness of capricious spirit. Walking a tightrope for a living expresses The Fool’s prescient grasp of human mortality. His flippancy, his main defense against mortal awareness, reflects also powerlessness to direct his own destiny. The selfish brute Zampanò—where else would he be but the road? Perhaps prison, for normal society dare not risk taking him in. Gelsomina’s issue is poverty. With other, younger children to raise, her mother, a widow, has had to sell her to Zampanò, even though the rock-hard life Zampanò offers, coupled with his uncaring nature, will likely result in Gelsomina’s death. All three characters lack the protection of material, familial and social enclosure, not to mention the comfortable myth of self-determination. Barely surviving in an inhospitable cosmos, they’re driven “Still like the thistleball, no bar,/ Onward, whenever light winds blow.”
     What threads this odyssey? Two things: departing from dogma, the film’s creation of its own myth of fall and redemption; a wistful trumpeted tune. Nino Rota’s cherished theme: I hear it now.
     Otello Martelli’s drab, faded black-and-white cinematography helps Fellini create the melancholy poetry that is the film’s hallmark.

1956
21. THE NIGHTS OF CABIRIA. Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria is brilliantly acted by wife Giulietta Masina as the unselfpitying Roman prostitute Cabiria, whom they introduced in The White Sheik (1952). Cabiria tells co-workers she might not join them on a religious pilgrimage, but when a procession of singing pilgrims passes through the scene, moved by the example of their hopefulness, she follows.
     Cabiria’s path crosses that of a man who ministers to the poor who live in caves. At the time of the film’s original release the Roman Catholic Church pressed for the deletion of this passage owing to the contrast it draws between the anonymous individual’s mission and the nonsensical pilgrimage, a moneymaking operation exploiting people’s hopes and fears, which brings participants to a pitch of hysteria in a packed, poorly ventilated church, and, as Cabiria herself points out afterwards, changes nothing and nobody. Fellini expresses outrage at the Church’s exploitation of the poor and the sick. The stage hypnosis of Cabiria, which leaves her angry and humiliated, is a metaphor for the corrupt pilgrimage and the Church’s manipulation of the masses.
     Cabiria’s fiancé steals her life’s savings and abandons her. A high camera follows as she walks back, alone, through the dark woods. Suddenly young revelers playing musical instruments surround her—children who have thus crashed the barrier between artifice and reality, for the music we have been hearing on the soundtrack now has a visible, realistic origin. Weaving around her, the children are smiling; Cabiria also smiles, and for a quick instant finds us, anonymous humanity, by looking directly into the camera. We are complicit in her ambiguous fate. We have a job to do, and perhaps Cabiria will join us in this endeavor. The world is unjust, and people need our kindness and our help.

1957
22. WHITE NIGHTS. Bellissima proved to be Luchino Visconti’s last Neorealist film. A purplish forbidden romance, Senso (1954), followed—a work of visual splendor that nonetheless leaves me cold. White Nights, based on the same Dostoievski story that Robert Bresson would film as Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), was considered at the time a letdown. It remains one of my favorite Visconti films.
     What Visconti described as “Neo-romanticism” resembles French poetic realism. But atmosphere, the correlative to European fatalism as Nazism threatened and devoured the continent in the real world, no longer is the repository of the film’s urgency; this has shifted to Natalia and Mario (Maria Schell and Marcello Mastroianni, both tremendous), who meet on a canal bridge one night and begin to bond, on their date, the next night.
     The romance is doomed from the start. Natalia haunts the bridge, awaiting the return of her lover, who failed to keep their rendezvous a year after his departure. Ironically, Natalia tries to duck her date with Mario in an unconscious replay of what her lover has done to her—an indication of how deeply her spirit remains embedded in the past with the man who has apparently ditched her. At first, Mario contests the unreality of Natalia’s persistent hope for her lover’s return but is then drawn into it, helping her compose a letter to him, just to keep her in his life. But Visconti’s Marxist side lets us see another barrier between the two; Mario is a lowly clerk, while Natalia is a bourgeois whose family has devolved into genteel poverty.
     Exquisite artificial sets, the painted sky, the voluminous darkness of Giuseppe Rotunno’s superb black-and-white cinematography: all these shift reality to the young pair and to Natalia’s oblivious joy when her lover returns at last, shattering Mario.

23. IL GRIDO. Mechanic Aldo abandons lover Irma, taking their child, when she refuses to marry him upon news of her husband’s death. Aldo drifts through gray industrial landscapes in northern Italy.
     The Cry’s depiction of a man’s life at loose ends finds Michelangelo Antonioni unhinging conventional narrative in order to invent a more flexible and poetic cinematic form stressing human behavior and the environmental factors contributing to it—Neorealist aims, but considerably less tied to the requirements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century storytelling. Perhaps the melancholy landscapes may be too refined to counter with sufficient gusto the tyranny of plot (L’avventura—see 1960—will complete the task); but the insinuative background of workers demonstrating against a proposed American airbase, not to mention the use of a poster advertising national integrity, doubles as a sly kick at the Hollywood way of pushing a plot line forward to connect a series of formulaic dots.
     In retrospect, we see from whence Antonioni came; at the same time we grasp more fully at what his inspiration, Roberto Rossellini, was aiming with his composite portrait, in Paisà (see 1946), of a regionally varied national character. A brisk move away from traditional “plottedness,” Paisà’s episodic nature reduces “story” by multiplying it—a method achieving especial grace and beauty in Francesco, giullare di Dio (see 1950), where the episodes are less like miniature stories or films, as in Paisà, and more like impressionistic brush strokes. Whereas Paisà resembles a completed jigsaw puzzle whose piece outlines remain discernible, Francesco is more than the sum of its parts, and a distinct whole that has thoroughly absorbed the pieces it comprises. This marks a formal departure from Neorealism that Antonioni, Rossellini’s heir, brings to fruition even as his work keeps addressing contemporary themes and (for now) the lives of ordinary people.

24. THE USUAL UNIDENTIFIED THIEVES. When I was thirteen, my parents, Uncle Joe, Aunt Estelle and I wept with nearly nonstop laughter through a television viewing of Mario Monicelli’s I Soliti ignoti, a.k.a. The Big Deal on Madonna Street. Uncle Joe, who was born in Italy, loved Italian films—even those whose politics and social mores were far more liberal than his own. But who doesn’t love this heist spoof, a riotous send-up of Jules Dassin’s somber Rififi (1955)?
     Thieves begins with an attempted car theft in the wee hours. The horn gets stuck in its sounding mode. As the thief tries to vacate the scene, his coat gets caught in the door. Cut to prison, to what will become a visual refrain: a chain of incarcerated men in a military quick-step. Thief to lawyer: “I’ve got to get out right away. I have a job to pull that will get me sent up for life!” Solution: someone has to be hired to confess to the crime and take the thief’s place. But it must be a first-time offender so he gets only six months. Does anyone know such an innocent?
     Peppe, an inept boxer, gets into prison all right, but somehow the actual criminal isn’t let out—and poor Peppe is sentenced to three years! Frustrated, the thief shares with Peppe the big job he has planned. Now in the know, Peppe tells the fellow the truth: he got a one-year suspended sentence. Released, Peppe recruits his buddies for the perfect, easy crime. But what bumblers they all turn out to be!
     The splendid script is by Monicelli, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, and the team of Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli. And the cast is to die for: Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Renato Salvatori, a luscious teenaged Claudia Cardinale, and Totò.

1960
25. L’AVVENTURA. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #17.

26. ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS. Italy produces the most trenchant films about brothers. Among these are Valerio Zurlini’s Family Diary (see 1962), Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers (see 1981), Gianni Amelio’s The Way We Laughed (1998)—and, of course, Luchino Visconti’s massive Rocco and His Brothers, inspired by Giovanni Testori’s novel Il Ponte della Ghisolfa, and a somewhat extravagant sequel of sorts to La terra trema (see 1948).
     The film opens with the arrival by train of widowed Rosaria and four of her sons. Poverty has driven them from southern Italy to industrial Milan, where the family reunites with Vincenzo, a fifth son and brother, struggles, and two of the boys, saintly Rocco and obstreperous Simone (Alain Delon and Renato Salvatori, both tremendous), fall out over Nadia, the prostitute they both love. The atmosphere accompanying this last aspect of the film seems closer to Dostoievski than Visconti’s earlier White Nights (see 1957), while the film’s episodic structure formally embodies the family’s disintegration.
     “It’s hard to find a job in Milan.” Rosaria, Simone, Rocco, Ciro and Luca move into the basement of an apartment block, and the first work the boys do, shoveling pavement, is occasioned by a snowfall. Such fortuitous piecemeal labor, however, is insufficient to sustain them. Simone becomes a boxer; Rocco takes a job in a dry cleaner’s. Eventually, after serving in the army, Rocco also becomes a boxer, signing a long-term contract, sacrificing himself in a complicated scheme of events for the sake of Simone, who would otherwise go to prison for theft. The burden of fraternal obligation undoes them both.
     Visconti succeeds at describing, though not penetrating, a disastrous immigrant experience, adhering, rather, to Matthew Arnold’s dictum, “Not deep the poet sees, but wide.” The different degrees to which family members assimilate are fascinating to chart and compare.

27. TWO WOMEN. With the exception of The Roof (1957), Vittorio De Sica had occupied himself with trivial works following Umberto D. (see 1951). With La Ciociara, from Alberto Moravia’s novel, he directed one of his most trenchant films.
     Allied forces are bombing Rome. Cesira flees with Rosetta, her teenaged daughter, to the country village of her birth. There is no escaping the war, however, the two discover.
     The genre of the road film absorbs the spectacle of disruption and dislocation that war imposes. Mother and daughter both get raped by soldiers inside the presumed sanctuary of a church. Her innocence taken from her, Rosetta suits her subsequent behavior to her grief and self-disgust, provoking from Cesira an impassioned spanking—a futile gesture aimed at restoring a broken childhood. Roberto Rossellini’s General della Rovere (1959), about wartime courage, to which De Sica contributed a brilliant lead performance, had briefly restored De Sica to a sober and serious mode.
     There are three especially compelling aspects. One is the ferocious passage depicting the two rapes. The shock into which the event throws Cesira is most convincing; here is a grueling portrait of a parent’s loss of the capacity to protect her child. Another is the beautiful (perhaps dubbed) performance by Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michele, a young idealist and Communist who is attracted to Rosetta. But above all is the film’s anecdotal nature, purging the drama of melodramatic exaggeration and consigning it to a nation’s haunted and heartbroken memory. Italy was recovering from the war economically; but to have been emotionally shattered is to remain so forever.
     Carefully guided by mentor De Sica, Sophia Loren gives a rare good performance as Cesira. Only one preposterous element is attached to it: the rumor that the actress was originally considered for the role of Rosetta.

1961
28. VIRIDIANA. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #22.

29. LA NOTTE. In his trilogy, Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte occupies the dead-center between the hopefulness with which L’avventura (see 1960) ends and the utter desolation of L’eclisse (see 1962), which begins and ends with the end of a relationship. It is a gray, weathered film that ends with a standstill in love that may yet be set back into motion. We certainly hope that life is still possible in Giovanni and Lidia’s marriage, and we appreciate their courteous, civilized treatment of one another in this troubled time of theirs. Their humanity, then, forms the basis for our hope that the couple may yet prevail. In retrospect, the conclusion of the trilogy, although it deals with a different (and unmarried) couple, eclipses all such hope.
     Giovanni and Lidia visit Milan to see Tommaso, a dying friend, in hospital. From this we can see their decency and compassion; few filmmakers have such fondness for their characters as Antonioni does. But, also, Tommaso functions symbolically to suggest the emotional and spiritual exhaustion that each of the marital partners feels. It is after Lidia learns of Tommaso’s death that she tells Giovanni she no longer loves him. She feels this way not because of anything that Giovanni has done but because of what he hasn’t done; exhausted himself, he hasn’t been able to pull her out of her doldrums. In Antonioni, a marriage isn’t an island; Giovanni and Lidia are affected, severely, by the alienating modern world in which they find themselves. Antonioni wouldn’t think of cheapening the moment with sentimentality, so it is all the more heartrending when he reveals that Giovanni, a writer, is so lost to himself that he fails to recognize his most intimate words as his own.
     Marcello Mastroianni is wonderful as Giovanni.
     Night is Antonioni’s most moving film.

30. IL POSTO—literally, The Job, but released in the U.S. as The Sound of Trumpets to discourage, for commercial reasons, the notion that the film has anything to do with work. But writer-director Ermanno Olmi’s film has everything to do with work.
     Domenico, 15, is out in the job market because his younger brother is in school and the family needs whatever it can get. In their apartment in Meda, a village in Lombardy, Domenico sleeps in the kitchen and his brother does homework at the kitchen table. This is not a family of means.
     Domenico applies for a clerical post at a large company in Milan. With a host of others, he is taking a general examination including an aptitude test. His father has told him that a job at this company, however little it pays, is a job for life.
     The film, wonderfully acted by nonprofessionals, resurrects a Neorealist line. The key is subdued, and the style, rigorously documentary. There isn’t even a score on the soundtrack.
     The film is divided into two parts, one in which Domenico tries to get the job, and one in which he holds a job. The enormity of the palace of employment, coupled with the practiced subservience of those who work there, suggests that employment is a gift. It turns out, despite job advertisements, nobody will be hired as a clerk; because he did well on the tests, Domenico is hired as a messenger—a position too low to bolster the shy boy’s confidence to pursue Magali, who has been hired as a typist. (Oh my!) A fortuitous death, probably the result of work monotony, opens a clerical position that Domenico gets to fill, thus becoming one of a roomful of robots. Few films slip so easily from realism into satirical expressionism.

1962
31. L’ECLISSE. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #5.

32. THE FIANCÉS. See 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #62.

33. SALVATORE GIULIANO. Francesco Rosi had been making films for a decade when he revolutionized cinema with Salvatore Giuliano, which drew upon Neorealism, purging it of sentimentality and didacticism. (Rosi began as an assistant on Visconti’s La terra trema; see 1948.) The film opens in 1950 with an overhead shot of the murdered corpse, in a courtyard, of Salvatore Giuliano, Sicilian folk hero and Mafia associate. A documentary inquiry, without guidance of voiceover or an individual investigator, creates a mosaic fleshing out the import of that shot. During the postwar fight for Sicilian independence, Giuliano is an activist whose partisans, the pisciotti, attack Italy’s military police (which retaliates with equal brutality in the village of Montelepre) and massacre Communists at Portella della Ginestra. Giuliano eludes authorities, but Giuliano’s close associate, Gaspare Pisciotti, is put on trial in Viterbo. Rosi’s film, a painstaking reconstruction of events in Sicily and southern Italy, paved the way for Roberto Rossellini’s present-tense histories and Gillo Pontecorvo’s combustible The Battle of Algiers (see 1965), to whose script Franco Solinas again contributed.
     Salvatore Giuliano eludes us as well as authorities; his face is rarely shown, and when the character is shown it is most often as a figure in white fleeing across white mountainous terrain. Beautiful pans of the landscape alternate between evoking the watchful eyes of partisans and searching for Giuliano. He is folk phantom and real boy, his mother’s wailing over his dead body attesting to the latter. Using just two professional actors (neither plays Giuliano) in a sea of actual Sicilian villagers many of whom were reliving events in which they had actually participated, Rosi achieves a fantastic degree of realism. The scene in which a wailing mass of women floods the streets in protest to the military round-up of their men is exceptionally powerful.

34. FAMILY DIARY. From Vasco Pratolini’s autobiographical novel (Pratolini contributed to the script), Valerio Zurlini’s Cronaca familiare follows Florentine brothers Enrico and Lorenzo Corsi. Zurlini emphasizes universality, in particular, the grandmother’s love for the boys (Sylvie’s performance is tremendous), and the elder brother’s contemplation of the eternal mystery, for him, of Lorenzo’s nature—a mystery ultimately sealed in the latter’s youthful death from an ailment itself so mysterious that it comes to seem a projection of Enrico’s limited capacity to fathom Lorenzo.
     The film opens in 1945, in a newsroom in Rome, where Enrico (Marcello Mastroianni, deeply affecting), a struggling journalist, is informed that a piece of his will be published. But news he receives by telephone robs the moment of joy: Enrico’s younger brother, in his twenties, died yesterday. The different course of their lives consigned Lorenzo to relative wealth and Enrico to poverty and squalor. Tubercular, why isn’t he the one to have died? In an outdoor long shot, slowly moving down a street against a continuous backdrop of immense buildings on both sides, Enrico seems like the narrowly entombed walking dead.
     When Enrico returns to his meager accommodations, Zurlini slips into using a subjective camera. The emptiness confronting Enrico (empty chair, unpopulated desk) reflects his vacant feeling. He is separated forever from the treasure of his brother’s company and love. He has finally caught up with Italy’s postwar mood of bereavement, exhaustion, defeat. He withdraws into memory, the years of the boys’ separation owing to their father’s war-wrought absence and their mother’s death, the baby’s adoption by another family, contrasts (example: Lorenzo, Fascist; Enrico, anti-Fascist), and then unlikely reunion and gradually reignited love.
     The film is literary but heartrending. The jury that awarded it the top prize at Venice: “delicious, powerful evocation of feelings filtered by memory.”

1963
35. IL GATTOPARDO. 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #63.

36. LES CARABINIERS. 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #64.

37. HANDS OVER THE CITY. In Naples, disaster strikes. How closely adjacent to a slum building is the new apartment building that was being constructed? The former has collapsed, killing two and robbing a boy of his legs. The real estate developer responsible for the new construction, Edoardo Nottola, sits on the City Council. The public land had been sold to him, and his development of it ignored urban planning law, including safety regulations. With the next municipal election one month away, an investigation is launched into governmental responsibility, but each agency admits to only the narrowest handprint on the project, declaring itself innocent of all irregularities. Someone else is to blame; but, as a both-serving political alliance is forged between Nottola’s right wing and the center, all responsible hands are absolved and Nottola, following re-election, is made City Commissioner! One cover-up covers up another.
     With documentary realism and poker-faced satire, former journalist Francesco Rosi’s Le mani sulla città achieves brilliant, absorbing, sometimes thrilling results. It is a film of hands. Hilariously, after the accident, city councilmen—and at this point in patriarchic Italy they are all men—throw up their hands as a sign of having hands that are clean of the building disaster. Other shots involve a sea of hands; in another, in the street, they belong to impoverished tenants who have been evicted as the city poses as though it were conducting itself responsibly. Where will these people—and in this group there are countless women—go?
     Toward and at the end, two shots of epic withdrawal, one inside the City Council chamber and the other outdoors, as another construction project is christened that will make Nottola even richer, one by dollie, one by reverse zoom lens, challenge us: Step back, and see what’s going on!

1964
38. IL DESERTO ROSSO. 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #67.

39. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #69.

40. BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. “Those who didn’t live in the eighteenth century before the [French] Revolution will never be able to know the sweetness of life.” — Talleyrand
     At 22 Bernardo Bertolucci made Prima della rivoluzione. Fabrizio, his young protagonist, concludes there’s no escaping his bourgeois past, no matter his Leftist political leanings. The oppressed whom he would help liberate aspire to be members of the middle class! Meanwhile, he has an affair with Aunt Gina, whom as a little boy he enjoyed watching dress. “I always laugh, I always cry,” says this encapsulation of Mother Church. She breaks down after being taunted by a child—I presume a Puckish image of herself—obliviously singing up in a tree. “You are happy,” she says aloud as Fabrizio (whom we glimpse through a window) dances in the street. “But it won’t last . . . you’ll forget me. You’ll hate me.” At Fabrizio’s wedding send-off, Gina (Adriana Asti, terrific) is tearfully showering with kisses a younger nephew.
     Inspired by Godard and Resnais’s Marienbad (1961), Bertolucci tries everything: zooms; a moving car camera, attached either to the front or the side; dissolves within a scene—if you will, “soft” jump-cuts; hard jump-cuts; misty lyrical poetry by a lake. This movie is in love with movies and movie-making.
     It is also one of the most important films for understanding the sixties. Its lovely incest (seven years before Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart) reaches for a synthesis derived from thesis (family, structure, order) and antithesis (the pleasure of doing one’s own thing). In the States we knew on the basis of this reconciliation that revolution would never happen here.
     Or, perhaps, anywhere else in the postwar West. A schoolteacher tells Fabrizio, “[Y]ou can argue only with people who have the same ideas.”
     Devastating; irreplaceable; phenomenal.

1965
41. VAGHE STELLE DELL’ORSO. Misty Stars of the Great Bear (called Sandra in the U.S.) took the top prize, the Golden Lion of St. Mark, at Venice. It is Luchino Visconti’s starkest film and among his most brilliant ones.
     Claudia visits Volterra, in Tuscany, with her American husband. The occasion: a ceremony honoring her Jewish father, who perished at Auschwitz. She and her brother, Gianni, suspect that their still-living mother and stepfather denounced their father. They determine to pursue this and extract justice. Their own close relationship, the subject of a novel he is writing, constitutes a memory Gianni cherishes, but Claudia is perplexed and nearly traumatized by it. Just what happened so many years ago, on both fronts?
     As he did in Il Gattopardo (see #42) and would do again in The Damned (see 1969), Visconti explores the decay and collapse of an aristocratic family as a reflection of national history. Both Claudia and Gianni feel driven to connect the dots of family history. Their stirring up a cauldron of secrets and suspiciousness ultimately shatters one of them, who commits suicide. Mourning may become Electra, but Claudia heads back to America—in its simplicity, heartlessness and obliviousness (qualities represented by her spouse), a refuge from her obsessions with father, brother, Italy, the past.
     We have, then, a skeletons-in-the-closet film, one that generates ancient echoes through its absorption and delicate rendering of the Electra myth. Italy has made many haunted films about its Fascist past and the German oocupation, but this may be the most gripping. Armando Nannuzzi’s black-and-white cinematography encompasses claustrophobic darkness and sorely ironic ravishing light. It befits an operatic mood-piece about unsettled and unsettling events, both familial and national.
     Claudia Cardinale and Marie Bell memorably play daughter and mother, while Jean Sorel functions as an Alain Delon substitute.

42. FISTS IN THE POCKET. In perhaps the most stunning debut in Italian cinema, 25-year-old writer-director Marco Bellocchio tackles the contemporary Italian family, suggesting the perverted mindset of Fascism, which, the film implies, proceeded from an obsession with family to the detriment of individualist consciousness and behavior. Augusto’s fiancée, Lucia, has received a threatening anonymous note from, they believe, his sister, Giulia, telling her to back off because she is pregnant with his child. The presumed motive: to keep Augusto at home, in part to help take care of their blind mother. Meanwhile, Giulia has received a love letter from Alessandro, their brother, who (perhaps having read Of Mice and Men) gets miffed when their other brother, Leone, feeds the pet rabbits he considers his own. Who and what belongs to whom?: What isn’t mixed up now, twenty years after the war?
     Ale—Alessandro—is the main character. He and Leone, who is retarded, are epileptic. We know things are just not right with Ale by the way he is introduced; he falls into the frame from above, presumably out of a tree. One of cinema’s greatest black comedies is in full gear.
     Indeed, Ale owes something to the protagonist of cinema’s greatest black comedy, Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Ale kills, too—also from a surfeit of family feeling, you understand. Augusto, who at least seems normal, should not have to put up with this ratty family of his. One by one its members meet a horrible death, starting with Mom.
     Lou Castel’s brilliant performance as Alessandro highlights this hilarious and frightening film. Paola Pitagora also is memorable as Giulia.
     Castel’s Alessandro not only looks back to Bates but also ahead to River Phoenix’s heartrending narcoleptic Mike in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991).

43. THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. Gillo Pontecorvo, as a teenager, was a leader in Italy’s anti-Fascist underground movement. As a filmmaker, though, he proved dull and unadventurous (The Wide Blue Road, 1957). Although derivative of Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (see 1962) and Nanni Loy’s Four Days of Naples (1962), The Battle of Algiers marked his substantial improvement.
     The Battle of Algiers, which ended in 1957, began the Algerian rebellion, 1954-1962, against longtime French colonial rule. Soldiers, dispatched to crush the rebellion and given a blank check in their methods, tortured and murdered, including vast numbers of innocents, claiming as many as a million Algerian lives. Pursuing their people’s independence, the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) used violent means that today would brand them as terrorists.
     Pontecorvo’s reconstruction of the street war, shot with hand-held cameras on black-and-white newsreel stock in the actual locations, has such raw urgency that the film announces upfront—boasts, really—that no newsreel or documentary footage was used. The brilliant cinematography is by Marcello Gatti.
     Commissioned by the ultimately victorious FLN, the film is passionately anticolonialist. There is a passage that shows an FLN member, a young woman, coolly blowing up a restaurant, before which she and the camera survey innocent French Algerian patrons, including children; some viewers go with this and other moments to claim for the film a “balanced” approach. The tone of the film admits no such possibility. Clearly, Pontecorvo feels that the situation—colonialist rule, now exacerbated by military terror—gives the African Algerians a moral blank check in their pursuit of independence. It is the French whose catalogue of terrorism, in the service of the status quo, that overwhelms with its viciousness.
     President Jacques Chirac, a soldier in Algeria, has thus counseled George W. Bush against repeating in Iraq France’s mistakes.

44. LE SOLDATESSE. Valerio Zurlini’s The Camp Followers, from Ugo Pirro’s novel, is about the armed transport of a convoy of women, prostitutes because of the poverty war has imposed, to service Italian soldiers in brothels in the 1940s during World War II. The action begins in Athens, Greece, and proceeds north. The truck ride over treacherous mountainous terrain evolves into a metaphor for war.
     Three soldiers are in charge of the transport: Lieutenant Gaetano Martino (Tomas Milian, magnificent), a sergeant, and Major Castagnoli. The perfect image of unbending military authority, the last is the only one not to change as a result of the ordeal. He embodies the monstrousness of war. The sergeant seems almost oblivious to war, while Martino is sick of it—heartsick, and sick to the bone. He and Castagnoli collide.
     Eftichia (Marie Laforêt, striking) is the most brooding and miserable of the prostitutes; young Martino falls in love with Elenitza (Anna Karina, poignant), the group’s apparent leader and warmest member.
     Whereas the women are shot to stress their solidarity as a group (for instance, the camera picks them up all facing the camera), the men, particularly Martino and Castagnoli, converse often without looking at one another, sometimes facing in opposite directions.
     During the firing squad deaths of a handful of “traitors,” Eftichia responds as though she also were being shot. Earlier, the group is attacked. One of the stricken women lies on the ground, dead. Martino covers the corpse with a blanket. His hand solemnly, caringly weighs in gently on the blanket. A long shot immediately follows: a panoramic view of the truck as it continues on its winding mission—at such a distance, a moving dot. We see what appears to be a gigantic handprint in the massive rock. It is the impression of war.

1966
45. THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s rambunctious comedy The Hawks and the Sparrows is an ideological fable.
     An old man and his son are walking down a vacant road. They pass through a slum punctuated by billboards, each identifying an individual but also a widespread problem: an unemployed man; a child who ran away. Down the road they meet a black crow, a self-described Leftist intellectual. The crow says his parents are Conscience and Doubt. The crow accompanies the pair.
     Suddenly the men are transported to the thirteenth century, where they are friars. St. Francis charges them with preaching God’s love to hawks and sparrows and converting the birds to Christianity. This they do amidst hilarious chirping; the hawks convert to consolidate their power, while the sparrows convert out of desperation. When the sparrows explain they need wheat and millet, they are told to fast! But the friars burst into tears when a hawk assaults and kills a sparrow. God’s love, apparently, is insufficient to counter class warfare. The two report back to St. Francis, who chides the friars for misunderstanding history and foretells the Coming of the Messiah: Karl Marx!
     Back in the present, the father utilizes an outhouse for a bowel movement. He and his son are told to take their shit with them. They refuse; they are shot at. Ownership and property lead to strife and battles.
     Now the two are a landlord and his goon. They invade the shack of an impoverished couple and threaten to confiscate their home for nonpayment of rent. For four days running, the woman has convinced her children to stay in bed because she has nothing to feed them. She is cooking a bird’s nest for her spouse. So recently victims themselves, our pair are unmoved.
     Food for thought.

46. THE HUNT. Three businessmen go rabbit hunting one day thirty years after being fascist compatriots in the Spanish Civil War. They start bickering from the get-go, kill animals, and end up shooting and killing each other.
     With Carlos Saura directing from a brilliant script by himself and Angelino Fons, La Caza revolves around the metaphor of the hunt as a revival of the war from the vantage of Franco’s winners, disconsolate men burdened somehow by the past despite victory. Another of their old group, Arturo, became an embezzler and committed suicide—an act they cannot comprehend; yet doesn’t their new bloodbath comprise their own suicides by proxy? Many shots show trapped animals: caged pet ferrets; a rabbit attacked in its hole by one of the released ferrets; a beetle, in closeup, transported to a wall of rock, where it’s shot to smithereens. But the hunters themselves are trapped in that earlier time, when they hunted Loyalists instead of rabbits, and they can’t escape. One has brought along his brother-in-law, Enrique, who is way too young to have fought in the war; but he, too, it turns out, chokes on the symbolic noxious fumes that are the result of the war’s tragic outcome. Sardonically, Saura sardonically traps him in a conclusive freeze frame in mid-flight from the scene of carnage.
     In one of the close mines a skeleton resides—as one of the hunters explains, a likely veteran of the war. Are any of these men really alive, or do they creep like guilty things in the shadow of blood they long ago shed? The infected rabbits symbolize the sick Spain that the war’s outcome consolidated. The desolate black-and-white landscape: the radio’s rock ’n’ roll desecrates this hallowed ground.
     Enrique is warned: “Be careful. Aim at the rabbits.”

1967
47. THE STRANGER. Albert Camus, who wrote the 1942 novel L’Etranger had been born to pieds-noirs in Algeria. His protagonist, a clerk, is a Frenchman who also lives in Algeria. In Luchino Visconti’s film, Meursault is played by Marcello Mastroianni, who was a dozen years too old for the part and way too emotionally accessible: a fortuitous stroke of monumental miscasting, for Mastroianni seems to be showing us Meursault (simultaneously) both outside and in-. In book and film, Meursault reminds one of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, whose ready response to any instruction or possibility of behavior is, “I prefer not to.” Meursault’s unintended assault on bourgeois sensibility when he fails to cry at his mother’s funeral is why he is tried and sentenced to beheading for the shooting death of an Arab man in the desert. His explanation for the act is the blazing, dizzying sun. The way Visconti shoots the scene is fiercely literal; it locates the absurdity of the act in the metaphysical conjoining of the death’s finality and Meursault’s casual, throwaway (though not quite flippant) explanation. Visconti is enormously convincing here.
     Indeed, Visconti is close to brilliant throughout, succeeding in making both the Arab victim and a neighbor’s loved/hated, talked-about scabby dog somehow seem broken images of Meursault himself. It is a broken world, in fact, in which Meursault endeavors to rely on himself for integrity.
     Lo Straniero reminds one how incredibly funny Visconti can be. The scene where Meursault’s avowed atheism causes the Prosecutor to go ballistic is hilarious. The film’s greatest shot, though, is anything but funny: the camera surveying Arabs in the dark holding cell after Meursault, arrested, answers, “I killed an Arab,” when asked by someone there what crime he committed. Here, we are very far from the ambiguating sunlight in the dunes.

1968
48. TEOREMA. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Marxism, religious feeling, gayness and penchant for startling visual poetry combine for a heady brew in Theorem, a surreal allegory about a handsome no-name stranger (Terence Stamp) who inexplicably visits a bourgeois Milanese family and proceeds to seduce maid, son, Mom, daughter and Dad before departing. This is The Gospel According to Sinner Pier Paolo. The Vatican condemned it, and Pasolini was actually tried for obscenity. Thank God he prevailed!
     Dad (Massimo Girotti) owns a factory. He gets it in the behind last because he is the pièce de résistance. Upshot: Dad turns over his factory to the workers. Well and good; but Pasolini reflects upon a possible adverse consequence: that the working class itself might turn bourgeois. Pasolini: “[A]nything done by the bourgeoisie, however sincere, profound, and noble it is, is always on the wrong side of the track.”
     The opening shot is of an expanse of seemingly ancient barren land, upon which is superimposed a quote from Exodus to the effect that God led the people by way of the wilderness. This is followed by shots of the factory complex, followed by the owner’s chauffeured entrance into the complex. Shots of the wilderness are interspersed. The factory owner thus appears as the modern diminution of God, while the factory, “civilization,” has replaced the wilderness. A shot of the owner with his family at the dinner table implies that “home” is an extension of “factory.” With its touch of wildness/wilderness, the anonymous stranger’s pansexuality is bound to shake things up.
     The stranger’s first conquest is the maid (Laura Betti, brilliant), who simply adores him. She ends up, miraculously, suspended in air, arms outstretched, herself an object of adoration. Wow!
     Despite efforts to condemn Pasolini, his film is chaste: bare male buttocks—no genitalia.

49. BLACK JESUS. Valerio Zurlini’s Seduto alla sua destra—literally, Seated at His Right, but called Black Jesus in the U.S. for reasons of commercial exploitation that are all the more contemptible given the U.S. role in deposing the democratically elected Congolese premier and replacing him with dictator Joseph-Desiré Mobutu—is stark, gripping and fascinating. Its Maurice Lalubi, played by John Ford regular Woody Strode, is based on Patrice Lumumba, who was murdered by a Belgian mercenary in 1960. Zurlini’s target is European colonialism.
     It is basically a prison film—and one with so existentialist an aura to it, at times you would swear you were watching a French film, not an Italian one. One can imagine Jean-Paul Sartre as having had a hand in the script.
     Lalubi, a black African rebel leader, is thrown into a prison cell with two white men, a soldier and a thief (Pasolini regular Franco Citti). All three are relentlessly and brutally tortured.
     Zurlini creates a painterly prison of the mind that taunts with false possibilities for escape. Rough, ochre, blank stone walls; without a handrail, a huge stairwell; the cell; the blood-spattered interrogation room: these combine in a shambles of a structure, which seems to wobble the historical fates of captors and captives alike. No one is at home: blacks, because their country is being run by foreigners; whites, because Africa as the “backyard of Europe” is too forlornly separated from the main house. In one striking passage, the thief, finding himself unattended, lumberingly shuffles up the steps in pursuit of freedom when, just as suddenly, an officer firmly descends, dashing his hope.
     The Christian pattern of betrayal, torment and martyrdom is likely the least interesting aspect of the material.

1969
50. FELLINI SATYRICON. Inspired by Petronius, Federico Fellini’s Fellini Satyricon followed the swank and soap opera of La dolce vita (1959) and the vacancy of 8½ (1963), in which a filmmaker who has just had a stupendous hit—read in La dolce vita—is given lots of money and freedom to make another film; but about what? Some find beguiling the idea of a film with nothing to say about the making of a film with nothing to say. I have nothing to say. Juliet of the Spirits (1965) was better but somewhat diffuse.
     Fellini described his Satyricon as a science-fiction film, but about the past. It’s a kaleidoscope of humanity.
     The film’s barbaric first-century Roman odyssey follows young Encolpio through a phantasmagoric landscape of gods, goddesses and grotesques, a false minotaur and a real hermaphodite, homosexuality and public sexual humiliations, carnival-like revelry, and fierce punishments. It opens with the student wailing against solitude and life’s injustice in front of a blank wall. Shit happens. On the same stage where a theater-piece is being sensually performed, a poor soul gets a hand axed off for real. The writer Eumolpo is tortured for plagiarizing and finally cannibalized by relatives. The film ends mid-sentence (as did Petronius’s uncompleted original), with the film’s assorted characters visually translated into the completed fresco—the once blank wall with figures frozen in time yet hauntingly alive, eternally.
     Blending harsh reality and mysterious legend, Fellini’s masterpiece posits humanity’s hapless existence. It is also a film about the artistic process by which the past is given form and its characters, finally, direction and purpose—humanity’s redemption. A part of this form is the film’s interrupted quality; narrative threads are abruptly dropped, and interruptions are themselves interrupted by other stories envisioned as flashbacks: an expression of life’s uncertainty, richness, unfathomability.

51. THE DAMNED. 100 Greatest English-Language Films List, elsewhere on the site, entry #68.

52. MEDEA. “I have a dim foreboding of grief.” — Medea
     The first half of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s anthropological Medea contains his most brilliant work; when the part corresponding to Euripedes’s tragedy kicks in, the film is less satisfying, partly due to the inadequacy of opera diva Maria Callas, whose striking poses do not add up to a performance.
     But the first half! The film opens with his adoptive father, Chiron, talking to Jason, who is, first, an infant, then thirteen, then an older teenager, then grown, as the centaur continues, telling the boy the boy’s family history and, ironically, contrary to the passage’s continuity over time, registering a changing viewpoint, beginning with a belief in the gods and that “[e]verything is holy,” and ending in disbelief in any god’s existence.
     But we know the story of the Golden Fleece, and that is partly why Pasolini doesn’t spoil his solitudinous vision of Medea’s barbaric culture with intrusive dialogue. In an extraordinary passage, a virgin is sacrificed—a boy this time—so crops will grow. His neck broken, the boy is communally slaughtered, his blood and body parts imbibed and devoured. Haunting pans of the barren land are correlative to the primitive madness we everywhere see. The hard edge of the film’s fiercely sunlit images collapses the distance between reality and ancient myth.
     Medea’s relationship with Jason is an instance of cultural collision. The barbaric sorceress Medea: can her marriage to civilized Jason prosper? No. He betrays her, and to punish him she murders their sons and Jason’s new bride, bringing to fruition what we first see as her premonition or dream. “Nothing is possible!” she cries out at Jason.
     The tenderness with which Medea tends to each of her children right before dispatching them is a highlight of the second half.

1970
53. IL CONFORMISTI. The quality of Bertolucci’s films is all over the map, but it is universally agreed that, from Alberto Moravia, The Conformist, about Fascism’s ghosts, is exceptionally beautiful.
      For many of us, when we were in graduate school or college, The Conformist was the film to see. When two glamorous young women danced together in a working-class dance hall, incongruity deliciously compounding incongruity, a heady intoxicant of perversity overtook our senses. The Conformist has remained one of the films of our dreams.
      Mild-mannered Marcello Clerici’s mania to appear “normal” and to disappear into the crowd drives him into an ill-suiting marriage and into becoming a Fascist assigned to assassinate a former professor of his, an antifascist activist. The film begins in the 1930s and ends after the war, by which time Clerici appears to embody Italy’s determination to deny its political past.
      The Conformist dazzles with its bits and pieces juggling the present and different degrees of the past. Vittorio Storaro’s color cinematography—at a level of achievement beyond what he contributed to the films that account for his three Oscars—deepens the impression that everything in the film is haunted by memory. Italy’s past is flypaper; but in the disposition of the Clericis’ marriage at the last Bertolucci also summons echoes of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
      Bertolucci is famous for eliciting superlative performances: Adriana Asti, Before the Revolution (1963); Marlon Brando, Last Tango in Paris (1972); Ugo Tognazzi and Anouk Aimée, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981); John Lone, The Last Emperor (1987); Keanu Reeves, Little Buddha (1993). On this occasion, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli, however, Bertolucci broke the bank. The Conformist may be the most brilliantly acted movie ever made.

54. THE DECAMERON. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s episodic masterpiece springboards off Boccaccio’s crammed 14th-century text to reflect on modern times.
     Shamelessly wealthy Andreuccio is tricked by thieves into an archbishop’s sepulchre to hand up costly garments, presuming his cohorts will share with him; but they lock him inside with the corpse. But who is the biggest thief? The Church, whose fabulous wealth comes at the expense of feeding the poor. Doesn’t the Church know the tomb will be robbed? This letting the poor think they’re getting away with something helps maintain Church authority. Similarly, by controlling the distribution of wealth, capitalism sets workers to low wages, the constant threat of unemployment, hence starvation, keeping them in tow. Again, redress waits upon some egalitarian afterlife.
     Pretending to be a deaf mute, a poor boy becomes the gardener at a convent, happily servicing the sisters’ long-suppressed sexual needs until his cock is worn to a frazzle. Masetto cuts off sex with Mother Superior and tries negotiating a more humane arrangement. Upon his hearing and speaking, Top Nun proclaims a miracle. “Independent” at the convent’s whim, Masetto is reduced to being Church property, as indeed workers in factories and businesses become owners’ property.
     When Elisabetta’s three brothers, wealthy merchants we never see do a stitch of work, discover that she and Lorenzo, a hardworking Sicilian laborer, are lovers, they murder Lorenzo. She severs his head and plants it in a pot of basil in her bed chamber.
     A master artist surveys the gorgeous work he and his crew have wrought in a cathedral. He muses: “Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?” To reach out; to share something of the dream with others. Pasolini’s delight at doing this counters the religious hypocrisy and capitalistic mean-spiritedness his Decameron condemns.

55. INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION. In Elio Petri’s Investigation, the killer is the chief police inspector, the young woman who is the victim, his mistress. It is a satirical black comedy with wild flashes of surrealism. Moreover, it is politically grounded; Petri’s chief inspector possesses enough remnants of Fascism for a whole garment. Indeed, promoted, the man is about to start a new job aimed at capturing “subversives.” He leaves clues to broadcast the fact that he is the killer because he is arrogantly out to prove he is “a citizen above suspicion.” I don’t think I am overreaching for a parallel by saying that the current U.S. president is this man’s psychological double. In the mix of motives for his criminal invasion of Iraq is George W. Bush’s desire to prove to himself he can get away with mass murder.
     Powerful men are perhaps driven to determine just how powerful they are. It is part of the pathology of power; one seeks its outermost limit. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the U.S. Supreme Court was a relatively sane and benign manifestation of this impulse. Bush’s stands in stark, frightening contrast.
     At Yale certainly, Bush proved himself a sadistic bully, like the “citizen” in Petri’s film. (One of Bush’s targets was a professor of literature.) Defensive in the extreme, both paranoid men become offensive; that is their coping mechanism. Petri’s police chief gets all jarred and jangled by the fact that his younger mistress taunts him sexually and beds with a young student. Bush’s own parents taunted him with the notion that younger brother Jeb would be better suited than he to be president—a humiliating reversal of the more traditional pecking order pursued by the Kennedys.
     Gian Maria Volontè is brilliant as Petri’s unnamed monster.
     Bush, perhaps?

1971
56. IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER. Surpassing Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques (1954) and Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . . (1968), the other titans of boys’ boarding school films, Nel nome del padre is also Marco Bellocchio’s most savage and caustic work, one eviscerating both the bourgeois institution of the Italian college and the Church that runs it. The film is an assault on patriarchy and paternalism, which proceed from the father’s being the family head, which proceeds from God the Father’s being the most authoritative member of the Holy Trinity. The film also assaults Fascism, the political translation of the nation’s paternalism.
     If the film is Buñuelian in content, it is also so in form: a black comedy in which human experience is heightened to the nearly surreal, and interwoven into whose fabric are flights of the fully surreal. The school morality play whose staging is usurped by the most rebellious among the students, who lend to it its bizarre tone, exemplifies fantasy’s invasion of reality. Variously fantastic images of the Madonna also contribute to Bellocchio’s form and style while at the same time suggesting the distorted images of women with which a patriarchic society is likely to become obsessed. Fascism, with its military trappings, exemplifies political fantasy’s invasion of reality. For all the wildness of its presentation, Bellocchio has wrought an intellectually coherent work.
     The Jesuit-run school at its center is no place any boy would want to be—a point hilariously underscored by the film’s opening, in which a father and son assault each other as the former drags the latter to the school to enroll him. The pupils, then, have already chafed at authority. But the film’s anarchic spirit contests such an outcome as beating them back into line.

57. THE WORKING CLASS GOES TO HEAVEN. A man has a right to know what he is doing, what use he is.
     “Use” and “use”: the contribution one makes to society through work, or the use to which one is made through institutional exploitation—in other words, how one is used.
     Ludovico Massa, nicknamed Lulù the Tool, operates a lathe in a factory. He is a thorn in the side of co-workers because he is so damned efficient. He sets the inhuman standard by which others are fined for failing to keep pace. He is most at home in the grinding monotony of his work. He has become a machine.
     Recalling Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a shot of workers factory-bound suggests the perspective that Lulù, captivated by his labor, lacks. The appeals by Communists for workplace justice fall, in his case, on deaf ears. Then one day a workplace accident costs him an index finger, and the loss of this displaced cock, in which his sense of manhood is bound up, sets the stage for an even more unmanning blow: Lulù is laid off. The one-time tool of capitalists becomes the tool of Communists.
     Writer-director Elio Petri (Ugo Pirro co-authored the script), himself a Marxist, shares in the critique of industrial capitalism; but the point of his satirical comedy lies elsewhere. Petri is targeting institutions—as he did in We Still Kill the Old Way (Mafia, the Church; 1967) and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (the police; see 1970). Lulù’s absurd switch of allegiance underscores his continuing status of being owned—by this group or that, one ideology or another. Lulù remains locked up, albeit in a different institution—like his friend, Militina, whose experience in the military, another gripping institution, has resulted in his confinement in a mental institution.

58. THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS. “I am happy I made [this film] because it brought me back to my old noble intentions. . . . All my good films . . . made nothing. Only my bad films made money. Money has been my ruin.”
     Vittorio De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis is based on Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 autobiographical novel. Bassani escaped Italy in time to avoid the fate of other Italian Jews who were rounded up by Germans in 1943.
     In 1938, Italy’s “race laws” barred Jews from public schools and libraries. Jewish life and death no longer existed in the eyes of the law; Jewish obituaries were prohibited. In Ferrara, Giorgio was a bourgeois boy in love with Michol, a member of a wealthy, aristocratic family that lived behind a great wall, which couldn’t finally protect it from the tumultuous history unfolding outside. Too attached to a family mystique, Michol doesn’t reciprocate Giorgio’s love. For Giorgio, love between them was always doomed because Michol and six million other Jews were doomed. There is no recollective narration; rather, the whole film is saturated with a sense of Giorgio’s memory, and this memory has made Michol prescient of what was to happen to so many.
     The two Jewish families live in different worlds; Giorgio’s father even questions the Jewishness of the Finzi-Continis. Others make no such distinction, consigning members of both families to the same assemblage, the same fate of deportation. The film ends with an overwhelming sense of a single Jewry.
     The soft, airy, gorgeous images of this eternally sad film dissolve into a haze of sunlight—conjured memories of the nation’s past too shameful, too tragic, to bring into sharper focus lest they prove unbearable. They achieve an elegiac tone, the visual equivalent of a distant tolling bell.

1972
59. THE MATTEI AFFAIR. Again Francesco Rosi applies documentary and fictional elements to an actual set of circumstances: the life and death of oil industrialist Enrico Mattei (Rosi’s indispensable Gian Maria Volontè, superb), whom Time magazine called “the most powerful Italian since Cæsar Augustus.” The film takes the form of a journalistic investigation, especially into the matter of the ambiguity of Mattei’s death in a plane crash in 1962, for which it offers alternative explanations as though trying to get to the truth by finding the most suitable script. One way or another, whether by dint of mechanical failure or of a conspiratorial something-else, Mattei was taken down. This becomes the take-off for a consideration of everything surrounding Mattei and what he represents: Italy’s past hopefulness and national spirit (during the war Mattei had fought in the Resistance), a growth of experience in capital investment in public companies, and the corruption into which Italy’s postwar economic recovery summarily fell, and the exploitation of Third World oil resources that the new global fascism required. Rosi and his writers, including Tonino Guerra, take their largest aim at capitalism and the means by which it prevails. What, if anything, lay behind Mattei’s death? None of the film is idle speculation, because the analysis it ultimately provides illuminates Mattei’s life, not death, and his corporate empire-building (in what the state intended to be its own operation).
     This piecing together of a man’s life owes a debt, of course, to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as well as Rosi’s own past work, all the while aiming at a nation-as-pilgrim’s progress. Rosi’s communist heart weighs the price to Italy’s soul of postwar upturn. Il caso Mattei is the ultimate Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The patient has recovered; but is the patient at all the same person?

1973
60. THE AGE OF COSIMO DE MEDICI. 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #81.

61. THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. Victor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena reflects on fascist Spain. Two sisters, Ana and Isabel, eight and ten, live with their parents in a rural Castile community in 1940, shortly after the defeat of decency in the Spanish Civil War. Their parents are each in their own lives: their father intently experimenting with bees, having transferred a colony to an artificial structure that unconsciously projects the political environment; their mother, consumed by solitude. (In a warm, fleeting scene, however, the mother combs Ana’s hair.) The girls are largely on their own; at night, they whisper back and forth between beds. Ana and Isabel are also cocooned, not as a matter of withdrawal from fascist reality, but in childhood’s innocence and ignorance. But a stray wounded Republican soldier, whom Ana finds in an abandoned barn (she gives him her father’s coat for warmth), is about to be murdered. At night, in long-shot, it’s a massacre; so many bullets for one debilitated man. Ana’s world will be disturbed even worse than by her sister’s “dead” act on a floor of their home.
     An itinerant projectionist has brought a movie to town: James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). Ana, who cannot understand why the townsfolk kill the creature, relates the soldier to it before his disappearance. There is little speech in this mesmerizing film, and only silence—sweet solidarity—between Ana and her secret friend.
     The stone well, the barn, the schoolhouse, wild mushrooms, the father’s musical pocket watch: in long-shot or closeup, things are simultaneously mundane and mysterious. A passing train, in long-shot, is immense compared with the sisters.
     Brown, beige, gray, white, black, occasional reddish brown, dark green, pale amber: Erice orchestrates colors of repression, with glimmers of life: the spirit of the beehive.

1974
62. CONVERSATION PIECE. 100 Greatest English-Language Films, elsewhere on this site, entry #73.

1975
63. THE PASSENGER. 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #82.

64. CRÍA CUERVOS. Raise ravens, and they will pluck your eyes out. — Spanish proverb
     Carlos Saura’s Raise Ravens—nonsensically in the U.S., Cria!—is, like his Garden of Delights (1970), a political allegory about Spain under Franco, who died either before or after production began. It is also a sensitive evocation of a nine-year-old’s childhood, but this childhood, described by the adult Ana as “sad” and “indeterminate,” itself suggests the imprint of fascist Spain.
     The film opens with black-and-white photographs of Ana and family. Color photos follow—also snapshots of the past, but, in juxtaposition with those preceding it, also suggesting the present. Finally, the appearance of both color and black-and-white photos within the same shot, intermingling time frames, suggests memory. Ana’s mother, Maria, is dead; Ana’s father, in bed with his mistress as Ana listens outside his door, is about to be, from a heart attack.
     Ana’s father was a military officer—one of Franco’s soldiers. The night of his death the camera moves through the darkness of his house; emblematic of Francoism, he is the darkness in the house. Maria might have been a concert pianist, but her husband’s rigid authority denied her this. He had translated the home into Francoism.
     Geraldine Chaplin plays (beautifully) two roles: Maria, as the adult Ana recalls or reimagines her; the adult Ana. The film is surrealistic, so there is really no way to determine whether or when Ana the child is imagining herself as a grown-up or remembering her mother, or whether or when the adult is Maria or Ana, or a conflation of both. In the same frames, both child and adult appear; but who is comforting whom? Daughter bereft of mother reflects mother bereft of daughter, and fascism has tightened the tangle of experiences and memories entrapping both Anas.

1976
65. ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES. The same year that the U.S. produced its middling, indifferently acted All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), another film exemplified the conspiratorial political thriller at full-throttle. While police inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura, in his finest performance) investigates a high court murder, other judges, prosecutors and magistrates continue to be killed. Dark, convoluted, blurring the line between paranoiac perception and a reality suited to paranoia, Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri eccelenti makes its way through a sludge of suspects, beginning with the Mafia, before lighting on right-wing assassination squads—the sort (though not in Italy) that the U.S. government is routinely fond of supporting.
     Rosi once described the film as “a journey through the monsters and monstrosities of power,” and along the way both Left and Right are in for close examination. But the particularity of such actual case studies as Rosi’s The Mattei Affair (1972) yields here to a more unbounded, featureless province, that of the waking nightmare. Illustrious Corpses, based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, is Kafkaesque.
     This kind of film hews to a line of unearthing the truth. Fittingly, this one begins in catacombs, amidst mummified corpses, suggesting the shadow of mortality dogging us and pressing our activities, including insane political acts, and introducing a permeative claustrophobic sense. We feel “buried alive”; Rogas becomes buried in the case.
     As assassinations mount, Rosi investigates their cost to society. Indeed, the horror of the unfolding event threatens to sweep away society’s institutions. Like a cancer, the conspiracy has a life of its own—a power to effect social consequences beyond the grasp of all its members.
     Rosi risks Kramertosis by casting Charles Vanel, Max von Sydow and Alain Cuny as legal V.I.P.s, but his taut control, not to mention gifted actors, keeps this a burrowing, enveloping film.

1977
66. PADRE PADRONE. In Father and Master, based on Gavino Ledda’s memoir, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani portray Ledda’s coming out of the shadow of his father, a Sardinian shepherd whose severity is dictated by overwhelming poverty, harsh terrain, hard work, and Italian patriarchy. Until he is 18, Gavino works (as his mother puts it) “alone alone” in his father’s pasture, guarding sheep and tending to crops.
     The film opens with the actual Ledda, age 35, now a linguist despite having been illiterate for the first half of his life, stripping a tree branch and handing the result to the actor playing his father, saying, “My father always carried a stick.” The actor graciously thanks Ledda, but this graciousness instantly evaporates as the actor slips into his role and into the schoolroom from which he will remove little Gavino. This concise opening ironically reflects on the extent to which environment contributes to human behavior; but for their different circumstance, the father might have been like the person who is playing him. In mimicking his father by fashioning the stick, moreover, Ledda makes the kind of implement with which his father punished (and, once, nearly killed) him. Because Ledda betrays no emotion, we fill in by imagining how Ledda must feel amongst his private memories. The Taviani brothers have drawn us into their film.
     There is the slow, trotting journey to the distant, isolated pasture where Gavino must stay, and the father’s moving attempt to educate his son as to the sounds of the pasture. Conjoined with images of Nature, the father’s voice becomes disembodied, creating a haunting echo of the past.
     The first part of the film is brilliant; the second part, charting Gavino’s victory over his past through education, should have been condensed into a page or two of script.

67. ELISA, MY LIFE. Geraldine Chaplin, Carlos Saura’s companion and Charlie’s daughter, haunts in Cría cuervos (see 1975), but she gives her finest performance in what has remained Saura’s most brilliant nonmusical: Elisa, vida mía. Again Chaplin plays two parts: Elisa, and Elisa’s mother. One must also note that Fernando Rey, tremendous here as Elisa’s father, also delivers his greatest performance.
     With its analytical flow of time, memory, reality, illusion, Elisa mesmerizes and succeeds in making surrealism as much the content as the method of the film—though what we can glean of the psychological narrative also is extraordinary: an elderly writer, ill, secretly writes a book about his grown daughter, Elisa, but from her viewpoint—autobiography by imaginative proxy—in order to secure their bond. Once this daughter reads the manuscript, also secretly, however, his sometimes inaccurate view of her view of reality creeps into and begins replacing her own. Thus an ironical Saura posits patriarchal authority and imposition in an elusive, circuitous way fully capable of suggesting their social and cultural pervasiveness; and sharpening the point is the unresolved ambiguity that the father may have left the manuscript in sight in order to entice his daughter to read it. Saura worries here, as in Cría cuervos, that fascism in Spain is not finished as a result of Franco’s death, that the social and cultural features that helped install Franco may survive his political rule.
     Saura’s method also enables him to explore the impingement of one psyche on another—one of the great modern themes—without reviving nineteenth-century overtones of vampirism that somewhat cloud, for instance, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966).

1978
68. THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS. I must have a cruel streak, for once upon a time I dismissed this film with this witticism: “De Sica, and ye shall find.” Over the years Ermanno Olmi’s peasant epic Tree of Wooden Clogs has grown on me, although I still question its reputation as a masterpiece.
     The theme is ownership: property rights versus natural rights. Near the turn of the century, families struggle to survive in a Lombardy farm district whose landowner takes three-fourths of the fruits of their harsh labor, paying them a measily amount based on their comparative productivity. One daring, devout family decides their son will go to school, for which he must walk many miles going and returning. When his shoes give out, the boy’s father fells a poplar tree to make him a pair of new shoes. This is deemed stealing, sealing the family’s fate.
     The richest part of this long film, which Olmi wrote, directed, (gorgeously mutedly) cinematographed, and edited, is the rhythm of life it conveys, at work and socially, portraying its events, including detailed studies of people hard at daily work, measured against a breathtaking sense of eternity. Shortly after Roberto Rossellini’s death, the spirit of his humanistic Francesco, giullare di Dio is evoked (see 1950), here given the political context of tumultuous Italian history that, unbeknownst to these farmers, will help determine the course of their families’ future.
     Beautifully acted by nonprofessionals, the film mixes documentary realism, authenticated by the recollections of his own family’s elders upon which Olmi drew, and selfconscious, hifalutin art, such as the explosions of Bach on the soundtrack. De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti!
     If some of us once dismissed this film in reaction to the fulsome praise it received, it may be time to give it a second chance.

1979
69. CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI. 100 Greatest Films List, elsewhere on this site, entry #85.

1980
70. THREE BROTHERS. The three Giuranna sons have gathered for their mother’s funeral in a Puglia village, in Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers. Nicola, the youngest, works in a factory in Turin and is an activist for workers’ rights. He and his wife are divorcing. Single, Rocco works at a boys’ reformatory in Naples. The eldest, Raffaele, happily married with a grown son, is a Roman judge, whose current case involves terrorists, making him a potential target for assassination. In the country, the father, Donato, interacts with his granddaughter and reminisces about himself and his wife when they were newlyweds.
     Rosi’s film opens on the exterior wall of the institution where Rocco works: concrete and orderly windows. In terrifying closeup, rats lurk on the grounds outside; the cut to Rocco waking up suggests this is a dream. Donato’s lush rural surroundings contrast with Rocco’s milieu. What different times and lives—a point ironically underscored by the fact that Vittorio Mezzogiorno plays both Rocco and Rocco’s father as a young man. Charles Vanel is excellent as Donato.
     But father and sons are each now a stranger to the three others. Nicola remarks, “My hometown is no longer a part of me, nor I of it.” In a wonderful shot, Rocco is upstairs, in the foreground, back towards us, looking out the window, and in the courtyard below his siblings are both walking very far apart. Rocco begins to cry. During the funeral, a flock of birds flutter; we see their shadows on an outside wall. Each of the sons is at loose ends in his life, although Raffaele (Philippe Noiret, in one of his greatest roles) is best at concealing this.
     About the delinquents, from poor families, whom Rocco helps, Raffaele tells him, “It would have been better had they not been born.”

1981
71. BLOOD WEDDING. Federico García Lorca’s 1932 play Bodas de sangre was based on an actual murder involving feuding families; for Alfredo Mañas’s 1974 musical adaptation Antonio Gades devised choreography suited to Emilio de Diego’s music. Flamenco ballet is—yes, this is possible!—both flamboyant and austere, as is Carlos Saura’s film version, again choreographed by and starring Gades. It is the most exciting dance film I’ve seen.
     It reminds me of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), which begins with the backstage preparations for a performance of the play at the Globe Theater, and then gradually draws us into the play’s medieval action before returning us to the framing device representing Shakespeare’s day. Saura begins and ends his film with the same sepia photograph: at the outset, perhaps of Andalusian villagers; at the close, of the dancer-actors in costume posing as them—yet a photograph haunted by the reality the villagers represent. At the beginning, there are preparations for a performance, including the thoughts of dancers as they apply makeup. Elvira Andrés, artistic director of Ballet Nacional de España, who worked on the film: “Saura wanted to see what happened when the dancers arrived and their preparations for the day[,] and he made wonderful photography from it. The images are memorable because they are authentic.”
     This is followed by the performance—a rehearsal set against enormous windows in a bare-bones rehearsal space. The drama passionately unfolds: a bride takes off with her former lover, and a knife duel to the death ensues between the two men. By that time, we have been so fully drawn into the action that our hearts are poised to burst.
     In a way, then, the film is about us, the audience—about our willingness to suspend disbelief. We embrace the human reality a performance represents.

1982
72. CAMMINA, CAMMINA. Hauntingly beautiful, Ermanno Olmi’s masterpiece is cinema’s greatest foray into biblical territory—and its least dogmatic. A commemorative reenactment by peasants of the journey of the magi to witness the birth of Christ drifts into the actual event, triggering again for the first time King Herod’s rampage of slaughter in Bethlehem. A “road picture” by caravan and foot, Keep Walking questions the faith of the faithful, the distinctions to which they cling in order to certify their faithfulness, and the disparities they often ignore between their behavior and professed beliefs. It’s a restless film.
     One of the opening events is little Rupo’s denunciation of Mel[chior], one of the magis, for ritually sacrificing a lamb, the boy’s sweet, innocent companion and, symbolically, The Lamb—Jesus. By film’s end, the three “wise men” and their entourage will have furiously withdrawn under threat from Herod, leaving Mary and Joseph and the newborn infant in peril. A lamb will prove the sole survivor of Herod’s raging fear of prophecy that this baby, not he, will prove to be the King of Kings. Did the infant Jesus, then, perish? Did he survive, or did only the idea of him survive? Is the grown Christ’s summary crucifixion a projection of the earlier event? In her brilliant analysis, critic Susan Doll asks, “What are the implications of building a religion based on the savior’s death?” In the film, his translator warns Mel that he will end up celebrating not Christ’s coming but Christ’s death.
     The film also conflates Testaments, identifying disparate humanity in its overwhelming aspiration. Doll points out that Olmi’s version of the magis’ journey suggests the Israelites, “who escaped Egypt to wander across the desert in search of the Promised Land.” Wanderers all, we are searching for home.
     Olmi wrote, directed, cinematographed, edited.

73. IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN. Niccolo, a filmmaker, has difficulty focusing on the woman he is with. Mavi has detached herself from family; nevertheless, Niccolo obsesses on them. With Ida (Christine Boisson, superb), Niccolo obsesses on the past—on Mavi. Niccolo takes up his nephew’s innocent suggestion to make a dumb Star Wars-level piece of escapism, which finds him (on film) star-trekking toward (the newspaper says) a dangerously expanding sun, to jolt himself out of space and time and into the moment.
     Niccolo and Mavi take a motor trip into the country, where they get lost, and stuck, in an immense fog. By providing a kind of protective cover, this fog, a projection of their anxiety and ambivalence, releases the couple’s worst mutual behavior. When Ida accompanies Niccolo to Venice on holiday, the other great set-piece seems to evoke this alternative couple’s stability and shared contentment. But it turns. On the water, in a canoe, Ida and Niccolo find themselves in a vast floating fog, the measured sound of lapping water adding to the melancholy to which the lovers differently respond: she, with her whole spirit; he, analytically. Ida and Niccolo float apart, together. At their hotel, Ida learns by phone she is pregnant, and the relationship drowns. Is Niccolo able to live with someone else’s past—Ida’s, or the child’s father’s?
     What a joyous tonic Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification is for all the strident, empty stylizing, sociologizing, politicizing and manipulation that take up so many screens nowadays. Mysterious pressures invisibly weigh in on his characters, leaving us to wonder whether our own lives, too, are an elusive fine thread whose course is best picked up somewhere unexpected, uncharted, far, far beyond our familiar sensible or emotional galaxy, in the direction of the sun’s perfect (if dangerous) clarity—somewhere beyond the clouds.

74. DEMONS IN THE GARDEN. Not long after the Spanish Civil War, in a small village, a family’s conflicts mirror a divided nation. Gloria runs a black market food store with the help of her elder son, Oscar, while her favorite, Juán, is part of Franco’s entourage of guards. Oscar hates Juán, whose affair with Ana, Oscar’s wife, precipitated his flight to Madrid. Childless with Oscar, Ana is drawn to the care of Juán’s small son, “Juanito,” whose rheumatic fever enables him to manipulate her, his grandmother and Ángela, his mother, Gloria’s impoverished, orphaned niece, whose sympathies remain with the anti-fascist side loyal to the vanquished republic. When Juán returns home, violence explodes.
     Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón has co-written (with Luis Megino) and directed a narrative film that nonetheless moves from shot to shot, not scene to scene. Perhaps it is its thoroughly absorbed historical symbolism that spares this wonderful film the taint of “visual storytelling.” Dark, oppressively atmospheric and precisely lit, Demons in the Garden is one of those works—John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) is another—where it’s impossible to determine whether characters and objects are emerging from darkness or disappearing into it. Everything bears an awful sense of both ill-fated history and ill-fated prophecy.
     However, Juanito’s view of reality is definitely emerging from the dark of a child’s bewilderment and ignorance. Juanito sneaks about spying and eavesdrops—for instance, when he is pretending sleep or an imminent heart attack. His perception is volatile. His father sends him another tin soldier, “a guard from Franco’s personal escort,” which inspires the boy to make his elders arrange a trip to Madrid so he can see Juán at work. But he recoils from his father, seeing Juán as nothing more than a waiter serving a master.
     This breaks the boy’s heart.

1983
75. AND THE SHIP SAILS ON. Bettered only in the Federico Fellini canon by Fellini Satyricon (1969), E la nave va is a meditation on the persistence of war and its ravages on humanity set against time’s passage. It is among Fellini’s most moving works. Like his masterpiece, it comments on human folly.
     A celebrated opera singer’s ashes are onboard a luxury liner that sets sail days after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb. The ship is transporting her friends to an island where her funeral service is to be held. Among the other people onboard are Orlando, a journalist and the humorous guide who speaks to us directly between attempts at interviewing guests, and Austria-Hungary’s Grand Duke.
     The film begins scratchily in sepia and silence; this bravura opening depicts the dockside activity, a good deal of it involving playful children, prior to the ship’s departure. The intricacy of this activity, especially since it’s captured primarily in long-shot, evokes allegorical paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. The artifice of the studio-bound details (cellophane ocean, solid, material smoke, etc.) likewise prepare us for an allegory, or at least a parable. The boiler room, with men working below as elaborately dressed guests espy them from on high, may even remind us of Dante’s Inferno—although guests sing for the workers, who applaud. (But do they really enjoy this zoo patron-like intrusion into their workplace?)
     Color is itself distancing: browns, white, black, and a touch of red.
     When Serbian refugees are brought onboard, spirited peasant dancing augments the plentiful operatic singing. (This film is full of wonderful music.) What is the captain to do when an Austro-Hungarian battleship demands that the refugees be turned over? The Grand Duke intervenes, but only so the funeral service can proceed.
     Heart-piercing finale.

76. NOSTALGHIA. Self-exiled from the Soviet Union, Andrei Tarkovsky went to Italy. In a highly symbolical, elliptical form, Nostalghia refers to this visit. Consider, for example, the glorious opening: a long-shot, in soft black and white, in which female figures, apparently peasants, rendered tiny by distance, their backs facing us, move farther away from the camera at a dreamily slow pace. This reflects the nostalgia of two Andreis for their Russian homeland, from which both are separated: the film’s protagonist, Russian poet Gorèakov, who is in Italy on a mission of academic research; Tarkovsky himself.
     Longing and guilt are conjoined in Nostalghia. Gorèakov’s translator, Eugenia, herself Italian, represents Italy, its seduction of the poet away from homeland and spouse. Gorèakov longingly dreams of his wife as Eugenia pursues him sexually. (“You’re a kind of saint,” Eugenia tells him disparagingly.) Meanwhile, Gorèakov is drawn to Domenico (Bergman’s Erland Josephson, superb), who has imprisoned his own family to protect them from evil. What kinship does Gorèakov feel for this madman? Perhaps he regrets having left his own loved ones alone, and for years, in the nation that the other Andrei, Tarkovsky, associates with evil. Watching the film, we sense that one Andrei flows in and out of the other.
     Incessant wetness (rain; dripping water), patient, subtle camera movements, mirrors and human reflections, church bells, bursts of Beethoven on the soundtrack: here is another of Tarkovsky’s poetic achievements that draws us into a highly subjective experience, as though it were very gradually submerging us in a dreamscape. Candles symbolize spiritual illumination (Tarkovsky is Orthodox Christian and devout), and a stunning scene of public immolation—it is Domenico who goes up in flames—symbolizes Gorèakov’s fierce desire to purge himself of guilt. Tarkovsky is mining his own soul.
     Giuseppe Lanci lends magnificent, barely color cinematography.

1984
77. THE HOLY INNOCENTS. From Miguel Delibes, Mario Camus’s Los santos inocentes is an incisive, haunting portrait of the political connection between Franco’s fascism, the Church, and the feudalism of land barons in Spain’s countryside in the 1960s. Impoverished peasants Paco and Régula work for Pedro, who manages a vast rural estate. Their problems are real, unlike those in the mansion that can be credited to high-born vanity and indolence.
     Paco and Régula h