Italian Cinema Today

Terrance Stamp in a scene from Fellini's "Toby Dammit" Long before he portrayed General Zod in the first two “Superman” movies, English actor Terence Stamp lived in Italy and collaborated with some of the country's most renowned filmmakers, including Federico Fellini , Silvana Mangano , Monica Vitti and Pier Paolo Pasolini . The actor died in August at age 87, so to pay homage to his  extraordinary six-decade-long career, we are spotlighting his collaboration with Fellini on a short film that served as the final segment in a three-part film inspired by Edgar Allen Poe tales. Loosely adapted from Poe’s story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 “Spirits of the Dead” is notable for being as close to a horror film as Fellini ever created. A 40-minute frenzy of celebrity, decadence and damnation, his “Toby Dammit” appears along with contributions by Louis Malle and Roger Vadim, and stands out as the film’s most imaginative, unsettling and i...

Anna Magnani in a scene from "Mamma Roma" Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 “Mamma Roma” starring Anna Magnani , follows the title character, a Roman prostitute determined to change her life and give her son the opportunities she never had. She seizes the opportunity to leave her life on the streets behind when her pimp (Franco Citti) gets married and frees her from his possession. Mamma then goes to the small provincial town of Guidonia to fetch her son, Ettore (Ettore Garofolo), and bring him to Rome to embark on their new life together. She buys a pushcart, finds an apartment in a nice neighborhood, and uses her connections to secure him a job in a restaurant. However, Ettore gets mixed up with boys who are petty thieves and is negatively influenced by them. At the same time, Mamma Roma’s pimp resurfaces and sends her back to the streets. When Ettore learns about his mother’s prostitution, he goes astray and wholeheartedly joins in on the petty crimes of the boys. One day, while...

A recently recovered film treasure will make its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival next week.  “Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967” is a short documentary shot with 16 mm color film by the French director Agnès Varda in New York City. The two were in town for the 4th edition of the New York Film Festival. The footage shows Pasolini walking around Times Square narrated by a Q&A voiceover between the two discussing filmmaking, Christianity and life.    The clarity is stunning for a film made more than 50 years ago. The footage was discovered in 2021, two years after Varda’s death, and restored by Cine-Tamaris, in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata.   The film will precede screenings of Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera” and other NYFF61 Main Slate selections, including Pictures of Ghosts, and Revivals selection Return to Reason: Short Films by Man Ray.   Click here for the complete lineup and schedule.

Lincoln Center described Pietro Marcello as “quietly redefining contemporary Italian cinema.” While the filmmaker says that the neorealist masterpieces of Vittorio De Sica have moved him to tears, he has charted a dramatically different course while drawing deeply from those cinematic roots. Born in 1976 in Caserta, Italy, Marcello attended Naples’ renowned Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied painting. Finding himself drawn to storytelling, he launched the radio program “Il tempo dei Magliari” and began experimenting with documentaries. “Carta” and “Scampia” were among his first short films.   In 2004, he completed the documentary “Il cantiere,” which was awarded the top prize at the 11th edition of the Libero Bizzarri Film Festival, a celebration of cinema named after the late journalist and screenwriter.     Marcello took it to the next level in 2007 when the Venice Film Festival premiered his documentary “Il Passaggio della Linea” (Crossing the Line). The poetic jo...

Italy’s first female documentary filmmaker, her films were gritty and unpolished, but they brought attention to the plights of marginalized people. Born in Mola di Bari on July 31, 1927, Cecilia Mangini relocated with her family to Florence  at the age of six, and then moved to Rome in 1952. There, she worked for a film club where she made personal and professional connections that would lay the foundation for the course of her life.    In the late 1950s, she partnered with Pier Paolo Pasolini for a trio of short documentaries that spoke of the poor living in desolation in the shadow of the industrial revolution.   The 1958 film, “Ignoti alla città” (Kids in the slums of Rome), documents the children of poor families living on the outskirts of Rome as they spend their days getting into mischief and searching for items of value in garbage dumps. An outspoken advocate for the poor, Pasolini wanted to show the other side of Italy's stereotypical image of its 1960s post-...

Carlo Levi and Anna Magnani  Fondazione Carlo Levi, Rome In my ongoing quest to learn more about 20th century artist and writer, Carlo Levi , I recently discovered one of his most celebrated masterpieces,  Ritratto di Anna Magnani  (Portrait of Anna Magnani), an  oil on canvas,  which was created in 1954.  His close friendship with Anna Magnani was news to me but what I found most fascinating about this portrait is the presence of Levi’s post-1935 style, his new pictorial approach referred to by art critics as the "wavy" brushstroke. He developed this style during his political exile in Basilicata in 1935 when he spent much of his time there creating stunning portraits of the contadini (peasants) he befriended, who served as the inspiration behind his infamous novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli , which was later made into a movie by Francesco Rosi . It fascinates me because it's further proof how much of an impact that one year of exile in Basilicata had on hi...

Alida Valli was born Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg in Pola, Istria, on April 29, 1921. Christened a baroness, she became a movie star at 15. Valli made her screen debut as a lead in Mario Bonnard’s 1937 comedy “Il feroce Saladino.”  In an interview featured in Mimmo Verdesca's 2020 documentary, “Alida Valli: In Her Own Words,” she explained how her last name was changed to Valli. “The writer Amedeo Castellazzi and the director Mario Bonnard found it (Valli) in the phone book. Because Altenburger was a foreign name, it was a bit too long, and so Alida Altenburger didn’t sound right,” she explained. Valli entered the film industry during a period when Italy’s Fascist government was constructing Cinecittà while producing its own propaganda films. Known as Telefoni Bianchi (White Telephones), the films of this era imitated American comedies and featured upper-class families, opulent Art Deco sets, and the namesake telephones, which symbolized the well-to-do...

"Be like me. I don't love anybody anymore, and they call me Amore." An unforgettable line in  Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1961 "Accattone" came from a spirited, light-hearted prostitute portrayed by Adriana Asti.  Born in Milan in 1931, Asti began her acting career in theater before going on to work with many of the great maestros of Italian cinema, including Luchino Visconti, Bernardo Bertolucci and Federico Fellini , to name a few. She had small roles in huge, iconic films and made those characters memorable. In addition to her on-screen roles, she was also the voiceover of many of her contemporary counterparts like Claudia Cardinale , Lea Massari, and  Stefania Sandrelli . She is still very active in theater, television, and film. I am working on a feature article about Asti for the July issue of Fra Noi Magazine . As part of my research, I reached out to documentary filmmaker Rocco Talucci , who made a beautiful film about her life and career. "A.A. Prof...