Moving on to the next film, in Riso amaro, melodrama and neorealism coexist to serve a different purpose. Namely, Giuseppe De Santis uses their juxtaposition as symbolism for the ideals of consumerism and Marxism, respectively. In fact, De Santis was already well-known as a Communist thinker, frequently communicating those ideas through his films. To begin to understand the significance of this symbolism in Riso amaro, the influx of American culture into Italy must first be explored. Any nation finds itself susceptible to the culture of a foreign army, but the liberating Americans brought a particularly strong influence to Italy during the Second World War. Robin Buss hypothesises that the great impact was due to the large number of those soldiers interacting with the local people who spoke Italian themselves because of ancestry. Following the war, the Italian population, particularly in the lower classes, sought to leave the war behind them and take full advantage of the recently lifted fascist restrictions. Thus, many turned to the allure of Americanised glamour and consumerism as well as photo-romances. De Santis viewed this as an invasion of a foreign culture that threatened the pure, rural life of lower-class Italy. In Riso amaro, the director links the presence of melodrama to an infatuation with Hollywood glamour.
To begin with, the opening scene of Riso amaro introduces this dichotomy between consumerism and worker solidarity. In fact, even the opening title helps establish that, reading “man has sought two things since the dawn of time – food and love.” In this scenario, food obviously connects to the basic needs of the workers, while love carries the connotation of the artificial sentiment of photo-romances. Followi...
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...sà. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. Organizzazione Film Internazionali, 1946. DVD.
Pucci, Lara. ""Terra Italia": The Peasant Subject as Site of National and Socialist Identities in the Work of Renato Guttuso and Giuseppe De Santis." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 71 (2008): 315-34. JSTOR.
Riso Amaro. Dir. Giuseppe De Santis. Perf. Silvana Mangano, Doris Dowling, and Vittorio Gassman. Lux Film, 1949. DVD.
Roma Città Aperta. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. Perf. Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani. Excelsa Film, 1945. DVD.
Viiti, Antonio C. “Riso Amaro/Bitter Rice.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower, 2004. Print.
Wagstaff, Christopher. “Italian genre films in the world market.” Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity: 1945-95. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 74-85. Print.
Ginsborg P (1990). ‘A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics: 1943-1980’ Published by Penguin; Reprint edition (27 Sep 1990).
A Raisin in the Sun. Dir. Daniel Petrie. Perf. Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee and John Fiedler. Columbia Pictures, 1961.
Film Noir, as Paul Schrader integrates in his essay ‘Notes on Film Noir,’ reflects a marked phase in the history of films denoting a peculiar style observed during that period. More specifically, Film Noir is defined by intricate qualities like tone and mood, rather than generic compositions, settings and presentation. Just as ‘genre’ categorizes films on the basis of common occurrences of iconographic elements in a certain way, ‘style’ acts as the paradox that exemplifies the generality and singularity at the same time, in Film Noir, through the notion of morality. In other words, Film Noir is a genre that exquisitely entwines theme and style, and henceforth sheds light on individual difference in perception of a common phenomenon. Pertaining
Two years ago I went to an exhibition in Milan titled: “Artemisia: storia di una passione” (“Artemisia: history of a passion”). The exhibition was sponsored by the Assessorato alla Cultura of the Comune of Milano and curated by Roberto Contini and Francesco Solinas, with the scenographic and theatrical work of Emma Dante.
Hamlet. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Perf. Mel Gibson and Glenn Close. Videocassette. Warner Home Video, 1990.
PORFIRIO, R., SILVER, A., & URSINI, J. (2001). Film noir reader 3: interviews with filmmakers of the classic noir period. New York, Limelight.
Bondanella, Peter. (2009), A History of Italian Cinema, NY, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
The Godfather is the “dark-side of the American dream story” (Turan, pp2). The film follows the practices of a fictional Italian mafia family, the Corleone’s. Though most Americans do not condone the practices of the Italian mafia, they cannot deny that Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is a cinematic masterpiece. This film gave insight to a mysterious way of life that the average person does not have knowledge of. As the audience is educated about the mafia they also are introduced to many stereotypes.
Since the beginning of its existence as a country, Italy has faced enormous challenges in establishing itself as a unified political and social entity. The geographic, economic, and linguistic differences between its various regions and the artificial manner in which they were amalgamated created a legacy of internal divisions that continues to dominate the country's political climate to this day. Italy's numerous historical fiascoes, such as its disastrous involvement in the two World Wars and the rise of fascism, further escalated the domestic problems that had haunted it since the Risorgimento. At first, the anti-fascist Resistance movement, which dominated the end of World War II, seemed to bring Italy a ray of hope, promising a new era of freedom, reform, and democratic representation. However, this hope was quickly extinguished, as widespread poverty, government corruption, and deep divisions between regions and classes persisted and no true social reform was attained. These harsh conditions were depicted by a group of Italian film directors whose neorealist works have since been celebrated as masterpieces of world cinema. One of the most prominent of these is Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. This 1948 film discusses the prevalent themes dominating Italy's social and political history, within the context of the unsettlingly poor post-War urban proletariat.
Barrera, Adriana, et al. Cinergia Movie File: Camila. 10 Apr. 2001. 15 Feb. 2005 .
One of the most influential Italian cinemas film directors was Federico Fellini, who became popular after World War II. The filmography of Fellini included 24 titles; of which won him five Academy Awards including the most Oscars in history for best foreign language film (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Federico Fellini’s influences have became such an integral part of the film industry, that some of his influences are barely even credited to him in todays society such as the word “paparazzi” which originated in his film La Dolce Vita, and became the word it means today. Also high schools across the America stage perform the Broadway musical comedy Sweet Charity, which was based on the Fellini film Nights of Cabiria, which was a film about an eternally optimistic Roman prostitute (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Fellini started out as a documentary-style realist in the Neorealism movement but soon developed his own distinctive style of autobiographical films that imposed dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery upon ordinary situations and portrayed people at their most bizarre state (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Federico Fellini was a significant directors in the Neorealism movement in his early career but later left Neorealism behind and created a new style of film that’s influences are still seen today and are prominent in film and other artistic pieces of work.
Jalao, Ly. "Looking Gran Torino in the Eye: A Review." Journal of Southeast Asian American. 5. (2010): 1-6. Web. 23 Feb. 2012.
As we traverse through time and history the world goes through many different phases; some of these phases have no similarity to the last and some overlap with one another. One of the phases Italian cinema went through was Neorealism. Like everything else, every phase comes to an end. Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D was considered the moving away from Neorealism in Italian cinema history. Umberto D did, however, carry aspects of neorealism just as Bicycle Thief, also by Vittorio De Sica, does during the prime of Neorealism.
Gunning, Tom 2000, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early film, its spectator, and the avant-garde.” Film and theory: An anthology, Robert Stam & Toby Miller, Blackwell, pp 229-235.
Martini, G. (2013) I Festival sono ancora necessari?, Spec. Issue of 8 ½- Numeri, visioni e prospettive del cinema italiano (2013).