Italy

Given Italy's unparalleled contributions to the visual arts from the twelfth century to the present, it would have been unusual, indeed, if its culture had not made fundamental contributions to the development of film art from the silent era to the present. After being identified with the historical epic in the silent cinema, Italy's film culture was virtually ignored during the fascist period, but the advent of postwar Italian neorealism after 1945 threw Italy into the forefront of modern European filmmaking. Subsequently, a number of the individuals associated with neorealism developed into auteurs, and Italy produced several generations of Europe's best art film directors. Italy also contributed a great deal to commercial film genres, such as the spaghetti western, the sword and sandal epic, the giallo (horror-mystery), and even the cannibal and zombie cult movies of the late twentieth century.

BEGINNINGS: THE SILENT PERIOD

On 11 November 1895, Filoteo Alberini (1865–1937) applied for a patent on an early device, the Alberini Kinetograph, and between 1909 and 1916, the Italian silent cinema represented a major force in world cinema before the hegemony of Hollywood was firmly established, with major production centers in Turin, Rome, Naples, and Milan. Alberini produced the first feature film with a complex plot—La Presa di Roma (The Taking of Rome, 1905)—which was based on a patriotic theme, the annexation of the Eternal City in 1870 to the new Italian republic. The next year, CINES, a major production company, was founded, and it rapidly allowed Italian silent films to capture an enormous international market share for a brief period. While Italian silent films reflected a variety of genres, including Roman costume dramas, adventure films, comedies, filmed drama, even experimental or avant-garde works by the Futurists, there is little question that the success of the costumed film set in classical antiquity was responsible for much of the industry's early success. Italy's Roman past, the wealth of classic ruins and grandiose monuments all over Italy, the favorable climate and natural light of the peninsula, plus the relatively low labor costs for huge crowd scenes, all encouraged on-location shooting of costume dramas and interior scenes with lavish neoclassical decors. Important works in this epic vein include Gli Ultimi giorni di Pompeii (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1908) by Luigi Maggi, Quo Vadis? (1913) by Enrico Guazzoni, and the silent cinema's most famous epic by Giovanni Pastrone (1883–1959), Cabiria (1914), whose majestic treatment of the Second Punic War introduced the use of the dolly into cinematic practice, influenced D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and subsequently inspired many neomythological or peplum films, a staple export item of the Italian industry in the 1950s and 1960s.

In addition to historical epics and filmed versions of themes taken from drama, opera, and history, the Italian cinema quickly developed the star system (the diva), a development that naturally led to an increased use of close-ups to convey passionate emotions. Italian femme fatales such as Lyda Borelli in Ma l'amor mio non muore (But My Love Won't Die!, 1913) by Mario Caserini, Maria Carmi in Sperduti nel buio (Lost in the Dark, 1914) by Nino Martoglio, and Francesca Bertini in Assunta Spina (1915) by Gustavo Serena, set an international standard for melodramatic passion. The most memorable male lead was the muscular former dockworker and taciturn protagonist of Cabiria, Bartolomeo Pagano (1878–1947), whose character in that film, Maciste, spawned numerous subsequent imitations that often changed Cabiria's classical setting. For example, Maciste became an Italian soldier during World War I in Maciste alpino (Maciste the Alpine Soldier, 1916), a modern tourist in Maciste in vacanza (Maciste on Vacation, 1920), a detective in Maciste policioho (Maciste the Detective, 1917), and even a visitor to Dante's Inferno in Maciste all'inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1926) by Guido Brignone, which included memorable special effects and tinted colors to represent the punishments of Hell.

During the silent period, the cinema also attracted the critical attention of key Italian intellectuals. The avant-garde Futurist movement devoted a Futurist manifesto to cinema in 1916, calling for this new art form to avoid the slavish imitation of other art forms and to concentrate on its novel and innovative visual effects (exactly the opposite of what the industry actually did, since it privileged literary adaptations). Some Futurist short films were produced. Other popular writers, such as Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938), who provided the intertitles for Cabiria, or Nobel Laureate and playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), who wrote a famous novel about a movie camera operator and worked to film a number of his successful plays, helped to bring respectability to this upstart art form that had only recently emerged from the atmosphere of the circus and vaudeville show. After World War I, American and European competition almost destroyed the Italian industry completely, forcing production to drop from 220 films in 1920 to less than a dozen works in 1927, just before the introduction of the talkies.

CINEMA UNDER FASCISM: THE ADVENT
OF SOUND AND THE INCREASE OF NATIONAL PRODUCTION

From 1922 to 1943, over 700 films were produced, most not really "fascist" films at all but primarily entertainment. Indeed, the fascist regime admired the Hollywood model, not the totalitarian cinemas controlled by dictators in Germany and Russia. When it desired pro-regime propaganda, Mussolini's government relied on radio and short filmed documentaries prepared by LUCE (the Union of Cinematographic Education) and screened with the feature films designed for entertainment. Even in wartime, Italy averaged some 72 films annually between 1939 and 1944, a figure that gives some idea of the large local market for film and its role as popular entertainment. When the Italian industry nearly collapsed after World War I, Italian movie theaters (numbering at one point some 3,000 theaters) were forced to show only foreign films, a situation that was intolerable for the Fascist regime, whose official economic policy was self-sufficiency—that is, autarchy—in all matters economic and cultural. When the Italian government moved to block Hollywood's near monopoly of film distribution within the Italian market, the Hollywood "Big Four" (20th Century Fox, Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros.) withdrew from the Italian market in protest. No longer forced to face overwhelming American economic pressure, the Italian film industry eventually rebounded, filling the void of Hollywood products with nationally produced films.

Outside of Italy, little was known of Italian cinema during the fascist period, and this ignorance encouraged the erroneous idea abroad that the post–World War II Italian cinema had arisen miraculously from the ashes of the war. In retrospect, many important achievements of this era are more clear. Mussolini himself was fond of saying that the cinema was the most powerful art form developed in the modern era. Mussolini's son Vittorio played a major role as the editor of an influential film journal (Cinema) that involved such collaborators as the future postwar leftist directors, Luchino Visconti (1906–1976), Michelangelo Antonioni (b. 1912), and Giuseppe De Santis (1917–1997), and it was Vittorio Mussolini's friendship that enabled Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) to begin to work in the industry. The regime founded a major film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (1935); and it built one of the world's great film production complexes, Cinecittà, inaugurated by Mussolini in 1937. Both of these institutions are still in operation, and with their vast archives, they also serve as repositories of Italian cinematic history. Bianco e nero, the official organ of the Centro, and Cinema helped to spread information about foreign theories and techniques through translations and reviews. The regime also sponsored university film clubs (Cinegufs) that helped to create a generation of cinephiles. Most of the great directors, actors, technicians, and scriptwriters of the neorealist period received their training during the fascist period, and some postwar stars made their first films in the service of a regime whose policies they would later repudiate after the fall of Mussolini in 1943.

The first Italian sound film was Canzone dell'amore (The Song of Love, 1930) by Gennaro Righelli (1886–1949). With the advent of the talkies, Italian cinema was dominated by two important directors: Mario Camerini (1895–1981) and Alessandro Blasetti (1900–1987). Camerini's stylish comedies stressed role playing in society, enjoyed intelligent and lively scripts, and first brought together Vittorio De Sica (1902–1974), as an actor, and Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), as scriptwriter in a classic comedy, Darò un milione (I'd Give a Million, 1935). Long before De Sica became identified by his neorealist masterpieces scripted with Zavattini, he was the most popular actor in fascist Italy, playing roles similar to those performed in Hollywood by both Cary Grant and James Stewart. Camerini's most important comedy, Il Signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937), starring De Sica, established a level of craftsmanship and witty sophistication that rivals the best products of the Hollywood studios during the same period. Blasetti's career represents an entirely different approach to cinema. Frequently abandoning the sound studios at Cinecittà so crucial to Camerini's work, Blasetti created his masterpiece 1860 (Gesuzza the Garibaldian Wife, 1934), a patriotic film about Garibaldi. In its original uncut edition, he linked Garibaldi's Redshirts to Mussolini's Blackshirts, first made use of nonprofessional actors and on-location shooting, and pursued film realism—all supposedly original features of the immediate postwar period. Blasetti's Vecchia guardia (The Old Guard, 1935) employs a similar documentary style in portraying Mussolini's rise to power. Yet, Blasetti also made one of the most beautiful and imaginative of all films during this era, La Corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), in which ornately stylized studio sets testify to the technical prowess reached at Cinecittà. Its call for universal peace at a time when the entire world (including Italy) was at war demonstrates how fascist censorship was quite loosely applied to the commercial cinema. Moreover, Blasetti's Quattro passi fra le nuvole (A Stroll in the Clouds, 1942) prefigured the poetic style of De Sica's postwar neorealism in its simple plot and a Zavattini script.

Italian films made during the fascist period were usually not "fascist" in tone, although they were often nationalistic and patriotic, much like their Hollywood counterparts. The search for realism in the Italian cinema thus began not with the postwar period and the neorealists but, rather, with directors working in the 1930s and the 1940s before the end of World War II. In an important manifesto published in 1933 ("The Glass Eye"), pro-Mussolini journalist Leo Longanesi called for Italian directors to take their cameras into the streets and to produce a non-Hollywood version of Italian everyday life, a film realism that was authentically Italian in content. This interest in realism was specifically the goal of the left-wing Italian fascist intellectuals associated with Vittorio Mussolini's journal Cinema, and after the war and the fall of his father's regime, these same individuals continued their interest in film realism but pursued this goal with a Marxist, not a fascist, twist. Not only talented auteurs such as Blasetti, but other directors took up Longanesi's call, and the advent of the war added urgency to a realistic view of Italian life on celluloid. A marriage of fact and fiction, documentary and fantasy, soon became the formula for successful films about the war. Francesco De Robertis (1902–1959), his protégé Rossellini, and Augusto Genina (1892–1957), all contributed to this search for realism while making war films. Genina's Squadrone bianco (The White Squadron, 1936), a film about Italian colonialism in Libya, was shot on stupendous desert locations; his L'Assedio dell'Alcazar (The Siege of the Alcazar, 1940), a celebration of the Falangist defense of the Alcazar fortress by Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War, also employed real locations and documentary footage.

The realistic war films of Genina, De Robertis, and Rossellini adopted the formula of the documentario romanzato (fictional documentary), combining a fictional-emotional-romantic theme (usually the love affair between a soldier and his lady friend) with the documentary-historical-realistic theme (the war film genre, real locations, documentary photography, some nonprofessional actors). De Robertis's Men on the Bottom (1941), made for the Italian navy, employs an editing style indebted to Eisenstein's montage (the Russian's theories had been discussed and partially translated by the film journal Cinema) and used nonprofessional actors, the men on board an Italian submarine, to great effect. Rossellini actually produced a trilogy of pro-regime films that we label today his "fascist trilogy," which may be contrasted and compared to the more celebrated "war trilogy" he made in the immediate postwar neorealist period. The first of these three works, La Nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941), the dramatic tale of life on a hospital ship saving brave Italian soldiers, was shot in collaboration with De Robertis; Vittorio Mussolini collaborated on the script. It was followed in short order by two other films supporting the war effort (the soldiers, sailors, and airmen doing the fighting and the dying, not necessarily the fascist regime): Un Pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942) and L'Uomo dalla croce (The Man With a Cross, 1943). These three nationalistic films shot to support the troops represent important precursors of Italian neorealism, and another appeared in 1943, the year that witnessed the downfall of Mussolini's regime: Ossessione (Obsession) by Luchino Visconti (his first feature). Based on a pirated version of James Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Visconti created a truly unusual antiheroic protagonist who can easily be seen as a homosexual. This character was indebted to American hard-boiled novels and was diametrically opposed to the kind of "manly" protagonists fascist censors might have preferred. Visconti's long takes and languorous rhythms reappeared in his postwar work and represented a style that was set apart from the more rapid editing techniques in Rossellini's neorealist classics.

POSTWAR NEOREALISM: A BRIEF DECADE

With the fall of Mussolini and the end of the war, international audiences were suddenly introduced to Italian films through a few great works by Rossellini, De Sica, and Luchino Visconti that appeared in less than a decade after 1945, such as Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Paisa Sica's Sciuscià (Paisan, 1946); Dè (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948), and Umberto D. (1952); and Visconti's La Terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). Italian neorealist films stressed social themes (the war, the resistance, poverty, unemployment); they seemed to reject traditional Hollywood dramatic and cinematic conventions; they often privileged on-location shooting rather than studio work, as well as the documentary photographic style favored by many directors under the former regime; and they frequently (but not always) employed nonprofessional actors in original ways. Film historians have unfortunately tended to speak of neorealism as if it were an authentic movement with universally agreed-upon stylistic or thematic principles. While the controlling fiction of the best neorealist works was that they dealt with universal human problems, contemporary stories, and believable characters from everyday life, the best neorealist films never completely denied cinematic conventions, nor did they always totally reject Hollywood codes. The basis for the fundamental change in cinematic history marked by Italian neorealism was less an agreement on a single, unified cinematic style than a common aspiration to view Italy without preconceptions and to employ a more honest, ethical, but no less poetic, cinematic language in the process.

These masterpieces by Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti are indisputably major works of art that capture the spirit of postwar Italian culture and remain original contributions to film language. But with the exception of Rome, Open City, they were relatively unpopular within Italy and achieved success primarily among intellectuals and foreign critics. In particular, De Sica was criticized for "washing Italy's dirty laundry in public" by Giulio Andreotti, a Christian Democratic politician who was later to become one of Italy's most powerful prime ministers. One of the paradoxes of the neorealist era in Italian film history, an epoch that lasted no more than a decade, is that the ordinary people such films set out to portray were relatively uninterested in their self-image. In fact, of the approximately eight hundred films produced between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s in Italy, only a relatively small number (about 10 percent) could be classified as neorealist, and most of these few works were box-office failures. After years of fascist dictatorship and the deprivations of war, Italians were more interested in being entertained than in being reminded of their poverty.

A number of less important but very interesting neorealist films were able to achieve greater popular success by incorporating traditional Hollywood genres within their narratives, thereby expanding the boundaries of traditional film realism. This group of commercially successful works include Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1947) by Luigi Zampa (1905–1991), a comical view of Germans, Italians, and Allied soldiers at war that cannot help but bring to mind the World War II TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes; Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948) by Alberto Lattuada (1913–2005), a daring film noir about the black market, prostitution, and American racism in postwar Livorno; Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) by Giuseppe De Santis, a vaguely Marxist film about proletarian class solidarity that gave birth to the phenomenon in Italy of the "sweater girl" known as the maggiorata, making Silvana Mangano (1930–1989) an overnight sensation; and Il Cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950) by Pietro Germi (1914–1974), a film about poor Sicilian miners migrating to France in search of work. These four films reflect a shift from the war themes of Rossellini to the interest in postwar reconstruction typical of De Sica's best efforts, but they are even more important as an indication of how the Italian cinema moved gradually closer toward conventional American themes and film genres.

THE "CRISIS" OF NEOREALISM AND EXPLOSION OF STYLES AND GENRES

In spite of the fact that Italian intellectuals and social critics preferred the implicitly political and sometimes even revolutionary messages of the neorealist classics, the public preferred Hollywood works or Italian films made in the Hollywood spirit, and even the neorealist auteurs soon became uncomfortable with the restrictive boundaries imposed upon their subject matter or style by well-meaning leftist critics. In Italian cinema history this transitional phase of development is often called the "crisis" of neorealism. In retrospect, the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s can be described more accurately as a natural evolution of Italian film language toward a cinema characterized by many different styles and concerned with psychological problems as well as social ones. Crucial to this historic transition are a number of 1950s films by Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Federico Fellini (1920–1993). In Antonioni's first feature film, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950), he borrows a plot indebted to Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, American film noir, and Obsession, but his distinctive photographic signature is already evident: characteristically long shots, tracks and pans following the actors; modernist editing techniques that reflect the slow rhythms of daily life; and philosophical concerns with obvious links to European existentialism. Antonioni continued to develop this kind of narrative into the next decade, eventually emphasizing image over narrative storyline.

FEDERICO FELLINI
b. Rimini, Italy, 20 January 1920, d. 31 October 1993

Acclaimed film director, accomplished screenwriter, and cartoonist, Federico Fellini is one of Italy's most celebrated filmmakers. In 1943 he married actress Giulietta Masina, who starred in several of his films.

When World War II ended, Fellini wrote important neorealist screenplays, including Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (Open City, 1945)—work that earned him his first Academy Award^® nomination, Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and L'Amore (Ways of Love, 1948), which contains "Il miracolo" ("The Miracle"); Alberto Lattuada's Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948);and Pietro Germi'sIl Cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950). Subsequently, Fellini launched a series of major works dealing with Italian provincial life that won him international fame, including Lo Sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952), La Strada (The Road, 1954), and Le Notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957). The last two films won Oscars^® for Best Foreign Language Film. Shortly thereafter, Fellini completed one of the most successful of all postwar European films, La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life, 1959), his first collaboration with actor Marcello Mastroianni. The film's title became synonymous everywhere and in numerous languages with the society life depicted by Rome's gossip-column photographers or paparazzi, a word Fellini contributed to the English language. Fellini's often imitated but never equaled masterpiece 8½ (1963) cast Mastroianni as Fellini's alter ego and earned a third Oscar^® for Best Foreign Film.

Fellini's later films became more personal and thus are linked to the postwar European art film. They deal with such themes as the myth of Rome—Satyricon (Fellini's Satyricon, 1969) and Roma (Fellini's Roma, 1971); Italy under fascism—Amarcord (1973), a film that won Fellini his fourth Oscar^® for Best Foreign Film; and the very nature of art and creativity itself—E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983); Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986); and Intervista (Fellini's Interview, 1987). As Fellini's art developed beyond his neorealist origins, it began to explore dreams or surrealistic fantasies and to exploit the baroque imagery and sumptuous Cinecittà sets for which his cinema has become justly renowned.

During the last years of his life, Fellini made three television commercials for Barilla pasta, Campari Soda, and the Banco di Roma. They are extraordinary lessons in cinematography and reveal not only his genius, but also his grasp of popular culture. He also exhibited his sketches and cartoons, many of which were taken from private dream notebooks, thus uncovering the source of much of his artistic creativity—the unconscious. Fellini received numerous honors during his lifetime, including twenty-three nominations for Oscars^® in various categories (eight of which were successful and four of which were for Best Foreign Film); a special fifth Oscar^® for his career achievement (1993); the Golden Lion Career Award from the Venice Film Festival (1985); and dozens of prizes from the world's most important film festivals.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Lo Sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952), La Strada (The Road, 1954), La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life, 1959), 8½ (1963), Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Satyricon (Fellini's Satyricon, 1969), Amarcord (1973), Intervista (The Interview, 1987)

RECOMMENDED READING

Bondanella, Peter. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Chandler, Charlotte. I, Fellini. New York: Random House, 1995.

Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini. Translated by Isabel Quigley. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.

Kezich, Tullio. Federico Fellini: His Life and Work. New York: Faber, 2006.

Stubbs, John C. Federico Fellini as Auteur: Seven Aspects of His Films Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.

Peter Bondanella

Fellini's early works also continue an evolution beyond neorealist preoccupation with social problems. In I Vitelloni (The Vitelloni, 1953), a film to which Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) is deeply indebted as a model, Fellini provided a portrait of six provincial slackers, their miserable daydreams, and their humble existence. Instead of indicting his characters for their limited perspectives, Fellini, as in his later films, focused upon the clash of illusion and reality in the dreary lives of his comic figures. Soon afterward, two masterful films

established his international reputation as an auteur: La Strada (The Road, 1954) and Le Notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957). Both works won an Oscar^® for Best Foreign Film, and in them both, Fellini moved beyond mere portrayal of provincial life to reveal a new emotional dimension, one motivated by a personal poetic vision and a particular Fellinian mythology concerned with spiritual poverty and the necessity for grace or salvation—concepts that seem to be Catholic but that, in Fellini's works, take on a strictly secular and vaguely existentialist connotation. As Fellini once remarked, he believed the story of one's neighbor was just as important as a narrative about a stolen bicycle (an obvious allusion to De Sica's neorealist masterpiece), and Fellini became the standard-bearer for the transcendence of neorealism by Italian film.

Although he was the neorealist director most directly associated with contemporary events and the use of documentary techniques and nonprofessional actors, Rossellini also joined Antonioni and Fellini in moving Italian cinema toward what he called "a cinema of the Reconstruction," most particularly in a number of films he made with his wife Ingrid Bergman: Stromboli (1950), Europe '51 (The Greatest Love, 1952), and Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953). In each of these important but unpopular films, Rossellini employed one of the most glamorous and famous Hollywood stars in intimate roles that played completely against any traditional treatment of the female movie star in Hollywood, a technique lionized by Rossellini's New Wave fans but rejected by popular audiences as uninteresting.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE
INTERNATIONAL ART FILM

In the years between the mid-1950s (when the "crisis" of neorealism had clearly passed) and the mid-1970s (a time of violent social and political upheavals in Italy), the Italian cinema achieved a level of artistic quality, international popularity, and economic strength that it had never before achieved before and that it would never again reach. Film production continued at well above two hundred films for a number of years, while a prolonged crisis in the American industry reduced Hollywood competition within the domestic market and abroad. Italy could boast a number of distinguished auteurs (Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, De Sica, Rossellini) who were producing their greatest masterpieces. Their films not only fascinated critics and festival audiences but also were highly successful commercially. Such hits as Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1962), La Caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), and Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971); Fellini's La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life, 1959), 8½ (1963), Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1969), and Amarcord (1973); Antonioni's trilogy on modern love L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (The Night, 1961), and L'Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) in black and white and the important color films Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964) and Blow-Up (1966); and De Sica's La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960) and Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, 1970) all show highly complex stylistic shifts in films created by four auteurs whose origins evolved beyond the simpler neorealist approach of their early work.

De Sica's two films were awarded Oscars^® and are highly wrought commercial films, skillful adaptations of literary works that might well have been made in Hollywood. Two Women portrayed a woman's horrifying experiences during the war and provided a successful star vehicle for a performance by Sophia Loren (b. 1934) that earned her an Oscar^® for Best Actress. The Garden of the Finzi-Contini presented a moving portrait of the Holocaust in Ferrara. Both films were far removed from the spirit of the simple storylines about humble people that established De Sica as neorealism's most poetic director. Visconti's films portrayed broad historical themes with lush, opera-like mise-en-scène: The Leopard, for example, was a pessimistic interpretation of Italy's national unification, while The Damned and Death in Venice both examined different aspects of German national character from the standpoint of European decadence and modernism. Visconti's films often seem as if they could easily unfold on the operatic stage of La Scala. In Antonioni's films, both those in color and in traditional black and white, photography preempted the central function of traditional plot and character, as his characters came to grips with a sense of alienation and futility in the modern industrial world. Antonioni was particularly brilliant in relating characters to their environments, and he framed his shots as if he were a contemporary abstract painter, asking his audience to consider people and objects as equally important and meaningful.

Fellini's baroque style in La Dolce Vita, or his celebration of artistic creativity in 8½, present broad strokes of fantasy, informed by the analysis of the director's own dreams and his desire to recreate his own bizarre fantasy world. For Fellini, the imagination, rather than reality, had become the cinema's proper domain because only fantasy fell under the director's complete artistic control. Since cinema entailed expression, not the communication of information, its essence was imagery and light, not traditional storytelling. The film 8½ also made an important statement about the nature of film art itself. The harried protagonist of the film, the director Guido, possesses many of Fellini's own traits. The narrative employed by Fellini in this work moved rapidly and disconcertingly between Guido's "reality," his fantasies, and flashbacks to the past of dreams—a discontinuous story line with little logical or chronological unity. Considered by many directors to be the greatest and most original film ever made (Citizen Kane may be its only true rival), 8½ has been imitated by directors as different as François Truffaut, Spike Jonze, Joel Schumacher, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Bob Fosse, and Peter Greenaway, not to mention certain episodes of David Chase's TV series The Sopranos. Fellini Satyricon presented a psychedelic version of the classic novel by Petronius, while Amarcord offered a bittersweet portrait of Italian provincial life under fascism, the main characters of which may be considered the parents of the postwar slackers in The Vitelloni. Amarcord asserted Fellini's belief that Italian fascism displayed the nation's arrested development, its paralysis in adolescence, and the average Italian's wish for a delegation of moral responsibility to others, an unusually ideological position taken by a director who was often criticized for ignoring social problems by his leftist critics.

THE SECOND WAVE: A NEW POST-NEOREALIST GENERATION OF AUTEURS

If Visconti, De Sica, Antonioni, and Fellini dominated the cinema of the period, their international prestige coincided with the rise of an extremely talented group of younger men and women whose early works were indebted to neorealism but characterized by more ideological intentions. The best examples of such works are Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975); Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo (b. 1919); Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964) by Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940); La Cina è vicina (China Is Near, 1967) by Marco Bellocchio (b. 1939); Salvatore Giuliano (1962) by Francesco Rosi (b. 1922);Il Posto (The Sound of Trumpets, 1961) by Ermanno Olmi (b. 1931); Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1969) by Elio Petri (1929–1982); Padre Padrone (Father and Master, 1977) and La Notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982) by Paolo Taviani (b. 1931) and his brother Vittorio (b. 1929); Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974) by Liliana Cavani (b. 1933); and Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1976) by Lina Wertmüller (b. 1926).

SOPHIA LOREN
b. Sofia Scicolone, Pozzuoli, Italy, 20 September 1934

Sophia Loren transcended illegitimacy and poverty to become the most famous film star in Italy. After working for Italian pulp magazines, Loren debuted in the movies as an extra in Federico Fellini's Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950) and then as a slave girl in Mervyn LeRoy's Quo Vadis? (1951), shot by MGM in Rome. She first attracted serious attention in a filmed version of the Verdi opera Aïda (1953), in which she lip-synched Renata Tebaldi's singing. Loren's busty physique made her one of Italy's most famous maggiorate (sweater-girls), along with Gina Lollobrigida and Silvano Mangano.

At first Loren's beauty overshadowed her very real talent as an actress. In Vittorio De Sica's L'oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954), her performance already commands respect. With the help of her husband, producer Carlo Ponti, Loren played a number of Mediterranean roles for Hollywood films, including Stanley Kramer's The Pride and the Passion (1957) and Melville Shavelson's Houseboat (1958), in which she worked with Cary Grant. In 1957 Loren and Ponti married in Mexico, but Italian divorce law did not recognize the marriage. As a result of marital and financial problems, the couple became the target of Italian paparazzi, and Loren even spent several weeks in an Italian prison in 1982 for tax evasion, a crime that only increased her popularity in Italy.

Loren's Hollywood films with such major stars as Grant, Alan Ladd, Anthony Perkins, and William Holden gave her international visibility. She appeared in both epic costume dramas, such as Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964); in westerns, such as George Cukor's Heller in Pink Tights (1960); and in romantic comedies, such as Charlie Chaplin's A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) and Robert Altman's Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994). No doubt, her Hollywood exposure helped her win an Oscar^® for Best Actress in Vittorio De Sica's La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960), in which she played the courageous mother of a teenaged girl during World War II. Two other De Sica films showcased Loren's talent for film comedy, pairing her with another Italian film icon, Marcello Mastroianni: Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1962), winner of an Oscar^® for Best Foreign Film; and Matrimonio all'italiana (Marriage, Italian Style, 1964).

Loren delivered the greatest performance of her late career for director Ettore Scola in Una Giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), in which she plays an unglamorous and world-weary housewife in fascist Italy, who falls for Mastroianni, only to discover that he is a homosexual. Loren received two career awards: an Oscar^® from the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1991), and a Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival (1998).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

L'oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954), La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1962), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Matrimonio all'italiana (Marriage, Italian Style, 1964), Una Giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1975), Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994)

FURTHER READING

Harris, Warren G. Sophia Loren: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Masi, Stefano, and Enrico Lancia. Italian Movie Goddesses. Rome: Gremese, 1997.

Peter Bondanella

Olmi's touching examination of the loneliness of a young office worker named Domenico in The Sound of Trumpets seems closest to the tone of Christian humanism that neorealist films frequently espoused. In its use of nonprofessional actors, its emphasis upon expressive deep-focus shots in office interiors, and its concentration

upon moments of crisis in the protagonist's life where film time coincides with elapsed narrative time, this simple masterpiece owed an obvious debt to De Sica. Olmi's L'Albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, 1978), one of many examples of successful films financed by Italian state television Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), an increasingly important source of funding for major Italian works or for co-productions with other national cinemas, returned to a neorealist recreation of peasant life on a farm near Bergamo at the turn of the nineteenth century, employing nonprofessional peasants from the area who speak their local dialect. Its three-hour length allowed Olmi to recreate the slow rhythms of life in a pre-industrial peasant culture much as Visconti did earlier in The Earth Trembles.

In contrast to Olmi's simple touch, Rosi moved beyond neorealist presentation of nonrhetorical facts to what he termed a "documented" method of making films. Salvatore Giuliano was less a work of fiction than an investigation (inchiesta) into the ambiguous historical circumstances surrounding a Sicilian bandit whose career, under the director's close scrutiny, reflected the machinations of the Christian Democratic party, as well as the Mafia. Rosi combined a documentary style with a series of ingenious flashbacks to present a legal brief against Italian political institutions. It was the first of many Italian political films with an anti-establishment tone that appeared during the next two decades. He continued the richly documented briefs against the political system that he began with Salvatore Giuliano in a series of excellent works: Lucky Luciano (1974) was a probing look into the link between American politicians and the rise of the Mafia in Sicily; Cadaveri eccellenti (The Context, 1976) contained a chilling Kafkaesque parable about the connection between political power and corruption in Italy, adapted from the novel Il Contesto by Leonardo Sciascia, where the image of the Mafia is transformed into a universally comprehensive metaphor for corrupt, absolute power everywhere in the world. Most indebted to the simple storylines of neorealist narrative was Rosi's Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981), a view of contemporary Italian life seen through the lives of three brothers who return to southern Italy for the funeral of their mother.

Like Rosi, Pontecorvo employed a documentary style in The Battle of Algiers, with a narrative structure that used flashbacks and flash-forwards to provide critical commentary on the "facts" the film presents. His careful recreation of a case history of Third World revolution owed an important debt to the style of Rossellini in his early war films and employed a variety of techniques—highly mobile, hand-held cameras employing fast film stock; telephoto lenses common in television news reporting; duplicating the negative of the film in the lab to reproduce the grainy, documentary texture of Paisan—to produce a hybrid style indebted not only to Rossellini's photography but also to Eisenstein's special form of ideological montage. Rossellini's neorealist model may also be discerned in Father and Master and Night of the Shooting Stars by the Taviani brothers. The first work was based upon an autobiographical account of how an illiterate Sardinian shepherd struggled to become a professor of linguistics. The acquisition of standard Italian thus became a metaphor for the acquisition of full citizenship in modern Italian society. The Night of the Shooting Stars is a postmodernist reinterpretation of Italian neorealism, a remake of Rossellini's Paisan. The Taviani brothers set Rossellini's realistic depiction of the meeting of American GIs and the partisan Resistance during World War II within a child's world of fantasy and imagination.

Although Bertolucci, Bellocchio, and Pasolini were indebted to Rossellini, they were also influenced by the aesthetics of Berthold Brecht (1898–1956) and the cinematic practice of Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave. Their relationship to their neorealist heritage was therefore far more ambiguous than might be suggested by

simple influence. Pasolini accepted many of the features of neorealism—nonprofessional actors, on-location shooting, contemporary themes, natural lighting—but rejected any attempt to create naturalist cinema that would ignore the mystery of life embodied in religion. He described his love for reality as "philosophical and reverential," not naturalistic. For Pasolini reality included mythology, religion, and dream. The style he developed in The Gospel According to Matthew, a biblical film made by a Marxist atheist, can be best described as pastiche, mixing the most disparate cultural and thematic materials. Nothing is more striking about this highly original work than its editing and sense of rhythm, for it is with a continuous process of rapid cuts and the juxtaposition of often jarring images that Pasolini forces us to experience the life of Christ through a new perspective. In his later films, such as Medea (1969) or The Decameron (1971), Pasolini moved beyond any simple neorealist vision of society and employed literary texts as platforms to launch his theories about how modern capitalist societies have destroyed the virtues of his beloved lower class characters from non-industrial and economically underdeveloped cultures. In the first film, he interpreted Euripides's play as a mythic portrait of the exploitation of the preindustrial regions of the Third World (Medea's world) by Western capitalism (Jason's world). In the second film, Pasolini transformed Boccaccio's panoramic portrait of Florentine middle-class, mercantile culture into an amusing portrayal of the way in which the sexual freedom enjoyed by lower class types from Naples represents a form of human liberation not possible in modern industrialized society.

Bertolucci and Bellocchio presented a fresh view of Italian politics in their youthful works. With Before the Revolution Bertolucci adapted Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in a poetic and highly lyrical study of a young bourgeois intellectual from Parma who toys with Marxism and eventually prefers a safe, middle-class marriage to revolution or an incestuous love affair with his aunt. Fabrizio, the protagonist of the film, is clearly a reflection of many of Bertolucci's own personal concerns, and like Bertolucci, he suffers from the "nostalgia for the present." He lives in an era before the revolution and is doomed, like so many of Bertolucci's characters, to embrace the coming workers' victory but never to take an active role in it. Bellocchio's artistic perspective is angry and provocative rather than lyrical and elegiac. While Bertolucci's Fabrizio retreats into the protective womb of the Italian family, China Is Near attacked the very institution of the family itself, as Bellocchio portrayed a thoroughly dislikable middle-class family in a satire of Italian political corruption. The result was a political allegory attacking the historic compromise between the right and the left in Italy, viewed from the microcosm of a small, provincial family. Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970), perhaps his most beautiful work, employed a complicated plot with frequent flashbacks and reliance upon psychoanalytic theories indebted to Wilhelm Reich on the link between homosexuality and fascism, to analyze the birth of a fascist mentality. Bertolucci's mature grasp of his craft was evident in the famous tango scene between two women, with its quickly shifting camera angles, positions, graceful motions, and skillful editing. Bertolucci's controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972) continued his exploration of psychoanalytic themes, with a masterful performance by Marlon Brando as an American expatriate who has a deadly love affair with a young girl in Paris.

Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, blending an ideological message with suspense and slick commercial presentation, was awarded an Oscar^® for Best Foreign Film. It combined the generic conventions of a police thriller with those of a more abstract, philosophical parable in the manner of Kafka. Like the film inquiries of Rosi, Petri's cinema aimed at a fundamental critique of Italian political power. Two Holocaust films by Cavani and Wertmüller presented radically different views of Nazi concentration camps, the most extreme form of political power ever exercised. In The Night Porter, Cavani narrated a controversial story about a female camp inmate who has an affair with a Nazi officer and then reunites with him years later in a sado-masochistic love affair ending in death in postwar Vienna. It is, as the Nazi says, a "Biblical" story, because the young woman asked for the head of another inmate who was annoying her and then danced nude for her Nazi lover in imitation of Salomé. In an entirely differen?ller's Seven Beauties (1975), for which she received the first Oscar^® nomination for a female director, moves in from wartime Nazi Germany to prewar Fascist Italy (Naples). Its main character is a Neapolitan dandy who lives by his wits but whose nefarious deeds eventually cause him to be sent to the eastern front and ultimately to a concentration camp. There, in order to survive, he desperately seduces the obese commandant of the camp, who then forces him to murder his and comic vein, Wertmu best friend in order to save his own life. Wertmüller's film thus portrays a man whose sole reason for living is to survive, even at the expense of neglecting all moral values. Both The Night Porter and Seven Beauties explored the moral implications of survival in the evil world of the Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp.

THE COMMEDIA ALL'ITALIANA: SOCIAL SATIRE AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

Much of the Italian film industry's success during its most prosperous years was based upon the popularity of film comedies, the commedia all'italiana. Thesegenre films were dominated by some excellent commercial directors who acquired auteur status by virtue of their comic genius: Mario Monicelli (b. 1915), Luigi Comencini (b. 1916), Dino Risi (b. 1916), Ettore Scola (b. 1931), and Wertmüller. Furthermore, these directors enjoyed the collaboration of great scriptwriters, such as Age (Agenore Incrocci [1919–2005]), Furio Scarpelli (b. 1919), Tullio Pinelli (b. 1908), and Scola himself. These directors and scriptwriters had at their disposal a troupe of great comic actors and actresses no national cinema outside Hollywood could match: Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Manfredi, Ugo Tognazzi, Claudia Cardinale, Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti, and Stefania Sandrelli. Once denigrated by Italian leftists as merely "commercial" films without artistic pretensions, Italian comedies often contained more trenchant social criticism than the more acceptable ideologically oriented "art" films of the period. The many excellent works produced from the late 1950s to the end of the 1970s provide an accurate mirror of changing Italian customs and values. They helped to force the average Italian into a greater awareness of conflicting values, by attacking age-old prejudices and questioning the inept rule of governing elites and institutions. They often embodied a black, grotesque vision of contemporary Italian society, and the laughter in these works was bittersweet.

The film that best reflected the combination of comedy and social criticism typical of the commedia all'italiana was Germi's Divorce, Italian Style (1961). Made before Italian law admitted legal divorce, Germi's satire of Sicilian sexual mores chronicled the comic attempts of a Sicilian nobleman to force his hated wife into adultery, so that he can murder her, receive a light sentence for a crime of honor (hence the film's title), and marry his mistress. Utilizing a complex narrative juxta-posing the director's critical view of this affair with the Sicilian's biased justification of his misdeeds, Germi recreated the oppressive atmosphere of Sicilian provincial life that forces men and woman to commit violent crimes in order to obtain sexual fulfillment. Another excellent example of commedia all'italiana was Bread and Chocolate (1973) by Franco Brusati (1922–1993), a grotesque indictment of the conditions experienced by Italian "guest workers" in Switzerland. Perhaps the most interesting comic director was Ettore Scola, who began working in the cinema as a scriptwriter on dozens of comic films produced in the 1950s and the early 1960s. In We All Loved Each Other Very Much (1974), Dirty, Mean and Nasty (1976), and The Terrace (1980), Scola employed a

LINA WERTMÜLLER
b. Arcangela Felice Assunta von Elgg Spagnol von Braueich, Rome, Italy, 1928

After an early career as an actress and puppeteer, Wertmüller encountered Federico Fellini and worked as his unaccredited assistant on 8½. Immediately afterward, she directed her first feature film, I Basilischi (The Lizards, 1963), a work that recalls Fellini's I Vitelloni (The Young and the Passionate, 1953) in its focus upon provincial slackers. After making several comedies under the name George H. Brown featuring singer Rita Pavone and actor Giancarlo Giannini—Rita la zanzara (Rita the Mosquito, 1966) and Non stuzzicate la zanzara (Don't Sting the Mosquito, 1967) that met with some success at the box office—Wertmüller made the spaghetti western, Il Mio corpo per un poker (The Belle Starr Story, 1967).

Her international renown came about because of five incredibly popular political comedies that introduced the pairing of Giannini and Mariangela Melato. Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (The Seduction of Mimi, 1972), a farce about sex and politics, made the two performers famous, and the subsequent Film d'amore e d'anarchia (Love and Anarchy, 1973) was a box-office sensation. Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept Away, 1975) aroused the ire of many feminists. This comedy of a rich woman abandoned on a deserted island with a member of the Italian proletariat and their subsequent love affair still arouses passions. A comparison of Wertmüller's Swept Away with the embarrassing 2002 remake underscores the quality of Wertmüller's early comic films. Wertmüller's cinematic style was influenced as much by popular Italian culture as by the cinema: a love for puppetry and the commedia dell'arte tradition informs her films, most of which employ stereotypical comic figures to criticize society.

Wertmüller's masterpiece, Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1976), which combined political comedy with a dark visionof the Holocaust, received the first Academy nomination for Best Director bestowed on a woman.

Following the unparalleled critical and commercial success of this film, Wertmüller signed a contract to direct English-language films, but her international popularity fell off dramatically with the appearance of La Fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte pienad pioggia (A Night Full of Rain, 1979). Subsequent Italian-language films—Fatto di sangue fra due uomini per causa di una vedova (Blood Feud, 1978), Scherzo del destino in agguato dietro l'angolo come un brigante da strada (A Joke of Destiny, 1983), Io speriamo che me la cavo (Ciao, Professore!, 1993), and Metalmeccanico e parrucchiera in un turbine di sesso e di politica (The Worker and the Hairdresser, 1996)—demonstrated her combination of politics and humor but never matched the popular and critical success of her 1970s films. Besides work in the cinema, Wertmüller has directed operas and made films for Italian television. Since 1988, she has served as an administrator at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the film school in Rome.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (The Seduction of Mimi, 1972), Film d'amore e d'anarchia (Love and Anarchy, 1973), Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (All Screwed Up, 1974), Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept Away, 1975), Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1976), Io speriamo che me la cavo (Ciao, Professore!, 1993)

FURTHER READING

Ferlita, Ernest, and John R. May. The Parables of Lina Wertmüller. New York: Paulist Press, 1977.

Wertmüller, Lina. The Head of Alvise. London and New York: William Morrow, 1982.

——The Screenplays of Lina Wertmüller. Translated by Steven Wagner. Introduction by John Simon. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1977.

Peter Bondanella

sophisticated metacinematic narrative (a narrative about movie making) to treat the history of Italian cinema itself, examining not only the heritage of neorealism (especially his model Vittorio De Sica) but also the assumptions of commedia all'italiana. We All Loved Each Other Very Much was the most complex of these films, combining a consideration of the many social and political changes Italy has undergone since the fall of the Fascist regime with an equally comprehensive survey of major developments in the history of postwar Italian film. Dirty, Mean, and Nasty presented a humorous remake of De Sica's proletarian fairy tale, Miracle in Milan (1950). However, Scola completely altered De Sica's fanciful utopian shantytown and his happy poor, for in Scola's contemporary shantytown every positive characteristic of the poor in De Sica's classic work is reversed. Instead of patient, long-suffering, and down-trodden people, Scola shows us vicious, brutish, mean, and nasty individuals without any redeeming moral values who have become what they are because of a desperate economic system. In The Terrace Scola examined the genre so crucial to his own career as a director and scriptwriter, the commedia all'italiana, continuing his metacinematic examination of Italian film history by questioning the very possibility of making film comedies.

With a style indebted to Fellini's baroque imagery, Italy's commedia dell'arte, and a political perspective critical of contemporary Italian society, Lina Wertmüller established herself in the 1970s as Italy's most important female director. Her best works were all typical of the commedia dell'italiana genre: The Seduction of Mimi (1971); Love and Anarchy (1972); Swept Away (1974); and her previously discussed masterpiece, Seven Beauties. Wertmüller's comedies, filled with stock characters and presented with the typical vulgarity of traditional Italian slapstick farce, treated controversial political subjects, such as feminism, women's rights, working-class chauvinism, and the opposition of love and anarchy, with grotesque humor. They frequently highlighted the acting talents of a pair of brilliant comedians, Giancarlo Giannini (b. 1942) and Mariangela Melato (b. 1941). Other important examples of this genre include four films by Monicelli: Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), a parody of a bank robbery film; The Great War (1959), a satirical attack on

patriotism; The Organizer (1963), a very funny account of a Socialist labor organizer; and My Friends (1975), a classical hilarious collection of cruel Tuscan practical jokes played on stupid people. Equally well-crafted works containing interesting social commentary may be found in Comencini's Everybody Home! (1960), a comedy about Italy's withdrawal from World War II; and in two works by Risi: The Easy Life (1962), a portrait of postwar Italian cynicism, and The March on Rome (1962), a send-up of a fanatic believer in Mussolini who persists even after the fall of Il Duce's regime.

KINGS OF THE Bs: ITALIAN GENRE FILMS

Between the mid-1950s and the 1970s, the Italian film industry produced an enormous number of genre films. The first of these specifically Italian versions of themes more often identified with Hollywood than with Rome was the sword-and-sandal epic, also called the neomythological or peplum film, accounting for 10 percent of Italian production between 1957 and 1964. Hercules (Pietro Francesci, 1958) gave birth to a flood of muscle-men pics with body-builders (often Americans, such as Steve Reeves or Gordon Mitchell) playing the lead roles and bearing the classically associated names of Hercules, Maciste, Ursus, Spartacus, and Samson, to name only a few. Perhaps the most skilled of the directors who worked in this genre was Vittorio Cottofavi (1914–1998), whose The Warrior and the Slave Girl (1958) and Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis (1960) are classic examples of the genre. Set vaguely in classical times and populated by mindless musclemen and buxom damsels in distress, these works appealed to a predominantly male audience that thrived on violent action and strong, anti-intellectual heroes. The genre flourished during the 1960s and then again briefly in the 1980s, but its production values were far removed from similar works made in Hollywood, and these films rapidly became cult favorites and the butt of jokes on Saturday Night Live satirical skits, which poked pun at the cheap dubbing that allowed actors to speak without moving their lips and to fall silent when they did move. In Italian film history, such films made conscious reference to the far older tradition of silent film epics, such as Cabiria.

The other remarkably successful commercial genre during this period was the "spaghetti" western, dominated by a great director, Sergio Leone (1929–1989), who virtually revived a dead Hollywood genre with A Fistful of Dollars (1964) by a conscious departure from what had come to be known as the "classic" western formula. Leone's film owed a debt both to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) and to Carlo Goldoni's play The Servant of Two Masters (1945). The Stranger, or The Man with No Name (a part that was to make Clint Eastwood an international star), leaves prison and cleans up a border town infested by two rival families: American gunrunners and Mexican bootleggers. Leone plunges his audience into a violent and cynical world far removed from the traditional West of John Ford or Howard Hawks. His hero is motivated by the same greed as the evil bandits, and graphic violence is accompanied by grotesque comic gags and mannered close-ups indebted to Eisenstein. A crucial artistic element is the skillful music of Ennio Moricone (b. 1928), whose unusual sound track composed of gunfire, ricocheting bullets, cries, trumpet solos, Sicilian folk instruments, and whistles became an international best-selling record. The classic western gunfight became, in Leone's hands, a ritualistic act that concludes a narrative cycle and employs a crescendo of music not unlike the close of an aria in a grand opera. This international hit was followed in close order by four other films of the highest quality: For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Duck, You Sucker! (1971). The link between popular film genres in the Italian industry may be discerned from the fact that Leone's first film before he began making his westerns was a colossal peplum, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), no doubt inspired by the success of the Hollywood production of Ben Hur filmed in Italy in 1959. More than a few links exist between the musclemen of the peplum and the strong, silent gunfighters of the spaghetti western. Between 1963 and 1973, over four hundred Italian westerns were produced, but none of them had the impact of Leone's works or were made with the same high production values and fine acting. Like the peplum genre, the lesser Italian westerns followed a formulaic pattern, focusing upon a single gunfighter hero, such as Sabata, Django, Ringo, Sartana, and Trinity. Eventually, the genre began to parody itself in such interesting films as My Name Is Nobody (Tonino Valerii, 1973); or to incorporate radical political themes, such as A Bullet for the General (Damiano Damiani, 1966) or Don't Touch the White Woman (Marco Ferreri, 1975). Again, as was the case with the peplum film, the high-water mark of this genre was reached within approximately a decade.

Another popular and low-budget genre that generated enormous profits for the industry and, like the peplum and the western, became an object of cult attention, was the so-called spaghetti nightmare or Italian horror film, often also called the giallo (the name being derived from the yellow covers that Italian publisher Mondadori employed on their mystery novel series). Pioneers in this genre were Mario Bava (1914–1980), Lucio Fulci (1927–1996), and Riccardo Freda (1909–1999), whose directorial debut, Black Sunday (1960), turned little-known British actress Barbara Steele into a cult-figure "scream queen." Perhaps the most highly regarded horror director is Dario Argento (b. 1940), whose successful works include The Gallery Murders (1970), The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971), Deep Red (1975), and Suspiria (1977). Argento's work combined the excessive gore and splatter violence of the traditional B-horror film with extremely elaborate and baroque visual settings. Because of the praise these spaghetti horror films have received from American directors Quentin Tarantino, George A. Romero, and John Landis, as well as writer Stephen King, the best and the worst representatives of this Italian genre remain popular and still command cult followings even larger than those that exist for the peplum or the spaghetti western.

THE DECLINE AND FALL: THE MID-1970s
TO THE END OF THE CENTURY

The international success of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris and Fellini's Amarcord may mark the high-water mark of Italian cinema's commercial and artistic success. From the dawn of Italian neorealism to the beginning of the 1970s, Italian cinema was universally regarded as one of the most original and innovative national cinemas, often rivaling Hollywood in its artistic achievements if not always in its commercial success. Subsequently, in 1976 both Bertolucci and Fellini attempted big-budget films, romantic epics more typical of Hollywood productions, the former with 1900, a historical treatment of the rise of Italian socialism with touches of Gone With the Wind, and Fellini's Casanova. In spite of their undeniable qualities, neither lived up to expectations. Leone attempted the same leap from Italian production norms to Hollywood blockbuster standards with Once Upon a Time in America (1984), challenging the association of American gangsters with Italians by telling the story of Jewish gangsters. Finally, with The Last Emperor (1987),

Bertolucci scored a bulls-eye, winning nine Oscars^® for his epic portrayal of the Emperor of China who eventually becomes a simple citizen and dies during Mao's Cultural Revolution. But the artistic merits of such films could not detract from the air of crisis circulating throughout the industry. Gradually the old lions, the great art film directors, disappeared one by one or simply ceased making interesting films; the economically profitable genre films, such as the peplum, western, or horror film, dried up and became no longer events at the box office but cult collectors' items on video and DVD. International co-productions, such as Last Tango or The Last Emperor, to cite only the most profitable examples by Italian directors, raised the embarrassing question of whether such films ought to be considered really "Italian" or whether they were more accurately to be labeled as Eurofilms.

Talented Italian directors, actors, and technicians did not disappear (indeed, there was a migration of Italian cameramen, makeup artists, special effects people, and set designers to Hollywood during this period). But Italian film theatres began to close: in 1985, almost 5,000 theatres existed; by 1998, that number was reduced to 2,600. Basically, individual great films continued to be produced, but these films were created within an industry that had become increasingly weaker. In the mid-1970s, Italian-produced films controlled approximately 60 percent of its home market, but by 1993, that figure had dropped to 13 percent. During the 1990s, some 140 to 180 Hollywood films circulated in Italy as opposed to around 100 Italian films, but the Hollywood products gained almost 75 percent of the market share. In 1999, the year that witnessed the international success of Life Is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni (b. 1952), only 14 percent of Italian production had any life at the box office at all; many were never distributed or were only screened in ten cities or less. In spite of this depressing situation, Italian films continued to produce some authentic gems in spite of its weak industrial base and the dearth of energetic and skillful producers.

THE THIRD WAVE: A NEW GENERATION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

A third generation of Italian directors is slowly appearing as younger artists begin to test their strength at the box office and at international film festivals. Their success may well hold out the promise of another Italian "Renaissance" in the cinema in the new century. This group may be described as the "postmodern" generation, since their works so often cite other films in the Italian or Hollywood cinematic traditions. Such new faces include Benigni; Gianni Amelio (b. 1945), Maurizio Nichetti (b. 1948), Nanni Moretti (b. 1953), Giuseppe Tornatore (b. 1956), Gabriele Salvatores (b. 1950), Silvio Soldini (b. 1958), Marco Tullio Giordano (b. 1950), Giuseppe Piccioni (b. 1953), Gabriele Muccino (b. 1967), and Ferzan Ozpetek (1959). Benigni's Life Is Beautiful combined comic techniques learned from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), Fellini's visual style, and Wertmüller's Seven Beauties to create a moving but tragicomic vision of the Holocaust. Nichetti married visual techniques learned from television advertising with a parody of De Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves in The Icicle Thief (1989). Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1989) owed much to both Fellini's example and the history of Italian cinema, and like Scola's We All Loved Each Other Very Much, it viewed contemporary Italy through the prism of the cinematic past, garnering an Oscar^® for Best Foreign Film and enormous audiences all over the world in the process. Salvatores's Mediterraneo (1991), another recent Oscar^® winner for Best Foreign Film, employed formulas from the commedia all'italiana (particularly the satires of patriotism in The Great War and Everybody Home!) to produce a funny account of inept Italian occupiers of a Greek island in World War II. Salvatores's most recent I'm Not Scared (2003) has been widely praised as a moving thriller. Nanni Moretti is perhaps the most idiosyncratic and most talented of this entire generation, producing bittersweet comic works that are closer to film essays than to fictional films. His Dear Diary (1994) won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival: it combined ideas about simple storylines from Zavattini's neorealist theory, political ideas from Pasolini's work, and Fellini's choice of the "mockumentary" genre form. His more recent work, The Son's Room (2001), the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, moved from Moretti's usual egocentric but sympathetic narcissism to treat the devastating effects of a young boy's loss on his parents. Piccione's Not of This World (1999); Muccino's The Last Kiss (2001) and Remember Me, My Love (2003); and Soldini's Bread and Tulips (2000) are all worthy successors to the glorious commedia dell'italiana tradition. Monica Stambrini's Gasoline (2001), a lesbian thriller that was a hit at various film festivals around the globe, may be the debut of another Italian feminist director that is even more outrageous than Lina Wertmüller and as equally talented. A number of excellent works by Gianni Amelio—Open Doors (1970), The Stolen Children (1992), Lamerica (1994), and The Way We Laughed (1998)—and by Marco Tullio Giordano—One Hundred Steps (2000) and The Best of Youth (2003)—all offer eloquent testimony that Italian cinema's penchant for social realism has not disappeared.

Perhaps the most unusual of the new faces to appear on the horizon is Turkish-born director Ferzan Ozpetek, whose films are resolutely Italian in character, language, and style but whose Levantine origins are also apparent in their themes: The Turkish Baths (1997), Harem (1999), His Secret Life (2001), and Facing Windows (2003). His ability to work within the Italian film industry while coming from another national culture recalls the success of another recent Italian hit with an international flavor, Il Postino—The Postman (1994), directed by non-Italian Michael Radford. Incorporating a moving performance by a dying Italian comic star, Massimo Troisi (1953–1994), Il Postino was Italian in every conceivable respect but its director's nationality. Perhaps one way Italian cinema may survive into this new century is to become more international and less deeply rooted in native traditions of cinematic art. But such a globalization of Italian cinema would deprive the world of one of the most original and unique film traditions to have arisen in the centuryold existence of the cinema.

SEE ALSO National Cinema;Neorealism;Westerns

FURTHER READING

Armes, Roy. Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema. London: Tantivy, 1971.

Bertellini, Giorgio, ed. The Cinema of Italy. London: Wallflower, 2004.

Bondanella, Peter. The Films of Roberto Rossellini. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

——. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, 3rd revised ed. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Freyling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Landy, Marcia. Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931–1943. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Marcus, Millicent. After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

——. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

——. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Palmerini, Luca M., and Gaetano Mistretta. Spaghetti Nightmares: Italian Fantasy-Horrors As Seen Through the Eyes of Their Protagonists. Edited by Margot Winick. Translated by Gilliam M. A. Kirkpatrick. Key West, FL: Fantasma Books, 1996.

Reich, Jacqueline, and Piero Garofalo, eds. Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Rumble, Patrick, and Bart Testa, eds. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives. Buffalo, NY and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Testa, Carlo. Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures, 1945–2000. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.

Peter Bondanella