Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

popularity, and economic strength that it had never
before achieved before and that it would never again
reach. Film production continued at well above two
hundred films for a number of years, while a
prolonged crisis in the American industry reduced
Hollywood competition within the domestic market
and abroad. Italy could boast a number of distinguished
auteurs (Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, De Sica,
Rossellini) who were producing their greatest masterpieces.
Their films not only fascinated critics and festival
audiences but also were highly successful
commercially. Such hits as Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi
fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), Il Gattopardo
(The Leopard, 1962), La Caduta degli dei (The
Damned, 1969), and Morte a Venezia (Death in
Venice, 1971); Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life,
1959), 8½ (1963), Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1969),
and Amarcord (1973); Antonioni’s trilogy on modern
love L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (The Night, 1961),
and L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) in black and white and
the important color films Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert,
1964) and Blow-Up (1966); and De Sica’s La Ciociara
(Two Women, 1960) and Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini
(The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, 1970) all show highly
complex stylistic shifts in films created by four auteurs
whose origins evolved beyond the simpler neorealist
approach of their early work.
De Sica’s two films were awarded Oscars Ò and are
highly wrought commercial films, skillful adaptations of
literary works that might well have been made in
Hollywood. Two Women portrayed a woman’s horrifying
experiences during the war and provided a successful star
vehicle for a performance by Sophia Loren (b. 1934) that
earned her an Oscar Ò for Best Actress. The Garden of
the Finzi-Contini presented a moving portrait of the
Holocaust in Ferrara. Both films were far removed from
the spirit of the simple storylines about humble people
that established De Sica as neorealism’s most poetic
director. Visconti’s films portrayed broad historical
themes with lush, opera-like mise-en-scène: The Leopard,
for example, was a pessimistic interpretation of Italy’s
national unification, while The Damned and Death in
Venice both examined different aspects of German
national character from the standpoint of European decadence
and modernism. Visconti’s films often seem as if
they could easily unfold on the operatic stage of La Scala.
In Antonioni’s films, both those in color and in traditional
black and white, photography preempted the central
function of traditional plot and character, as his
characters came to grips with a sense of alienation and
futility in the modern industrial world. Antonioni was
particularly brilliant in relating characters to their environments,
and he framed his shots as if he were a contemporary
abstract painter, asking his audience to
Italy
consider people and objects as equally important and
meaningful.
Fellini’s baroque style in La Dolce Vita, or his celebration
of artistic creativity in 8½, present broad strokes
of fantasy, informed by the analysis of the director’s own
dreams and his desire to recreate his own bizarre fantasy
world. For Fellini, the imagination, rather than reality,
had become the cinema’s proper domain because only
fantasy fell under the director’s complete artistic control.
Since cinema entailed expression, not the communication
of information, its essence was imagery and light, not
traditional storytelling. The film 8½ also made an
important statement about the nature of film art itself.
The harried protagonist of the film, the director Guido,
possesses many of Fellini’s own traits. The narrative
employed by Fellini in this work moved rapidly and
disconcertingly between Guido’s ‘‘reality,’’ his fantasies,
and flashbacks to the past of dreams—a discontinuous
story line with little logical or chronological unity.
Considered by many directors to be the greatest and most
original film ever made (Citizen Kane may be its only
true rival), 8½ has been imitated by directors as different
as François Truffaut, Spike Jonze, Joel Schumacher,
Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Bob Fosse, and Peter
Greenaway, not to mention certain episodes of David
Chase’s TV series The Sopranos. Fellini Satyricon presented
a psychedelic version of the classic novel by
Petronius, while Amarcord offered a bittersweet portrait
of Italian provincial life under fascism, the main characters
of which may be considered the parents of the postwar
slackers in The Vitelloni. Amarcord asserted Fellini’s
belief that Italian fascism displayed the nation’s arrested
development, its paralysis in adolescence, and the average
Italian’s wish for a delegation of moral responsibility to
others, an unusually ideological position taken by a
director who was often criticized for ignoring social
problems by his leftist critics.
THE SECOND WAVE: A NEW POST-NEOREALIST
GENERATION OF AUTEURS
If Visconti, De Sica, Antonioni, and Fellini dominated
the cinema of the period, their international prestige
coincided with the rise of an extremely talented group
of younger men and women whose early works were
indebted to neorealism but characterized by more ideological
intentions. The best examples of such works are Il
Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew,
1964) by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975); Battaglia di
Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo
(b. 1919); Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution,
1964) by Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940); La Cina è vicina
(China Is Near, 1967) by Marco Bellocchio (b. 1939);
Salvatore Giuliano (1962) by Francesco Rosi (b. 1922);
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 47