Suso Cecchi D’Amico was one of the early pioneers who set the foundations for Italian cinema. She started her career right after World War II and played a key role in what is known as Neorealism genre and in the 60’s as part of Age & Scarpelli invented commedia all’italiana (Italian-style comedy).

Some of her most notable screenplays include these masterpieces:

• Bicycle Thieves – Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica – 1948)
• The Leopard – Il gattopard0 (Luchino Visconti- 1963)
• Too Bad She’s Bad – Peccato che sia una Canaglia (Alessandro Blasetti – 1954)
• The Girlfriends – Le Amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni – 1955)
• Senso (Luchino Visconti – 1954)
• Big Deal on Madonna Street – I Soliti Ignoti (Mario Monicelli – 1958)
• Rocco and his Brothers – Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Luchino Visconti – 1960)
• Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi – 1962)

I liked her comment from a 2006 interview:

“If we had as many newspapers and magazines back then as we do now, maybe many of us would have become journalists instead of making films. But there weren’t many papers and making film was inexpensive and we merely wanted to tell our stories about our experiences of that era.”

I found it as support for a basic truth. If you have a passion for something and a great hunger to express it, like water it will find its way out somehow.

• Sub-Plots: Police investigation showcases stories of five witnesses that depict how their day started and what they saw when it finishes in Paolino park

• Themed Character: Roman rain that drives characters to seek shelter, triggering transitions to portrayal of the prostitute at different stages of her day before meeting her nocturnal fate.

Paolino Park where all witnesses congregate
and the victim – prostitute in the far left

The above are the building blocks of an Italian cinema masterpiece, written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The backdrop story is that Bertolucci has started his career assisting Pasolini in his first feature film Accatone a year earlier. He describes this experience as “witnessing the birth of cinema” as neither Pasolini nor him had any experience making films. All Pasolini wanted was close up angles of the protagonists that should resemble tormented faces of religious saints, sacrificed on the altar as depicted in timeless Tuscan paintings.

In this film you will find the typical Pasolinian themes of the rough life of poor boys on the fringe of society and their struggles to find meaning in a chaotic environment. Pasolini convinced Cinecitta’ executives to allow Betrolucci and Franco Citti to turn his story into screenplay. However by the time the script was ready, Pasolini was completely busy tending to his film Mamma Roma (1962), so luck and ample talent crossed path and the assignment of directing the film was given to 21 year old Bertolucci who had never before directed a full feature film.

In the Criterion’s interview of this disc, Bertolucci confesses to the initial disbelief sentiment the entire set had towards taking orders from a young unknown 21-year old. What I found interesting is that although Bertolucci tried to personalize the film with his signature poetic style of keeping the camera always in movement as it followed the characters’ individual trajectories towards the park crime scene, emphasizing the element of the passing hours as a prosaic manifestation of the ordinary and life-like realism – critics only saw the Pasolinian influence dominating. It tells you a lot about the delicate balance between screenplay and directing style, especially when the story comes from such a powerful source as Pasolini.

The film brings another fine auditory gem; a brooding suspense of the park scenes countered with a jovial jazzy street life – a genuine score
by classic composer Piero Piccioni. With that, the film opens up a window to a Pasolinian Rome coined in his signature novel “Ragazzi di vita” of the early 60’s, depicting rough urban realities of adolescents at the lowest social rung: the faces, the fashion, the accents, the architecture, the cars, and yes the music that paints it all with a rich depth.

You will find the story structure following Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950), where a master scene is being reflected by myriad of point views, in this case of the five eye witnesses, each revealing another layer that was not visible through the others.

Think about the next time you read the paper about the latest crime scoop, which serves as the only valid conclusion but what caused it often carries multiple conflicting agendas, which validates once again that the truth is indeed in the eye of the beholder.

>Buy this film

I came early to get a close seat in the first rows. I am surrounded with young film students in their early twenties that are busy texting and convivially chatting away. In the back are sitting some older folks with serious expressions. Photographers are everywhere with their cameras at the ready, which builds up a tension as if a spaceship from Mars is about to land any second.

With the customary 15 minutes delay, Debora Young, the Festival director opens up with a few words of introduction after which Maestro Bellocchio is ushered onto the stage that in instant becomes a focal point of million camera flashes.

Master class with Marco Bellocchio

Interviewing Bellocchio is Dan Fainaru (Internal Communications) that poses wide range of questions about various milestones in his rich career. No English translation is provided, so I am glad all these years of Saturday Italian classes are effectively kicking in. Here are some insights I found the most interesting:

• Cinematic approach taken by young students: Bellocchio sees today’s young film students as very proficient in mastering the technical aspects of producing an effective soundtrack or solid camera angles, giving an example of the other day’s Short films shown or a typical reality TV shows that generated an audience-wide jeer. What they most lack of is a good script and a credible recital. He points out that in the Neorealism period, non-professional actors although used banal dialogs, they were extremely genuine as they reflected real people telling their own stories in their natural habitat.
• Dubbing: Bellocchio outlines two stages in the evolution of dubbing (i.e., use of professional voiceover artists instead of the actors’ own voice): 1) when he started out back in 1965 it was a common practice. In the case of I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket), it was rather a necessity as Lou Castel, the lead actor did not speak Italian fluently. He also gave an example of many directors including Fellini that shot scenes with complete dialogs only to change them entirely at the dubbing stage. 2) Around the 80’s he ditched dubbing, as it has become outdated practice no one considered valid anymore.
• Italian Cinema today: Bellocchio teaches classes in directorship and screenplay writing. Regarding global cinema, he points out that even back in the 50’s 3D movies were popular, they disappeared and now are back in vogue, referring to the other day’s opening of Toy Story 3 in the Teatro Greco (Greek Theater). He didn’t say it explicitly but I found it as an acknowledgment that these are all technology muscles, but with no soul. As for Italian cinema, he confessed that classic Italian cinema, namely Neorrealism, had to its advantage extremely tough economic post-war conditions as backdrop, which enabled to tell much more believable stories about human poverty, loss of job and other survival challenges. With the help of an audience member sitting at the front row he summed up a common quote that aptly summed up the current thinking:

“Italian cinema today is inferior to the sum of its parts”

I do hope we won’t need another war to improve quality, as I believe there are great contemporary gems from Tornatore, Ozpetek, Salvatores, Sorrentino, Solidini and many others that brought forward new directions and perspectives in tune with the times. That said, it was a bit unsettling when I stopped at a local DVD store and the only titles for sale were American blockbusters. It could be a coincidence or cold business sense but still telling.

Just arrived yesterday to charming Taormina, aptly named because it’s perched royally on mount Tauro overlooking mount Etna. The town is not packed as I was initially afraid of but contains a healthy dose of tourists that happily savor the holy trinity: pasta-espresso-ice cream.

I decided to kick off the festival with the short films contest sponsored by New Italian Cinema Events (N.I.C.E), showcasing Sicilian cinema as an optimal way to get the local cultural sensibilities.

Here are some of my favorites, which illustrates that a rich story can easily be captured under 12 minutes:

Sunnyside (Ivano Fachin – 6′)
The film, shot in black and white depicts the grim daily grind of a corporate rat in… Manhattan (!?). I was hoping to see the Sicilian version… regardless the film is able to bring about a sense of daily work routine by using repetitive activities of the actor; drinking coffee, typing away in his office etc. with no heard dialogs – only intimate guitar soundtrack that shares space with the sounds of the big city. When the protagonist decides one day to wear a red clown nose firing smiles wherever he goes the people seem initially not to respond. It’s only when he gives up on this “be happy” strategy that reality changes but without him noticing. Think about it the next time you wait for an email reply that hasn’t arrived just yet. It’s just that people have other agendas and most likely it is not personal.

The Tomato – Il Pomodoro (Alessio Angelico – 9′)
If the previous film dealt with the grim side of life, this film literally lit up the screening room due to its comic and clever screenplay. Using a tried-and-true plot strategy of marrying unlikely combinations: a tomato falls out of the grocery bag of a light switch salesman, a seemingly trivial event, gets mushroomed into a Kafkian tail of bureaucratic nightmare. The poor guy needs to fill out official applications to remove the tomato from his doorstep as if it’s a public hazard. Inspectors are coming and measuring the shriveling tomato that by the day loses its original maturity when dropped, thus creating a vicious cycle of comic parody. I liked the choice of the tomato, as the object of contention, that on one hand puts the film on a sci-fi mode of an Italian society that like the sacred cows of India – evolved into complete veneration of the tomato with dead serious processes and at the same time the immense ridicule seeing it though realistic eyes.

Rec Stop Play (Emanuele Pisano – 11′)
The film weaves together 4 stories: a father tending to his comatose child, a prisoner on parole receiving love letters from a customer in a launderette where she works, a casual dialog of two passersby and a common thread of a guy that records all these dialogs only to play them back to a puppet in his garden. The message at the end of the film states: “communication conquers all barriers.” I saw a different Pirandellian message: what you see is never what it seems. Especially since the plotline uses brief shots to conjure specific assumptions and then reveal the opposite intent.

Self-Portrait – Autoritratto (Antonio Emanuele – 8′)
A frustrated painter is experiencing a radical case of creative bloc to the point his girlfriend leaves him and he’s left alone with a blank canvas that is mockingly staring at him in his shabby apartment. The photography and the facial expressions of the struggling actor that tries variety of tactics to compel the canvas into obedience – turns the canvas into a relentless adversary. It sure made me think about how hard sometimes the first stroke could be, carrying this imaginary heavy weight of self-criticism, where in fact all you need is really to take the plunge and let your first idea lead you to the second, third and Nth ideas that typically just hide under that blank page. Ideas are like a social network in your brain and can easily get viral, you just need to post the first comment…