Search and Destroy: Italian Cinema

Search: Amarcord, Cinema Paradiso, The Legend of 1900, Il Postino, the entire back catalogue of Franco E Ciccio

Destory: All other Italian slapstick (especially Fantozzi)

Destroy a pice of pap call L'Ultimo Bacio which I saw whilst living in Italy. One of the worst films I've ever seen.

Destroy La Vita è Bella. Utter tripe.

Search Cinema Paradiso, but not the long cut, that's just too self indulgent.

Search: Il postino
Search Roma: Città Aperte. One of the best portrayals of a wartime city ever.

destroy
muccino, giuseppe piccioni, benigni, 60% of moretti's stuff.

it might be the only Italian language film I've ever seen.

1. The Horror of Dr. Hitchcock (1962) - Ricardo Freda - Also w/ Babs Steele - Hallucinatory gothico-necro fest - tasty

2. 8 1/2 (1963) - Federico Fellini - Saw this YEARS ago at the NFT - can't remember a damm thing abt it (it's v. long and I may well have snoozed for parts of it) - some good shots of a misty spa?? I do recall enjoying it, anyway...

3. Blood and Black Lace (1964) - Mario Bava - proto-'giallo'/Friday the 13th stalk'n'slasher w/ ultraripe colour/acting/dubbing/gore

4. ...Louis XIV (1966) - Roberto Rossellini - I remember only its v. formal shot/image look, in garish/washed-out super-sixties colour photog. Wld totally like to see again someday.

5. Salo, the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) - Pier Paolo Pasolini - once seen, NEVER forgotten! First viewed in a v. knackered old (cut) print at the defunct Scala. Since seen on the BFI's uncut, but still not pristine, vid edition. There is also a DVD.

5. Tenebrae (1982) - Dario Argento - His last gd film? I first saw this one on its uncut UK cinema release, in a really grotty fleapit that used to be at the bottom of Charing X Rd, long gone now. Until the 'vid revolution' really kicked in, UK cinemas were constantly showing (as porn (cut), action/exploitation, horror etc.) dubbed Italian exploitation flicks - a golden age!

Plus almost any Fulci up to the repulsive 'New York Ripper', Antonioni, Leone and lots more Spag Westerns, gore flicks, outright rip-offs, a ton of morally questionable material, in total one of the most vibrant/varied/sexist! national cinemas - cld be a lifetime's work to fully document it!

If you liked the orig. in any way, DO NOT SEE THE EXT. VERSION

It's my everlasting heartbreak that The Conformist isn't available anywhere in a non-dubbed version. Does anyone know where I can get this in subtitles?

this fellow, a writer, is travelling with a friend further and further out in a chain of islands, attempting to find an appropriate place to work. they keep getting back on the ferry and moving on to the next, smaller, more remote spot. at least that's how i remember it.

saw one night on bravo and would like to see again. thx

oh my how could I forget this (actually i forgot it was italian since I saw a dubbed version) (hehe). Came out of the cinema exhausted by the images.

saw suspiria: the soundtrack really provides most of the 'effect'. fine but wasn't bowled over by it.

Definitely search the aforementioned Bicycle Thief, Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and The Conformist. All four of those are flawless.

And of course all the Leone, especially don't forget about Duck, You Sucker! Great performances from James Coburn and Rod Steiger ... now that I think about it, both of them died last year. Weird.

All three of Rossellini's war trilogy are essential, Rome, Open City; Paisan; Germany Year Zero. I also really like Pasolini's first one, Accatone, very much in the neo-realist style.

Antonioni is probably my favorite director and L'Eclisse is certainly one of my top 5 films ever. Also don't miss L'Avventura and La Notte.

Visconti doesn't get as much pub as some of the others but his Rocco and His Brothers and The Damned are masterpieces. Especially the first one, do try to see that, it's epic. Fantastic direction and acting (featuring a young Alain Delon in one of his first roles).

Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and Ginger and Fred are good in addition to the obvious ones.

Also, Bud Spenser to thread!

Also search Umberto D., La terra trema, and Bertolucci's Spider's Srategem

Lots of his movies are not so hott. I think he's too proficient for hissown good. I liked him best when he was insufferably callow.

I find both Antonioni and Bertolucci very hard to love.

Argento's "Suspiria" and "Deep red" are extraordinary, the most stylish horror films I've seen.

I'll also add my admiration for "Once upon a time in the West".

Moretti's "The son's room" is the best Italian film I've seen in recent years.

Last year at the Venice Film Festival there was a complete retrospective of his work, featuring all new prints. I was seriously thinking about going but just couldn't get the scratch together. I've seen everything he's made, including the early shorts, except for I Vinti, Chung Kuo China, and Indentification of a Woman. It would have been wonderful to see it all together. I actually have a cassette of the IoaW that someone gave me but I refuse to watch it until I first see it on the big screen.

He's currently working on his section of a three-part film called Eros, which will also have segments from Almodovar and Kar-Wai.

The Icicle Thief is great, but as good as Bicycle Thief? Nah...

I think the reductionism in The Conformist is a little annoying, yes, but everything else about the film is so powerful and moving that I really don't care to carp too much about it. The scene where they're all dancing is amazing.

Despite the treatments used on the master negative (unfortunately almost always duplicate negative) the following can be found in the show copies:

- Photographic jumps between one scene and the next caused by the substitution of lost frames using a different duplicate negative
- Sudden changes in light and contrast in all the fading in/out parts caused by the amateurish and outdated methods used at the time of filming
- Flaws, snow and dirt due to the photographic printing onto duplicate negative

If the authorities that have actively participated in the rescuing of major films belonging to Italian cinema by restoring them (from the SCUOLA NAZIONALE DI CINEMA - CINETECA NAZIONALE to the PHILIP MORRIS ASSOCIATION FILM PROJECT, CINEMA FOREVER – MEDIASET) do not take instant measures, most of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are doomed to disappear.

It's awesome, but I'm ticked about the lack of the English dub track. The translation is excellent and illuminating. find the tape too!

I would think that would be a good thing, this lack.

(Got the CC version of Rashomon the other week, yay...)

also, what did you think of the wacky CC Japanese you bought at Aron's on my semi-recommendation???

(And Sean and I agree, it's great.)

I've never seen 8 1/2 with the dub track. I remember once renting La Strada on laserdisc for a screening thing I used to do in university, and you had the option of two different dub tracks: one with Anthony Quinn dubbed into Italian and everyone else speaking Italian, and another with Quinn speaking English and everyone else dubbed into English. Now I know that all dialogue would be dubbed, as everything was looped in Italy then, but it was a strange thing to be offered: either one person appearing to speak out of sync and everyone else relatively normal, or the other way around.

That took way too long to explain.

Destroy the practice of dubbing as a convention in Italian cinema, even when the film is in Italian. Where is Italy's Hou Hsiao-Hsien?

And it's a little too late to destroy that convention... it doesn't really go on much nowadays, does it?

I have no trouble with dubbing dialogue per se. Just that it becomes stifling when it seems to be the only option.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien chose to become Taiwan's first live-sound director b/c he felt the specificities of regional Taiwanese dialects and the general rhythms of conversation were being obscured/forgotten in dubbing. (I believe Marcel Pagnol made a similar decision back in the '30s.)

I never thought about how this related to the dubbing of dialogue, but the sounds do seem to be given impact by being "set apart." They sort of come in out of nowhere, as opposed to a backdrop of general ambient sound.

Granted doing postsynch dialogue can make this easier. But even Bresson, master of purposeful discrete sounds, very often used synch sound for dialogue. Tati however always used dubbing I believe (you can really tell, sometimes). Kiarostami is a master at integrating synch and postsynch sound cues.

Anyway, I definitely think you stand to lose something when dubbing dialogue, although it's a necessity for parts of nearly every film. That's why I brought up HHH.

I also said that Antonioni couldn't have experimented with long takes if he had been devoted to synch sound. And that the kind of sparse soundtracks that you admire in Antonioni can be achieved -- albeit not as easily -- with some use of live sound.

A major achievement in this regard is HHH's Flowers of Shanghai. The film is entirely composed of extremely long takes (the average shot length is about three minutes, and the very first shot of the film is nine minutes long) and about half of the dialogue was recorded live.

I'm off to find Flowers of Shanghai tomorrow!

Europa '51 / 1952
CAST: Ingrid Bergman, Alexander Knox, Giulietta Masina.
When a well-off woman loses her son, her recovery confronts her with the problems of the less fortunate. BW 113m.
Drama. D: Roberto Rossellini.
PLAYING ON TCM: 06/27/2005 12:00 AM (ET)

xpost

i've always wondered how de sica, rossellini, etc. got saddled with the term neo-realist. who were the first realists? are they thinking of zola, etc. in literature? or of some realist movement in cinema prior to WWII? would that have been andre antoine in france or something?

x-post: I've always thought neo-Realism was a reference to literary Realism, but I could be way off.

And I wish I could find that other Silvana Mangano movie that Nanni Moretti watches in Caro Diario- I believe it is called Anna.

The jackboot-hammered low piano notes of the Ennio Morricone theme music are, on the other had, classic.

search:
• Uomini si nasce poliziotti si muore (1975)

destroy: Milano violenta (1976)

I'm dying to see Blood Feast and Salo.

Is noshame still a going concern? Their web site and new release schedule seem to have gone dead.

Destroy: The Family Friend.

Worst film I've seen in years: Bad story, moronic script and no cohesion. Rubbish.

I've seen a few Tinto Brass films recently, which are just insane. Hesitate to actually recommend these to anyone, but if you like the sound of what he does, they're wilder and better looking than you can imagine. Shame about the dubbing though.

Rumors on the intranets that noshame is coming back to life with Dario Argento's Door Into Darkness.

The whole film on YT, but it looks like at least the last 2 segments aren't subtitled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3-AmkV63qg

Bellocchio's Vincere is a good one, a few great scenes staged during film screenings.

RIP Suso Cecchi d"Amico, screenwriter of Bicycle Thieves, The Leopard, etc:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2110

wow. RIP. wasnt really aware of her. just watched the leopard a couple weeks ago.

RIP. The Leopard is one of the best judged adaptations from a book that I can think of. Really correct to cut at the last chapter (although I guess Visconti is just as responsible for that decision).

yeah, the last chapter is amazing, but I don't see it working on film.

just watched I bambini ci guardano, really moving

Saw IL Divo a few weeks ago and loved it. Sorrentino finally had a story to back his film making chops.

i still don't think Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is a GREAT film, but the story of its making and reception is quite something.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion

Directors: http://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/seasons/elio-petri-forgotten-genius

This looks fantastic: http://contramundum.net/catalog/current/writings-on-cinema-life/

This is high on my to-watch list:

http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/le-mani-sulla-citta/

Watched that a few years ago - Rod Steiger does not disappoint.

Found a piece by Petri: http://www.contramundum.net/Hyperion/Documents/Petri-Lire_Castrated.pdf

Sophia Loren... 80!

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-sophia-loren-80

Thinking I should go see this in DC on the 28th

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/calendar/film-programs/summer14-specialevents/sorpasso.html

Wonderfully mismatched costars Vittorio Gassman and Jean- Louis Trintignant embark on a wildly reckless ride in a Lancia Aurelia convertible from Rome to rural southern Italy. Dino Risi’s sorely neglected classic of commedia all’ italiana reads as a sort of elegy on the unfettered energies of the early 1960s — fast cars, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, even good fashion sense. “The model for a dozen road movies, from New Hollywood to Alexander Payne, Risi’s film is also the most unassuming sort of masterpiece” — Nick Pinkerton. (Dino Risi, 1962, Italian with subtitles, 105 minutes)

Totally wanted to see that when it played here but didn't make it.

This is high on my to-watch list:

http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/le-mani-sulla-citta/

I just watched this a few days ago and enjoyed it a lot. Lots of stuff about government, corruption, shady deals and the like. Old corrupt Italian men screwing the poor basically. It was very intriguing. Seek it out asap.

Anyone care to recommend a Monicelli that isnt Big Deal or The Organizer?

http://filmforum.org/series/mario-monicelli-series-page

Lady Liberty is far from great, but the NYC time capsule stuff is cool, and it has a scene apiece w/young Susan Sarandon and a young, not bald and reasonably thin Danny Devito. And "I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City" by Nilsson is heard about twelve times on the soundtrack. That accompanying Vitti-starring short sounds interesting.

Finally watched Big Deal properly, looking forward to seeing some more

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=vittoriodesica

Gotta say there is quite a bit to enjoy in the De Sica retro in August.

Quite a few films w/Loren and idk if I've seen her in a film or not.

well goodness gracious me

I know - shocking etc.

Wow.

I really enjoyed Lattuada's Mafioso recently, it is a very odd movie with social realism, bawdy comedy and then goes full crime at the end. It doesn't seem to get a lot of respect but I thought it was great.

saw the damnedest WW2 movie today, Liliana (Night Porter) Cavani's The Skin, about Naples under US occupation, with M Mastroianni as a writer/liaison and Burt Lancaster (dubbed! as usual in these) as the Yank general. Has the most amazing outbursts of horrific gore and slice-of-life humiliation, along with some really plodding romance and a plot about a senator's wife/aviator. Both search and destroy (a recent DVD release).

My school is running an Italian film series. I've seen the Leone's, of course, none of the others. I'm not the biggest horror guy, but I liked Bava's Rabid Dogs and Argento's Tenebre. Recommendations please!

September 23 Divorzio all'italiana, Pietro Germi, 1961

September 30 Ad ogni costo (Grand Slam), Giuliano Montaldo, 1967

October 7 We All Loved Each Other So Much (C'eravamo tanto amati), Ettore Scola, 1974

October 14 I vampiri (The Vampires), Riccardo Freda & Mario Bava, 1956

October 21 Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World), Mario Bava, 1961

October 28 Django, Sergio Corbucci, 1966

November 4 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Sergio Leone, 1966

November 11 Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone, 1968

November 18 L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), Dario Argento, 1970

November 25 Profondo rosso, Dario Argento, 1976

December 2 Suspiria, Dario Argento, 1977

B-b-but where is The Gold of Naples?

I saw this film at DOX: http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/tiff-2015-cinema-scope-64-preview-lost-and-beautiful-pietro-marcello-italy-wavelengths/

The article talk a bit about this kind of film. That is the most interesting Italian cinema at the moment, I think.

i saw Antonio Pietrangeli's I Knew Her Well the other day, which Criterion releases in 2 weeks... Aa aspiring-starlet story much less baroque (or self-conscious) than contemporaneous dolce vita films. A wow finish, as Bogart might say. Never got a theatrical run in the US.

https://www.criterion.com/films/28600-i-knew-her-well

Bitter Rice is kind of a strange hybrid of neorealism and noir (for which it received heat from some of the more humourless Marxists of the era, I've read), but the thriller plot is legit suspenseful and involving, and the film is always gorgeous to look at, up to and including a lead cast of both male and female eye candy. Surprised to see that it got a "Best Story" nod at the 1950 Oscars, as I didn't think they were in the habit of recognizing foreign language films (outside of their designated category) yet.

Isn't there a musical number in there, "Anna's Song" or "Ana's Song," a super-catchy Latin number, which starts out "Tengo ganas de bailar," or is that another film of hers,

i saw Antonio Pietrangeli's /I Knew Her Well/ the other day, which Criterion releases in 2 weeks... Aa aspiring-starlet story much less baroque (or self-conscious) than contemporaneous dolce vita films. A wow finish, as Bogart might say. Never got a theatrical run in the US.

https://www.criterion.com/films/28600-i-knew-her-well🔗

xpost

The field workers sing a couple of improvised songs in the film, but I wouldn't necessarily call them "musical numbers," and certainly nothing Latin sounding.

Sorry, It was a totally different film with Silvana Mangano.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-HNZLg6ntI

I first became aware of it when Nanni Moretti sees a clip of it on a television in a store in one of his films, forget which. This was a while back, in pre or early internet days, definitely long before youtube so I couldn't quite figure out what it was at the time.

Music is someone's conception of pan-Latin, a mix of Brazilian and Afro-Cuban elements and no doubt some others, and hella catchy despite or because of it. How bizarre.

How bizarre
How bizarre

Every time I look around

I found the Nanni Moretti scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH3Zx9BJYpQ

NYC retro for D

fuck

for Dino Risi; any recommendations? I was not wild for Il Sorpasso.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/3628?locale=en

The Risi retro has made it clear to me what a formidable, versatile actor Vittorio Gassman was. Largely wasted in his American films, I guess.

yup

Wish I could see this again: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-beating-bette

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/loro-silvio-berlusconi-paolo-sorrentino-toni-servillo?utm_content=buffer29fd0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitterbfi&utm_campaign=buffer

Fine rev of the new Sorrentino film

It's all about the poliziotteschi really.

it's important to remember that Zeffirelli was kind of a nasty piece of work

Accusations of sexual misconduct eventually surfaced. Bruce Robinson, who played Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, has said that he was the target of Zeffirelli’s advances during the production and that he based Uncle Monty, the eccentric lecher in Withnail and I (1987), which Robinson wrote and directed, on Zeffirelli. Last year, Johnathon Schaech, who starred in Zeffirelli’s Sparrow (1993), detailed the director’s abuse of his privilege in a piece for People magazine. Similar accusations had been aired for years, but they didn’t keep Zeffirelli from being elected twice in the late 1990s to the Italian Parliament as an ultraconservative senator for Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. His electoral prospects weren’t hurt, either, by his claim that Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) was the product of “that Jewish cultural scum of Los Angeles, which is always spoiling for a chance to attack the Christian world” or his argument that women who had had abortions deserved to be executed.



https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6450-the-triumphs-and-failures-of-franco-zeffirelli

Thought this was really good. Still thinking about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFSeAuG2oxQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Sordi

Sordi provided the voice of Hardy in more than forty Laurel and Hardy films from 1939 to 1951, paired with Mauro Zambuto, who voiced Stan Laurel.

He also appeared as a voice actor in other Italian-language versions and Italian films. Sordi provided voice-overs for such actors as Bruce Bennett, Anthony Quinn, John Ireland, Robert Mitchum, Pedro Armendáriz and Frank Faylen. He also dubbed Italian actors such as Franco Fabrizi, Marcello Mastroianni and Enzo Fiermonte for English-speaking audiences. His own voice was dubbed over by Gualtiero De Angelis in Cuori nella tormenta and Carlo Romano in Bullet for Stefano. Sordi ceased his career as a dubber in 1956

it's important to remember that Zeffirelli was kind of a nasty piece of work

And, on top of those clearly more damning offenses, also an excruciatingly dull director

Right

Just saw the CONTEMPT restoration and laughed out loud at the bit about Jack Palance hiring Michel Piccoli because he wrote the script for TOTÓ AGAINST HERCULES. #onethread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-HNZLg6ntI

Probably the Avalanches got this from seeing it in Nanni Moretti's CARO DIARIO?

Probably. Although there could have been other avenues of approach