Cinema - Italy (review)

This may be an overstatement, but the treasure house of the world's best films would be much smaller without Italy's contribution. In fact, seeing that country's best work for the first time is a revelation; it offers a vision of what the medium can and should do. Step forward Piero Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. All their films, in very different ways, highlight the dramatic and visual power of cinema, its ability to be both real, in a social sense, and a waking dream.

Stefania Parigi presents a collection of essays that emphasize the meaning and aesthetics of Italian films, rather than their historical or national concerns. This is not an easy book. Most of the time, it assumes that the reader is well acquainted with the films under discussion; there is an intensity of language and imagery that is unusual for an academic study. Even so, concentration yields its rewards. Parigi is an ideal film spectator. Like a kind of cinematic detective, she is attuned to the smallest details of images, structure, and juxtaposition. Her writing represents not only an eloquent examination of a particular filmmaker but also a deeper analysis of the function of film itself.

That function reveals itself in her first chapter on Cesare Zavattini, the Italian screenwriter and early theorist of neorealism. Parigi shows that this influential approach to post-war filmmaking was not a mere matter of documenting physical and social realities. Rather, it was a challenge to the established notions of filmmaking itself. Zavattini was looking for a new language, for what he called "the narration of life not in obedience to a plot, but actual existence." This did not mean a slavish adherence to reality, but rather new approaches to the construction of time, to the relationship between "verisimilitude and naturalist illusion," and to the nature of the image itself. These ideas are worked through in detail in a study of Roberto Rossellini's Paisa (1946), a compendium film about the American liberation of Italy. The author pays great attention to the complex construction of the screenplay with its mixture of conventional and improvised elements and to the role of its actors, some of whom were amateurs and some professionals. The author sees the film as a mythical and elliptical echo chamber, with a symbolic relationship between the structure of the shots and the rhythm of their associations. Her interpretation is a valuable warning to those of us who tend to assume that neorealism is only political and documentary-like.

This approach is at its most successful when Parigi is studying three films by Visconti—La terra trema (1948), Il Gattopardo/The Leopard (1963) and Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa.../Of a Thousand Delights/Sandra (1965). The first film is a neorealist study of the Sicilian fishing community, presented for the most part in the dialect of the region and containing echoes of one of Visconti's favourite novels, I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree) by Giovanni Verga. Parigi's emphasis here is on the dual nature of the film's language, the fact that Visconti wrote a script that was altered and interpreted by his nonprofessional cast, and that the film uses conventional voice-over to give the action context but also to act as a ritualistic chorus. The impression is that though the filmmaker is presenting a realistic tale, the power of his work comes from the tension between the naturalistic and the artificial, between high and low culture.

By contrast, Il Gattopardo is a story about aristocrats in the Sicily of 1860 and their response to Garibaldi and the Risorgimento. Here, the elegant characters and their luxurious possessions become almost one and the same thing. Visconti used real locations, studio sets and references to painting and literature to create a pictorial surface that embodies and dramatises the meaning. For anyone who loves this film, this chapter is invaluable, as is the analysis of Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa, a low-budget study of incest and the search for a lost past.

Parigi's...