'Love in the City' - A Rediscovered Treasure

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 situations actually happened to the people portraying themselves in the essays. The occasional narration that accompanies them is a nice touch because it gives sort of a lesson to these sometimes tragic events.

For example, Fellini’s piece about an agency in Rome that arranges marriages ended with this commentary: “We drove back to the city in silence. I wanted to say something to her not to justify myself but to help her. I wanted to tell her to be more confident, to open her eyes to the many encounters life presents daily. But I didn’t want to be rhetorical and I knew it’d be of no use. Her problems, her daily hardships would still be all that mattered to her. I didn’t say anything. When we said goodbye, I sincerely wished her good luck.”

The compilation was released on Blue Ray in 2014 and is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. It’s free if you have a Prime account or otherwise it’s just $1.99 to rent. Minerva Pictures also has a version on YouTube with English subtitles. I highly recommend this. It also provides a beautiful portrait of contemporary Rome in the 1950s.

Click below to stream it on Amazon..

Or watch here on YouTube...

Click here to read the New York Times article..

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