Tag Archives: Federico Fellini

May 20, 2013

A Decalogue of the Dopest Movie References in Dylan

By michaelgloversmith

In honor of Bob Dylan’s birthday on Friday, this year’s movie-related Dylan birthday post is the inverse of last year’s list of the best Dylan references in movies; I’d now like to highlight some of the most memorable movie references in the work of Bob Dylan (whether in song lyrics, poems or Dylan’s own films). Happy 72nd, Bob!

10. The appropriation of a joke from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera in the song “Po’ Boy”

night

In spite of its fame, true Marx brothers fans know that A Night at the Opera (1935), along with all the other films the brothers made at MGM, is inferior to the anarchic, truly batshit-crazy slapstick movies they had made earlier at Paramount (e.g., Duck Soup, Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers, etc.). The problem is that, while the brothers were always the star of the show in their Paramount films, they tended to be shunted to the side in their MGM vehicles, while some wooden young romantic leads took center stage. Still, A Night at the Opera has its share of zingers. One of the best comes when Groucho calls room service to ask, “Room service? Send up a larger room.” This joke found its way into a couplet on the wryly funny “Po’ Boy,” one of the best cuts on Dylan’s celebrated “Love and Theft” album (2001):

“Po’ boy, in a hotel called the Palace of Gloom
Calls down to room service, says, ‘Send up a room'”

Of course, almost as funny as the room service joke itself is the notion that a hotel would be named the “Palace of Gloom.”

9. The homage to Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player in the poem “11 Outlined Epitaphs”

shoot

“there’s a movie called
Shoot the Piano Player
the last line proclaimin’
‘music, man, that’s where it’s at’
it is a religious line
outside, the chimes rung
an’ they
are still ringin'”

So ends “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” the long poetic liner notes Dylan wrote for his legendary 1963 album The Times They Are A-Changin’. Truffaut’s seminal French New Wave movie Shoot the Piano Player (1960) doesn’t end with anyone literally saying that music is “where it’s at” but that is the general impression of the scene: after the lead character, played by Charles Aznavour (long one of Dylan’s favorite singers), loses his girlfriend in a tragic shootout with gangsters, he simply returns to playing the piano — the thing he knows how to do best (and a sentiment with which the ever-touring Dylan can probably relate). Dylan seems to have been influenced by watching many foreign-language — especially French — films in Greenwich Village arthouse theaters early in his career. He would speak of being influenced by Truffaut and Godard in interviews for years to come.

8. The description of seeing Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in the memoir Chronicles: Volume One

ladolcevita

Bob Dylan first arrived in New York City in January 1961. Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) opened in New York only three months later and seems to have made a particularly strong impression on the young folk singer. Dylan name-checked Anita Ekberg, one of the film’s stars, in I Shall Be Free, the last track on his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and referenced the film’s title in the song “Motorpsycho Nitemare” one year later (see entry number two on this list). When Dylan met the German singer Nico a year after that, he claimed to remember her from her bit part in the film (when she was known by her birth name, Christa Paffgen). In his intentionally — and hilariously — inaccurate 2003 memoir Chronicles Volume One, Dylan used vivid language to describe seeing Fellini’s movie for the first time:

“There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies — French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to get out of America, go to Greenwich Village. I’d seen a couple of Italian Fellini movies there — one called La Strada, which means “the Street,” and another one called La Dolce Vita. It was about a guy who sells his soul and becomes a gossip hound. It looked like life in a carnival mirror.”

Dylan then intriguingly adds that he watched La Dolce Vita “intently,” unsure of whether he would ever have the chance to see it again. “Life in a carnival mirror” is exactly how many have described Dylan’s best lyrics from the 1960s.

7. The use of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance as an “opening act” in 2010.

intolerance

Dylan puzzled many longtime fans in 2010 when the early shows of his fall tour began with the opening 30 minutes of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (1916) being screened via digital projection. In a neat coincidence, some of the theaters Dylan was playing were old movie palaces that had originally shown Intolerance some 80-odd years earlier. What kind of message was Dylan trying to send? Some commentators speculated he was comparing 21st century America to the decadent, ancient Babylon depicted in Griffith’s film. Whatever the case, Dylan, as usual, kept mum. Midway through the tour, the projection of Intolerance stopped just as mysteriously as it had begun.

6. The appropriation of dialogue from Clint Eastwood’s Bronco Billy in the song Seeing the Real You at Last

bronco

Dylan has long used movie dialogue — along with lyrics from folk songs, stray lines from other works of literature, etc. — as a source for his song lyrics. In the mid-1980s especially, he was apparently spending a lot of time with classic Hollywood films on VHS, the dialogue of which found its way verbatim into his songs. This list could have been much, much longer if I had wanted to point out film dialogue appropriated solely for the 1985 album Empire Burlesque. Instead, I’ll settle for highlighting a single line from Clint Eastwood’s highly personal 1980 comedy Bronco Billy that turned up in the song “Seeing the Real You at Last.” At one point in the movie, Eastwood’s title character, a Wild West show impresario, says, “I’m looking for a woman who can ride like Annie Oakley and shoot like Belle Starr.”

The verse in “Seeing the Real You at Last” goes:

“When I met you, baby,
You didn’t show no visible scars,
You could ride like Annie Oakley,
You could shoot like Belle Starr.”

Incidentally, the “no visible scars” line is a quote from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). Almost every line in the song has been traced back to one film or another.

5. The homage to Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents in the song “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”

savage

One of the unlikeliest hits of Dylan’s career is the drunken sing-along/nonsense song “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn),” which originated as one of many such songs he spontaneously wrote and recorded with The Band in the legendary 1967 sessions that would form the basis of The Basement Tapes. Although nothing in the song’s lyrics corresponds very closely to anything that happens in Nicholas Ray’s underrated 1959 drama, it is generally assumed that the title is a reference to the protagonist of The Savage Innocents, an Inuit man played by actor Anthony Quinn. The song title itself would inspire yet another movie — the 1989 Jamaica-set thriller The Mighty Quinn, starring Denzel Washington as a detective.

4. The influence of Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise on the entire Rolling Thunder Revue-era

children

Along with La Dolce Vita and Shoot the Piano Player, another film that can be said to have had a major impact on Dylan’s career is Marcel Carne’s 1945 masterpiece Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis). It isn’t known exactly when Dylan first saw this tale of doomed love set in the world of 19th century Parisian theater but a revival screening at a Greenwich Village art house (with Suze Rotolo?) seems likely. At one point in the movie, the female lead, Garance, says, “You go your way and I’ll go mine,” which would form most of the title of a well-known song from Dylan’s 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. But Dylan clearly must have watched it again at some point in the early to mid-1970s because the film’s biggest influence was on the recorded music, live performances and film work Dylan was involved in from 1975 – 1978. Dylan’s bittersweet love song “You’re a Big Girl Now” from 1975 features the line “Love is so simple / to quote a phrase.” The phrase being quoted is a line from Children of Paradise, spoken by Garance twice during the movie. Dylan’s live appearances on the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975/1976 saw him wearing “white face” make-up in what is widely regarded as an homage to Baptiste, the mime protagonist of Carne’s film. And Dylan’s own 1978 movie Renaldo and Clara, a fascinating four-hour experimental epic shot during the 1975 tour that mixes live performances with improvised fictional scenes, has several elements clearly inspired by Children of Paradise. In an interview to promote Renaldo and Clara, Dylan even cited the Carne film as the only one he knew of that could “stop time.”

3. The appearance of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Titanic character in the song “Tempest”

titanic

Many Dylan fans were surprised when it was revealed in early 2012 that his forthcoming album, Tempest, would contain a 14-minute epic about the sinking of the Titanic. Even more surprising was when word leaked out that the title song included references to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson, who, in typically perverse Dylan fashion, is referred to by the actor’s name rather than the character’s name:

“Leo took his sketchbook
He was often so inclined
He closed his eyes and painted
The scenery in his mind”

Dylan fans are split on the song’s worth. Some find it overlong and monotonous while others have claimed it is one of the bard’s most extraordinary compositions. Dylan himself acknowledged the reference to DiCaprio in an interview with Rolling Stone: “Yeah, Leo. I don’t think the song would be the same without him. Or the movie.” What Dylan doesn’t say is that he was essentially repaying a compliment: DiCaprio’s character anachronistically quoted Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone in a line of dialogue in Titanic: “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

2. The parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in the story-song “Motorpsycho Nightmare”

psycho

Some of the funniest lyrics Dylan ever penned can be found in the story-song “Motorpsycho Nightmare” from 1964. The song essentially mashes-up the plot of Hitchcock’s proto-slasher film with the old joke about the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter. In the Dylan tune, a farmer grants the narrator a place to sleep for the night under the condition that he doesn’t touch the farmer’s daughter and in the morning milks a cow. In the middle of the night, the farmer’s daughter, who looks “just like Tony Perkins” (a line that rhymes, hilariously, with “I was sleepin’ like a rat / When I heard something jerkin'”), wakes up the narrator and implores him to take a shower. This leads to a slapstick fight between the narrator and the farmer, from which the narrator is lucky to escape alive. The song ends with the farmer’s daughter moving away and getting “a job in a motel” and the narrator thanking his lucky stars that he’s not “in the swamp” (the fate of Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho).

1. Myriad eferences to Henry King’s The Gunfighter in the song “Brownsville Girl”

gunfighter

One of Dylan’s very best songs is the 1986 mock-heroic epic “Brownsville Girl,” written in collaboration with playwright Sam Shepard (who was also, once upon a time, implored by Dylan to watch Children of Paradise and Shoot the Piano Player when he was hired to write scenes for Renaldo and Clara). The song begins with the line “Well, there was this movie I seen one time / About a man riding ‘cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck.” The song’s narrator tells the story of an ill-fated love affair with the title character that plays out in various locations across the state of Texas but he continually interrupts this narrative with reminiscences of seeing Henry King’s 1950 western The Gunfighter. The film indeed stars Peck as Jimmy Ringo, a famous gunfighter who is shot in the back by a “hungry kid trying to make a name for himself.” Ringo, on his deathbed, lies to the local sheriff, saying that it was he (Ringo) who drew first; his rationale is that he wants the kid to know what it feels like to have gunfighters out to get him. Dylan and Shepard get a lot of comic mileage out of having their narrator, who appears to be something of a coward (“I didn’t know whether to duck or to run, so I ran”), identify with Peck’s noble outlaw. When Dylan became a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1997, the award was presented by none other than Gregory Peck who, amusingly, made reference to the song:

For more fun with Dylan lyrics and film dialogue, check out this great site: http://dylanfilm.atspace.com/

Dylan fans should feel free to post their own favorite Dylan movie references in the comments section below.

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December 2, 2011

An Italian Cinema Primer: From Neo – to Psychological Realism, pt. 2

By michaelgloversmith

A continuation of the list of essential Italian movie titles spanning the movements of Neo – and Psychological Realism that I began last week. This part of the list encompasses films released from 1960 – 1969.

L’avventura (Antonioni, 1960)

A woman, Anna, mysteriously disappears while on a yachting trip with friends. The missing woman’s lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), spend the remainder of the movie looking for her but their search merely becomes the pretext for a love affair as they promptly proceed to forget about her. L’avventura‘s slow pace and lack of narrative resolution have driven many viewers up the wall (including me the first time I saw it) but Michelangelo Antonioni’s stately compositions and underlying philosophical themes have a power as awesome and mysterious as the ocean he so lovingly photographs in the film’s majestic first third. L’avventura‘s 1960 Cannes premiere was one of cinema’s game-changing moments.

La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)

Although he had made several formidable movies in the decade preceding it, La Dolce Vita marked the true beginning of Federico Fellini’s art as it would come to be known, loved and imitated: a stylistically baroque, excessive, grotesque depiction of life-as-a-carnival in which the director seemed to hurl at the screen all of his ideas about life, love and art with little regard for self-censorship. Marcello Mastroianni has movie star charisma to burn as a hedonistic yellow journalist struggling to come to grips with the modern world, the first of many times he would play the role of Fellini’s idealized alter ego.

Accattone (Pasolini, 1961)

The amazing first film of Pier Paolo Pasolini, loosely adapted from his own acclaimed novel A Violent Life. Pasolini follows the title character, a pimp played by the remarkable non-actor Franco Citti, through the slums of Rome in a style that could be said to harken back to Neorealism if not for the inclusion of a bold dream sequence and the director’s insistence on viewing Accatone as a saint (most obviously through the repeated use of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion chorus on the soundtrack). One of the all-time great directorial debuts.

8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)

Life imitates art and art imitates life in Fellini’s masterpiece, a thinly-disguised autobiographical study of a movie director (Mastroianni again) fighting “director’s block.” Guido Anselmi struggles to complete his latest film, a science fiction epic, as fantasies, dreams and childhood memories collide (most of which pertain to Guido’s struggles with religion and/or women). Fellini never again recaptured the greatness on display here (even though he repeatedly mined similar subject matter) but as far as career peaks go, 8 1/2, quite simply one of the most influential movies ever, remains a dizzying high.

Black Sabbath (Bava, 1963)

Yes, the band got their name from here. Mario Bava’s superb anthology film tells three unrelated spine-tingling tales of terror (a literal translation of the original Italian title is “Evil Has Three Faces”). In the first, an early giallo, a woman alone in her apartment receives threatening phone calls from a mysterious stranger. In the second, an elderly vampire attempts to “turn” his entire family. In the third, a nurse is haunted by the image of a dead woman after stealing her ring. Serving as master of ceremonies is none other than Boris Karloff who also plays the vampire, with great poignance, in the second story. What really impresses here is Bava’s visual storytelling: he conveys an atmosphere of dread through a bold and eerie use of color (dig the purple), camera movement and composition. One of the great horror movies.

The Leopard (Visconti, 1963)

Few directors have been as adept at capturing physical beauty as Luchino Visconti and The Leopard is his most beautiful and perfectly realized film. Adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s equally great novel, Visconti’s movie tells the story of Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (a fittingly regal and masculine Burt Lancaster) who maneuvers through the political tumult of 1860s Sicily, which includes marrying his revolutionary-minded nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) to the beautiful, newly upper-class Angelica (Claudia Cardinale). The Leopard‘s climactic ball scene, a virtually non-narrative 40 minute visual feast, is one of the glories of the film medium. The Criterion Collection’s blu-ray release of this title single-handedly justifies the purchase of a blu-ray player.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, 1964)

Pasolini’s best-loved film is this unorthodox but reverential version of the Christ story in which the life of Jesus (hauntingly portrayed by non-actor Enrique Irazoqui) is told in straightforward, realistic fashion – from his birth in Bethlehem to his revolutionary political teachings to his crucifixion, death and resurrection at Golgotha. Some critics have detected a Marxist slant to Pasolini’s take yet this is a movie virtually anyone, even the Pope, could love. The impressively eclectic soundtrack features Bach, Mahalia Jackson and Blind Willie Johnson.

Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film features one of the most expressive and purposeful employments of color cinematography in the history of cinema, where the director notoriously spray painted entire fields in order to achieve the appropriate psychological mood. Red Desert begins shortly after Giuliana (Monica Vitti in her prime), the wife of a wealthy industrialist has suffered some kind of unspecified mental breakdown. Seemingly unable to adapt to the modern world, the distressed woman is taken advantage of by Zeller (a dubbed but very fine Richard Harris), a business associate of her husband. Arguably the apotheosis of Antonioni’s career (at least as a work of pure visual storytelling), this is the last Italian movie he would make for many years.

Fists in the Pocket (Bellocchio, 1965)

If L’avventura lamented the displacement of traditional social institutions (marriage, church, family, etc.) by eros in the modern world, Fists in the Pocket goes a step further and allegorizes post-War Italy as a murderous, incestuous family presided over by a blind, religious mother. Lou Castel, a Colombian actor best known for his work in Italian and French movies, burns up the screen as Alessandro, a mentally disturbed young man who is driven by ostensibly altruistic reasons to murder his family members one by one. A harrowing debut film by the prodigiously talented writer/director Maro Bellocchio.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the definitive “spaghetti western,” a popular subgenre of American-set westerns made in Europe, usually Spain, by a typically Italian cast and crew. This is the third installment of a trilogy (preceded by A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More, both of which also starred Clint Eastwood) but this Hollywood co-production works perfectly as a stand-alone film. The plot concerns the misadventures of the title trio, all of whom are in search of $200,000 in buried gold, set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Director Sergio Leone’s “operatic” visual style combines with Ennio Morricone’s legendarily innovative score to lend The Good, the Bad and the Ugly a singular tone that is at once comical, cartoonish and, in Dave Kehr’s astute phrase, “inexplicably moving.”

Dillinger is Dead (Ferreri, 1969)

Marco Ferreri’s bat-shit crazy black comedy is very much a product of the “anything goes” 1960s: it captures one long night in the life of a bored bourgeoisie (the always terrific Michel Piccoli in what is nearly a one-man show) as he engages in gourmet cooking, infidelity and murder. Along the way, he paints a pistol red with white polka dots, listens to some groovy music and projects and interacts with home movies on his living room wall. I respect this experimental film more than I love it but, as an example of cinema at the end of its tether, I can’t think of a better way to put an end to this particular list of movies.

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November 28, 2011

An Italian Cinema Primer: From Neo – to Psychological Realism, pt. 1

By michaelgloversmith

The most well-known period in the history of Italian cinema remains the era of “Italian Neorealism,” the legendarily socially conscious movement comprised of documentary-style films made during the years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. But I think the best way to understand Italian cinema is to look at how the conventions of Neorealism gradually morphed into something quite different (and arguably even polar opposite) by the end of the 1960s – mostly at the hands of the very same filmmakers (Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, et al) who had been responsible for setting the world on fire by helping to create that earlier revolutionary movement. Antonioni purportedly once claimed that “the bicycle is no longer enough,” referring to the fact that a film character’s psychological problems should no longer be seen as stemming only from external factors. There is no more succinct description of the transition that occurred between the socially-rooted dilemmas of the characters in Neorealism and the more extravagant psychological flights of fancy found in Fellini or in the existential angst of the characters in Antonioni. It is also significant that the characters of Neorealism tended to be working class while the characters of the Psychological Realism of the ’60s tended to be affluent. Between these two seemingly opposite poles of Italian cinema can be found nothing less than the whole wide world.

The list is presented in chronological order and will be split across two posts. The first part below encompasses the years 1943 – 1959:

Ossessione (Visconti, 1943)

Luchino Visocnti’s unofficial adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is often cited as the birth of Italian Neorealism due to its working class milieu and use of documentary-style location shooting. However, Visconti’s employment of Cain’s Hollywood-style plot (a woman who runs an inn seduces an unemployed drifter into murdering her much older and less attractive husband) and the use of glamorous stars in the lead roles (Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti) better positions this as an early forerunner of the movement.

Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945)

Roberto Rossellini is, in my opinion, the greatest of all Italian directors and this low-budget but courageous dramatization of the Nazi occupation of Italy in the waning months of WWII, heroically made immediately after the period had ended, was where he first found himself. The climactic scenes depicting the torture of Resistance members by the forces of Fascism remind us of what true courage is, much more so than what has ever been achieved by the feel-goodism of Hollywood-style recreations. Anna Magnani’s performance is one of the miracles of cinema.

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

The definitive Italian Neorealist film remains a deceptively simple, emotionally overwhelming experience that must be seen by anyone who loves movies. Writer Cesare Zavattini and director Vittorio de Sica crafted the ultimately politically engaged drama with this tale of Antonio Ricci, an unemployed factory worker (non-actor Lamberto Maggiorani) who finds a job putting up posters around Rome that requires the use of a bicycle. After selling his bedsheets to get his bike out of hock, Antonio finds that his bicycle is tragically stolen, a turn of events that causes him to spend the day looking for the thief with the aid of his young son Bruno (Enzo Staioloa). A humanistic portrait of despair that has never been bettered.

Bitter Rice (De Santis, 1949)

A fascinating melodrama/film noir/Neorealist hybrid set among female rice workers in the Po valley. The voluptuous Silvana Mangano became an international star overnight for her portrayal of Silvana, a working girl tempted by the bounty of a thief on the run. A huge commercial success upon its release due to its unbridled depiction of earthy sexuality, Bitter Rice still packs a memorable erotic punch today.

Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950)

After helping to define Neorealism only a few years earlier, Roberto Rossellini abruptly turned his back on the movement with this astonishing Ingrid Bergman-starring melodrama, the first in a profitable cycle of such films. An Eastern European woman (Bergman) agrees to marry an Italian fisherman in order to escape a prison camp in the aftermath of WWII. But life in the fishing of village of Stromboli isn’t all that she hoped it would be, which leads to a startling existential crisis. A film of both incredible documentary value (the tuna fishing sequence!) and visceral erotic symbolism.

The Gold of Naples (De Sica, 1954)

Following the box office flop of the bleak Neorealist Umberto D in 1952, director Vittorio de Sica returned to directing the light comedy that characterized his early work. He also returned to his native Napoli for this delightful anthology of comic vignettes: a gangster forges an unlikely relationship with a clown, a down-on-his luck aristocrat gambles with a child, a prostitute gets married, an unfaithful woman searches for her missing wedding ring. The incredible use of Neapolitan locations and the high-powered cast of glamorous actors (Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano, de Sica himeself) make this arguably the most Italian film on this list.

Senso (Visconti, 1954)

Alida Valli is a wanton countess in 19th century Italy who betrays her country to pursue a destructive affair with a lieutenant of the occupying Austrian army (Farley Granger). Visconti’s elegant mise-en-scene, featuring impeccable period set and costume design rendered in ravishingly beautiful Technicolor, marked an about face from his early Neorealist phase and the beginning of a mature “operatic” style that would continue for the rest of his career.

Journey to Italy (AKA Journey to Italy) (Rossellini, 1954)

My favorite Italian movie ever is this deceptively simple melodrama about a bored married couple (George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman) who travel to Naples following a death in the family. As they wander the city separately (she visits museums and the ruins of Pompeii, he flirts with the prospect of adultery), they take emotional stock of their lives for the first time in years, leading to one of the most spiritually uplifting finales in cinema. A film in which nothing and everything happens, this is the birth of cinematic modernism without which such diverse films as Antonioni’s L’avventura, Godard’s Contempt and Kiarostami’s Certified Copy would not be possible.

Il Grido (Antonioni, 1957)

Il Grido is unusual for Michelangelo Antonioni in that it focuses on a working class character (the first and last time he would do so) but is typical of the director in almost every other respect: a near plotless series of events, the theme of the alienating effects of modernity, a generally bleak tone and a fine compositional eye for landscapes and architecture. The American actor Steve Cochran is very good as the mechanic who breaks up with his long-term girlfriend, then takes her daughter on the road where he drifts through a series of casual affairs. Fascinating in its own right but even more so seeing how it prefigures an epic stretch of greatness that would begin with Antonioni’s very next film, 1960’s Lavventura.

Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 1957)

This is in my opinion the best of Fellini’s pre-Dolce Vita films, a relatively fleet and stylistically subdued valentine to the genius acting talent of his wife Giulietta Masina. Here she plays the title character, an eternally optimistic prostitute who works the streets of Rome while conscientiously saving money and dreaming of a better life. The picaresque narrative takes her through a series of adventures both humorous and heartbreaking, climaxing in an extraordinary final shot, a tribute to an indomitable spirit that will permanently burn itself into your brain.

To be continued . . .

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May 15, 2010

Top 25 Films of the 1960s

By michaelgloversmith

25. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda, France, 1962)

cleode5a703

24. Psycho (Hitchcock, USA, 1960)

23. Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, France, 1966)

22. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, USA, 1968)

21. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Straub/Huillet, Germany, 1968)

20. The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Rossellini, France/Italy, 1966)

19. Boy (Oshima, Japan, 1969)

boy

18. 8 1/2 (Fellini, Italy, 1963)

Life imitates art and art imitates life in Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, a thinly-disguised autobiographical study of a movie director (Mastroianni again) fighting “director’s block.” Guido Anselmi struggles to complete his latest film, a science fiction epic, as fantasies, dreams and childhood memories collide (most of which pertain to Guido’s struggles with religion and/or women). Fellini never again recaptured the greatness on display here (even though he repeatedly mined similar subject matter) but as far as career peaks go, 8 1/2, quite simply one of the most influential movies ever, remains a dizzying high.

17. Black Girl (Sembene, Senegal, 1966)

black

16. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, USA, 1962)

15. Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, France/Italy, 1961)

Alain Resnais followed up Hiroshima, Mon Amour by expanding on its innovative formal structure to create this audacious, intellectual “puzzle film.” A man and a woman (again unnamed) meet at the title resort where he attempts to convince her, against her protests, they had met and had an affair the previous year. As Marienbad progresses, we can never be sure if we are watching flashbacks, false memories or fantasies – or even which character might own them. Don’t let its reputation as a “cold,” “impenetrable” film deter you; there are many points of entry into this masterpiece, including the extraordinarily beautiful black-and-white cinematography, the sly humor of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s script and a great lead performance by the regal Delphine Seyrig.

14. A Fugitive from the Past (Uchida, Japan, 1965)

13. Army of Shadows (Melville, France, 1969)

12. My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer, France, 1968)

mauds

11. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, Italy, 1964)

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s best-loved film is this unorthodox but reverential version of the Christ story in which the life of Jesus (hauntingly portrayed by non-actor Enrique Irazoqui) is told in straightforward, realistic fashion – from his birth in Bethlehem to his revolutionary political teachings to his crucifixion, death and resurrection at Golgotha. Some critics have detected a Marxist slant to Pasolini’s take yet this is a movie virtually anyone, even the Pope, could love. The impressively eclectic soundtrack features Bach, Mahalia Jackson and Blind Willie Johnson.

10. Charulata (Ray, India, 1964)

My favorite Satyajit Ray film is this 1964 masterpiece, the title of which is sometimes translated as The Lonely Wife. It tells the story of Charu, a housewife with an interest in literature, whose wealthy husband is preoccupied with his business of running an English language newspaper. The husband’s younger brother comes to visit and forms an instant intellectual bond with Charu that threatens to turn into something more serious. The psychology and emotions of the characters are vividly captured by both a flawless cast of performers as well as Ray’s atypically daring use of film form (i.e., camerawork, editing and even optical effects) that suggests the influence of the French New Wave; highlights include the impressionistic swing set scene and the unforgettable final freeze frame.

9. The Leopard (Visconti, Italy, 1963)

Few directors have been as adept at capturing physical beauty as Luchino Visconti and The Leopard is his most beautiful and perfectly realized film. Adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s equally great novel, Visconti’s movie tells the story of Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (a fittingly regal and masculine Burt Lancaster) who maneuvers through the political tumult of 1860s Sicily, which includes marrying his revolutionary-minded nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) to the beautiful, newly upper-class Angelica (Claudia Cardinale). The Leopard‘s climactic ball scene, a virtually non-narrative 40 minute visual feast, is one of the glories of the film medium. The Criterion Collection’s blu-ray release of this title single-handedly justifies the purchase of a blu-ray player.

8. Viridiana (Bunuel, Spain, 1961)

7. L’avventura (Antonioni, Italy, 1960)

A woman, Anna, mysteriously disappears while on a yachting trip with friends. The missing woman’s lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), spend the remainder of the movie looking for her but their search merely becomes the pretext for a love affair as they promptly proceed to forget about her. L’avventura‘s slow pace and lack of narrative resolution have driven many viewers up the wall (including me the first time I saw it) but Michelangelo Antonioni’s stately compositions and underlying philosophical themes have a power as awesome and mysterious as the ocean he so lovingly photographs in the film’s majestic first third. L’avventura‘s 1960 Cannes premiere was one of cinema’s game-changing moments.

6. Le Mepris (Godard, France/Italy, 1963)

The best movie ever made about making a movie (and no, I’m not forgetting 8 1/2), Jean-Luc Godard’s colorful, Italian-shot fantasia stars Michel Piccoli as a beleaguered screenwriter, Brigitte Bardot as his trophy wife, Jack Palance as a blowhard American producer and the great director Fritz Lang as himself, all of whom collide on an unlikely film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Add in a magisterial score by George Delerue, one of the greatest ever written, and the end result is Godard’s finest early work.

5. Chimes at Midnight (Welles, Spain/Italy, 1965)

4. Playtime (Tati, France, 1967)

Jacques Tati achieved perfection with this 1967 masterpiece, the pinnacle of his career. The great director put the largest budget he ever had to work with to good use, constructing enormous steel-and-glass skyscraper sets in order to suggest a futuristic Paris. Inside of this city of encroaching globalization (before the term “globalization” even existed), Tati’s characters — including Monsieur Hulot in a diminished role — bounce around like human pinballs. Shot in deep focus 70mm, the intricate jokes on display take place in the foreground, middleground and background of the frame, and often occur simultaneously, resulting in a film that demands to be seen many times in order to be fully appreciated — even though watching it for the first time is as easy as breathing. To see Playtime projected in 70mm is one of the glories of moviegoing. As the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, the film’s most eloquent defender has perceptively asked, “What other movie converts work into play so pleasurably by turning the very acts of seeing and hearing into a form of dancing?”

3. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, Russia, 1966)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, epic biopic of the famed 15th century icon painter is for my money the greatest movie ever made about the life of an artist. Told in vignette fashion, Tarkovsky depicts Rublev’s story against the turbulent backdrop of medieval Russia during the Tatar invasions. The highlight is the climactic sequence where Rublev, who has sworn a vow of silence in protest of the horrors he has seen, witnesses a boy oversee the arduous process of casting a giant bell. The boy saves himself from execution by successfully casting the bell in spite of the fact that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. At the conclusion of this awe-inspiring 30 minute scene, the depiction of a miracle that comes off as a miracle of filmmaking, Rublev is inspired not only to speak again but to continue painting and to go on and create his greatest works.

2. Gertrud (Dreyer, Denmark, 1964)

Carl Dreyer’s final film is an adaptation of Hjalmar Soderberg’s 1906 play of the same title and its deceptively theatrical character is also reminiscent of Ibsen (a protoypical feminist heroine) and Strindberg (the eternal conflict between men and women). But there are few films as truly and wonderfully cinematic as Gertrud, whose unique qualities of stillness, slowness and whiteness are perfectly suited to capturing the title character’s near-religious view of romantic love as an uncompromising ideal. A lot of men seem to love Gertrud but none love her as much as she requires and so she chooses to live alone – without regrets. Unforgettable for its use of long takes (one of which clocks in at 10 minutes) and Nina Pens Rode’s luminous lead performance.

1. Antonio das Mortes (Rocha, Brazil, 1969)

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