Italian Cinema Today

He’s been called the “mustachioed matinee idol,” but a newfound interest in 1950s melodramas has made him an international arthouse legend. Amedeo Nazzari was born Salvatore Amedeo Buffa on Dec. 10, 1907, in Sardinia. Assuming his maternal grandfather’s last name and moving to Rome during the 1930s to pursue a career in acting, he found an immediate place in theater but struggled to break into film because of his towering height and slim build. Nazzari landed small film parts during the mid-’30s before scoring the title role in Goffredo Alessandrini’s 1938 “Luciano Serra, pilota” (Luciano Serra, Pilot), about an American pilot attacked by Ethiopian soldiers. The film won the Mussolini Cup for Best Italian Film at the 6th Venice International Film Festival and launched Nazzari’s silver-screen career. Although he rose to fame during tumultuous times and was personally invited by Mussolini to join the Fascist Party, Nazzari remained politically neutral and worked prolifically in postwar I...

Fellini and Masina on the set of "La Strada" As open-hearted and sunny as Federico Fellini was dark and complex, they were perfect counterpoints during a half-century of marriage and professional collaboration.  Nicknamed a  “female Chaplin” and described by Chaplin himself as  the actress who moved him most,  Giulietta Masina confronted the tragedy of her characters with an eternal innocence and enthusiasm that gave Italians hope in the most challenging of times.  Born in 1921 in San Giorgio di Piano, a commune north of Bologna, Masina was the oldest of four children born to a father who was a music professor and violinist and a mother who was a grade-school teacher. Her parents sent her as a child to live in Rome with her widowed aunt while she attended school there. As Masina took an early interest in gymnastics, her aunt saw in her a passion for performing and encouraged her to pursue acting. So after high school, Masina attended Rome’s La...

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...