'IL MIO VIAGGIO IN ITALIA'
Jack Lefton
Scorsese Pays Tribute to Italian Cinema
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
o watch "Il Mio Viaggio in Italia," Martin Scorsese's monumental
introduction to postwar Italian cinema, is to be indelibly reminded of how
much movies can matter. Contemplated apart from klieg-lighted hype and movie
star gossip, even a flawed film can be seen as a revealing dreamscape of
ideas, images and feelings, a vision of the world narrowed into a fragment
of a collective unconscious, if you will. And when that vision is directed
by a serious artist, it can change the way we see.
That is the impassioned sense of cinema Mr. Scorsese brings to the watching
as well as to the making of films. And the richness of "Il Mio Viaggio in
Italia" ("My Journey in Italy") demonstrates that his talents as a director
are matched by his gifts as a teacher. The four-hour film is a sequel of
sorts to this director's comparably sweeping 1995 television documentary, "A
Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies." It's no
exaggeration to say that watching both films will forever change and deepen
the way you look at cinema.
"Il Mio Viaggio" follows the same format as "A Personal Journey,"
interweaving this director's recollections and sparse commentary with
extended excerpts from his favorite films. Mr. Scorsese's remarks are
incisive, often intensely personal responses to what he chooses to show. The
10- to 15-minute excerpts from a dozen or so Italian classics are edited so
precisely that with the addition of Mr.
This documentary, which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight and
tomorrow at the Walter Reade Theater, focuses on a popular art form. Still,
the flowering of Italian cinema in the two decades after World War II, as
viewed through Mr. Scorsese's eyes, is inseparable from history itself.
Italian neo-realism, in particular, which dissolved the boundaries between
documentary and fiction, Mr. Scorsese movingly describes as Italy's "prayer"
to the world to recognize the essential humanity of the Italian people.
Especially in the excerpts from Roberto Rossellini's "Open City" and
Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thief" and "Umberto D.," you feel you are
watching life as it was lived in the most desperate of times.
Because his Sicilian grandparents left Italy to live in the United States,
those images also have deep personal associations for Mr. Scorsese, who grew
up in New York's Little Italy. When he first encountered many of these films
on his family's 16-inch television set, he recalls, they connected him to
his immigrant roots and helped him understand his grandparents' values and
hard-bitten culture.
We're also given brief, pungent glimpses of Italian prewar cinema, including
a couple of silent clips. Vintage costume dramas about ancient Rome,
especially, introduced Mr. Scorsese to a many-centuries-old folkloric
mythology whose American counterpart, he suggests, is the western. Certain
films strike particularly deep chords. In Federico Fellini's
semiautobiographical "I Vitelloni," about a group of aimless young men
frittering away their lives in a provincial town, Mr. Scorsese sees a
picture of what he might have been had he not become a filmmaker.
As it goes along, "Il Mio Viaggio in Italia" transcends nationality to
become a study of the emerging modernist sensibility in an increasingly
affluent, secularized culture. The movie is divided into two parts. The
first half concentrates on the neo- realism of Rossellini and De Sica. And
the cumulative impact of those serial visions of poverty and despair amid
the postwar ruins is emotionally overwhelming. Part 2, which isn't as
wrenching, examines the work of Luchino Visconti, who brought a high-style
operatic sensibility to realist filmmaking; Fellini, who emerged from
neo-realism as a maestro of the phantasmagoric; and Michelangelo Antonioni,
the poet of modern metaphysical malaise.
Fellini's "Dolce Vita" is remembered as a turning point. Juxtaposed with an
excerpt from that film, which rocked the world with its vision of hedonistic
celebrity culture unencumbered by religious guilt, is a fragment from a
Pietro Germi film in which a rural, tradition-bound Sicilian audience takes
in a scene of "La Dolce Vita" in stunned silence.
The movement toward modernism culminates with Mr. Antonioni in "L'Avventura"
and "The Eclipse," whose characters are trapped inside their own isolation
in landscapes that have lost their capacity for spiritual nourishment. "Il
Mio Viaggio" ends by returning to Fellini, whose masterpiece "8 1/2," a
phantasmagoric investigation of his own creative turmoil following the
success of "La Dolce Vita," Mr. Scorsese names as the most personally
influential film of all.
In examining neo-realism, Mr. Scorsese makes a crucial distinction between
the work of Rossellini, who let the brutal facts speak for themselves, and
De Sica, a Cary Grant- like screen idol in the 1930's who turned to
directing and proved himself a master of emotion. The documentary goes out
of its way to make a case for the value of late-1940's and 50's films by
Rossellini like "Stromboli," "Voyage to Italy" and "Europa '51," which all
starred Ingrid Bergman. An extended sequence from "Stromboli," in which a
band of tuna fishermen on a remote Sicilian island haul in their catch, is
as heart- stopping in its evocation of primal human activity as anything
shown from the director's earlier masterpieces.
The common denominator Mr. Scorsese finds in those later Rossellini films
(which also include "The Miracle" and "The Flowers of St. Francis") is a
profound compassion and an emphasis on spiritual renewal. That trust in the
spiritual, whose source Mr. Scorsese locates in the soil, on the streets and
in the culture and religious traditions of Italy, is a quality that extends
to his own films. And watching him respond to it in the work of others is as
inspiring as anything to be seen in this extraordinary labor of love.
IL MIO VIAGGIO IN ITALIA
Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Raffaele
Donato, Kent Jones and Mr. Scorsese; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; produced
by Barbara De Fina, Giuliana Del Punta and Bruno Restuccia. Running time:
246 minutes. This film is not rated. To be shown tonight at 6:30 and
tomorrow at 11 a.m. at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street,
Lincoln Center, as part of the 39th New York Film Festival.
Sad McBain
a theater/video release?
Matthew NAder