Italian Cinema Today

“Vera & Giuliano” “I knew Fellini , Antonioni , Pontecorvo. It was a period of good people, good writers and very good directors.” A pioneering director himself, Giuliano Montaldo is one of the last living greats from Italy’s cinematic Golden Age. At 92, he’s as active as ever, and the pandemic hasn’t slowed him down. Donning his mask, he was one of the first in line when Italy reopened its movie theaters. Born in Genoa in 1930, Montaldo moved to Rome as a teenager to follow his dream of working in cinema. While attending film school, he was discovered by director Carlo Lizzani. Taking Montaldo under his wing, Lizzani cast him alongside Gina Lollobrigida in his 1951 war drama “Achtung! Banditi!” and then nurtured him as an assistant. Montaldo worked on a string of films with Lizzani, including his acclaimed 1952 murder mystery “Ai margini della metropoli” (At the Edge of the City) , starring Giulietta Masina . Montaldo then assisted director Gillo Pontecorvo while continuing to ta...

Giulietta Masina  gives a forceful performance in Carlo Lizzani and Massimo Mida’s 1952   suspenseful murder mystery, “Ai margini della metropoli” (At the Edge of the City).  Masina plays Gina, the devoted wife of Mario (Michel Jourdin), an unemployed peasant accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Marcella. The layered story and brilliantly written screenplay show a side of 1950s Rome that we rarely see in Post-WWII films but existed for the vast poverty-stricken population. The subject deals with the unspoken discrimination against those living in camps and land-shares who did not benefit from the post-war economic boom. A young, vibrant Massimo Girotti portrays a torn defense attorney who gets emotionally invested in the case, having a gut feeling that his client is innocent while the evidence continues to pile up against him. Gina goes to great lengths to track down the alleged witnesses and call them out on their false testimony. The entire film comes together in...

Antonio Cifariello in a scene from Fellini's "Agenzia Matrimoniale" “This reaction — this viewing of the film as monstrous — underlines the fear we feel when called to look at the truth.” Screenwriter and director Cesare Zavattini was truly ahead of his time. I am so fascinated with this 1953 film compilation put together by Zavattini. “L’amore in città” (Love in the City) is a collection of six short film essays directed by Zavattini, Dino Risi, Michelangelo Antonioni , Carlo Lizzani, Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada. The New York Times did a beautiful article on the collection in 2014 referring to Zavattini as “a pioneer of documentary fiction (sometimes called “hybrid cinema”), in which nonactors essentially play themselves, dramatizing their particular situations.” With the exception of Fellini’s short, in which he narrates something that happened to him but uses actors to demonstrate it, this collection is exactly this type of “hybrid cinema”… the situat...

Cesare Zavattini on the set of Vittorio De Sica's "L'oro di Napoli" The Audiovisual Archive Foundation of the Workers' and Democratic Movement (AAMOD) was established in the late 1970s. Filmmaker Cesare Zavattini oversaw operations during its first 20 years with the main goal of researching, collecting and storing historical audiovisual documents such as cinema, newsreels and multimedia. Much of the content includes documentaries and video essays covering numerous topics such as social movements, catastrophic events, post-war conditions and culture. In 1983, the archive was declared a place of “considerable historical interest” by the superintendent of the region of Lazio. Over the last decade, many clips have been uploaded to YouTube. Although most of the clips are in Italian without English subtitles, the site is worth looking through if only to see actual video of life in Italy over the last century captured by photojournalists documenting history. Go to...