Experience

New Italian Cinema's fact, fiction, fascination

Is it soccer or politics that is Italy’s reigning national sport? Certainly the former is more beloved—but the latter arguably offers even more unpredictably suspenseful gamesmanship. The Italian political landscape frequently makes our own look flat as a Kansas cornfield. Unsurprisingly, then, that the 13th edition of San Francisco Film Society’s New Italian Cinema festival, finds the political and personal mixing more frequently than you’d find in any assortment of U.S. narrative films.

That’s certainly personified by this year’s tributee, mid-career writer/director Marco Risi. Son of the late Dino Risi, popular craftsman of robust comedies, Marco has demonstrated a strong social consciousness in the diverse projects he’s produced since the early 1980s.

topics: art film, audiences, italian cinema, san francisco film society, world cinema

Take Two

PFA offers a look at the exiled Ingrid Bergman

Before Ingrid Bergman, European starlets exported to Hollywood tended to be exotics, femmes fatales, mystery women—always the “other,” whether a grand tragedienne like Garbo or a vamp like Pola Negri.

Bergman was the first girl next door whose door happened to originate several thousand miles from Anytown, U.S.A. Even when she played “bad girls,” the American public trusted she was really above reproach. When they decided otherwise, she was virtually exiled for some years—sent back to Europe, where (diehard American Puritans imagined) such fallen women belonged.

topics: actors, european film, genre films, hollywood, immigration, italian cinema

Critic's Notebook

PFA rescues "Desert of the Tartars" from undeserved obscurity

It’s usually easy enough to pinpoint why a particular movie is remembered, but often hard to explain just why another has been forgotten. Certainly Valerio Zurlini’s 1976 The Desert of the Tartars—making an exceedingly rare appearance this Wednesday as part of the Pacific Film Archive’s “Ecco l’uomo: Celebrating Italian Actors” series—would seem an unlikely candidate for such obscurity as it’s languished in for 30-odd years.

topics: italian cinema, pacific film archive, world cinema

Experience

SFIFF52: "Once Upon a Time in the West," restored

In a sense, nobody has ever made movies larger than Sergio Leone. Not large in expense, epic scale, or god knows in cosmic import. But rather large in the sense of, well, tangible largeness —no one has ever quite equaled his ability to maximize the unforgiving vastness of wide open spaces and the intransigent solitude of humans hellbent on enforcing their will within that inhumane desolation. Could he have made his mark in any genre but the Western, with its innate need for harsh wilderness and stark good-vs.-evil conflicts? Perhaps, but it’s hard to imagine how. Leone’s sensibility fit the Western so completely that in the end he was almost incapable of working his way out of it.

This Sunday afternoon the SF International Film Festival presents a meticulously restored new print of Once Upon a Time in the West, there’s little risk in promising that it will be spectacular. This 1968 Italian-U.S. coproduction was Leone’s magnum opus, granted all the length, extravagance and star power he could desire. Was this fulfillment (not to mention the sheer exhaustion of marshaling such sprawling resources) so overwhelming that it made future effort near-impossible?

topics: actors, bay area, critics, directors, genre films, hollywood, international film, italian cinema, san francisco international film festival, world cinema

Insider

New Italian Cinema faces forward, flashes back

Early in the silent era, Italian cinema had a major global presence. It did again for a long stretch after World War II—from neorealism’s dawn to the ’60s heyday of Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni and Visconti. That latter period also encompassed the commercial bonanzas of “sword ‘n’ sandal” epics, “spaghetti westerns” (which made Clint Eastwood a star), plus exportable bombshells like Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, and the musically named Gina Lollobrigida. Imagine, foreign movies (albeit English-dubbed ones) in wide U.S. release! So 1962. Those days may be gone, but Italy still makes good movies: More than a few of them are in the current edition of New Italian Cinema, a showcase presented by New Italian Cinema Events (aka NICE), the Italian Cultural Institute and San Francisco Film Society, and beginning Sunday, November 16.

On the basis of features previewed, this is an especially strong year for the festival. It starts on a fun note: Tributee Paolo Virzi, whose prior efforts Living It Up (1994) and Hardboiled Egg (1997) are also being screened, will be on hand to present Napoleon (and Me), an historical fiction of the kind that used to be called a “romp.”

topics: actors, bay area, directors, italian cinema, san francisco film society, world cinema

Insider

"Days and Clouds" finds changes in the weather

It’s said those who’ve never known it think love is the key to happiness; the poor know it is money. Those who espouse the more selfless kind of love are either monks or have never known real, suffocating, no-visible-way-out poverty. Even a drop from one economic strata to another that might still be positively luxurious in the Third World can cause serious anxiety or worse in the First.

Particularly now, with the economy (are we past that “Don’t call it a recession” stage yet?) having displaced terrorism and the war in Iraq as Americans’ biggest worry, it gives pause to realize how seldom our popular entertainment deals at all with that which so often concerns us most. Namely, why are we working harder, yet it keeps getting harder to make ends meet? The U.S. bedrock is supposed to be its middle class—yet that population bulk has slipped around on less-than-terra firma lately while the rich/poor gap widens, tipping more and more working-class folk increasingly toward a future as The New Poor.

topics: italian cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

Experience

Asia Argento, in full flower

Motherhood has supposedly had a slowing-down effect on Asia Argento, though at present evidence points rather wildly to the contrary. Not only does she star in this week’s San Francisco International Film Festival official opener, Catherine Breillat’s costume intrigue The Last Mistress, she also figures heavily in two other SFIFF features. Both are programmed in the culty "Late Show" section: Go Go Tales, Abel Ferrara’s most acclaimed film in years, and The Mother of Tears, a latest horror opus directed by her own fan-idolized gorehound dad Dario Argento. A couple weeks ago yet another vehicle opened commercially, Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, which is entirely dominated by her feverish and highly physical performance.

Conventional logic might suggest all this visibility means it’s "breakthrough" time for Asia Argento, that moment when an actor goes from being a familiar face to a marquee name that can singlehandedly draw folks into the multiplex, or at least the arthouse. (In Europe she’s already quite well-known.) But as her project choices among other things bear out, Argento probably isn’t very interested in becoming a "star" in the conventional sense. In fact, she seems the girl most likely to run from any such fate.

topics: actors, genre films, italian cinema, san francisco international film festival