Italian cinema in decline
Masolino d'Amico
The Tree of Wooden Clogs ('L'albero degli zoccoli'), Ermanno Olmi's 190-minutelong film which opened this week at the Curzon, won the first prize at the last Cannes Festival. It has played throughout Italy with reasonable success at the box office, considering that it deals with life in a peasant community at the turn of the century, and that it has no stars. Padre padrone, which was awarded the same prize at the 1977 Festival, did very well, at home and abroad; indeed, previously unexported films by its authors, the Taviani brothers, subsequently found their way onto the screen in London and New York. Salvatore Nocita's Ligabue, the life of a naif painter, was warmly received at the Toronto Festival. And the French magazine L'Express recently made its cover story the explosion of the so-called 'commedia all'italiana' in France: popular directors now in their sixties, like Luigi Comencini, Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, not always the darlings of Italian critics, who have always shown a tendency to distrust comedies, are now winning international acclaim. A routine episodic comedy which is the joint effort of several such directors — aptly retitled Viva Italia — is doing good business in New York.
Yet the outlook at home is gloomy. Fewer films are being made this winter, cinemas are shutting down, the price of tickets is going up. Cinecitta, the great state-owned studio, will probably be converted into flats. It is fashionable to put at least some of the blame on the withdrawal of American capital. The argument runs as follows: in the heyday of neo-realism in the late Forties it was possible to shoot a film in Italy with as little as the equivalent of £25,000 today. When some of those films opened in the United States, to great critical and moderate, but not negligible, financial success, Hollywood's interest was aroused. The big studios began financing Italian production at the source, undeterred by the hybrid results (the star system failed to work in a different context: De Sica refused to have Cary Grant play the lead in Bicycle Thieves; Rossellini swept Ingrid Bergman away from Hollywood and transformed her into something Hollywood did not like).
But instead of producing films directly, Paramount, Warner and the other 'sisters' backed Italian organisers who often made their profits long before the actual shooting began, by submitting an inflated estimate of the film's cost and pocketing the difference. The Italian producers' lack of concern with the quality of the final result was reflected in the box-office failure of most such ventures in the late Fifties and through the Sixties. Even the most conscientious efforts were aimed at both markets, and failed in at least one .(Visconti's lavish productions, much admired in Europe, were never popular in the States). Meanwhile everybody, from top directors down to dressers and electricians. began demanding, and getting, salaries much closer to the American standard.
By the early Seventies a first-class film — with a couple of well-known actors, that is. and a good director — could not be made for less than £500,000. It had to collect three times as much in order to break even, while only a handful of films could be expected to top the million mark on the national market alone. Then, suddenly, the financial backing was cut short, along with the certainty of American distribution. The failure of many Italian 'American' films, the rising costs, and most of all the rebirth of an interest for all-American films in the United States, meant the death of Hollywood-on-Tiber. The American executives simply packed their bags, and left for good. Some of the most enterprising Italian producers followed suit.
That is one explanation. It makes sense, but it only tells part of the story. To have a fuller picture, one must take into account television which has been dealing all but mortal blows to the film industry all over the Western world for the past 20 years. Still. the Italian situation is probably unique, and in order to grasp it one should try to understand both the nature of Italian television as it is now, and of Italian films as they have been since the war.
Before the second World war, the cinema in Italy was as popular as anywhere else. But there was not any great demand for Italian films as such. Looking back on those Italian films it is easy to see why. They never dealt with relevant issues. Their language was obsolete. Like all dictatorships. Fascism discouraged any portrayal of contemporary squalor; crime was not reported in the Press, and on the screen (or stage) it could only happen in faraway places, like Hungary. Furthermore, Fascism used films in its campaign to impose a linguistic unity on the country. In 1870 it is reckoned that only 600,000 people could both speak and read Italian. viz, the literary language Manzoni chose for his great novel. Local dialects were so strong, that school teachers had to use them in order to be understood by their pupils. Mussolini compelled the Venetians. for instance. to Italianise street signs with place-names in dialect: to write 'portico, instead of 'portego', 'parrocchia' instead of 'parochia'. Screen actors were similarly encouraged to speak in films as they spoke on the stage, that is, in that artificially-built common language that was accepted as a convention in the theatre, and on the radio.
But films are a very realistic medium. The best Italian ones of the period look almost as well made as any from France or Germany, but the soundtrack is weird. People there speak like nobody ever spoke. (This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why, when the lid was suddenly taken off the simmering pot, and directors, old and new. were enabled to film whatever they wanted — provided that they found the money — post-war misery, street urchins, crime, and so on — they found themselves short of actors, as they were of funds and of almost everything else. Many brilliantly daring inventions were born out of necessity. The much-admired 'coarse-grain', newsreel effect of Open City was due to the odd bits of discarded film Rossellini had to use because none other was available. In a similar way, faces from the crowd were taken instead of professional actors, because in many cases the available trained actors' style of elocution would have looked preposterous in a realistic film.) When Fascism fell, cinema was, of all media, the one readiest to come to grips with reality. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise: only a minority went to the theatre, read books, or even bought the newspapers. And the radio was controlled by the parties in power. Cinema, however, did not mean neo-realism alone. The work of Rossellini, De Sica and others was immensely important in establishing the image of the new Italy, and of Italian films, abroad. It had a great influence on a whole generation of filmmakers around the world. It encouraged American investment in Italian films. But it did not really help the Italian cinema to conquer an audience at home. The neo-realist films failed to make any money in Italy; their directors only became well-known long after the peak of that revolution.
Still, there were Italian movies that did well on the national market, and they too belonged to a genre which only came into being when it became possible to deal with true issues — and to employ the onceforbidden dialect. They were the cheap. corny, zany comedies of local clowns and comedians who came from the 'avanspettacolo' — the lowest form of popular entertainment, a sort of second-class variety show which took place between showings of a film. Tote, Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, the De Filippo brothers, Walter Chiari, Renato Rascel and, later, Alberto Sordi, all shared that background. Some of them would graduate to 'serious', and therefore less popular, movies; some, like Tote, arguably the greatest of them all, went on appearing in countless little films which few critics would bother to review, but which were immensely successful and popular.
These comedians all specialised in one dialect. Their comedies were based on contemporary situations, often being shot and released within days from the event they referred to. The early ones dealt humor ously with such post-war predicaments as the shortage of houses, the presence of Allied troops, and so on; later ones ridiculed the national vices — machismo, mammismo, the obsession with sex; or institutions, including the police, which would be untouchable in serious pictures; or simply anything that was happening at the time.
The fashion has never really died down, and I would predict that Last Tango in Zagarol (a small town south of Rome) will one day have more devotees than its famous begetter. Virtually no contemporary issue was left untouched by such comedies, which escaped censorship — for some reason, the censor did not take seriously what made no attempt at seriousness. Indeed, satire was relished by the audience of those films and of their more sophisticated follow-ups of the Sixties. All the really great money-making postwar Italian stars were comic. actors. Tote, Tognazzi, Manfredi, Sordi no Brando, no Gerard Philipe. Vittorio Gassmann, a born tragedian, only became popular when he turned to comic roles. Mastroianni, a very successful comic actor. all but destroyed his box office appeal at home when he became internationally cast as a romantic lover. Comic films were amusing, timely, relevant. They often influenced things. To take but one instance, Divorce Italian Style was possibly the strongest single influence in changing the Italian attitude to the divorce laws.
Comedies were not, of course, the only asset of the Italian cinema, when the going was good. The imagination which went into discovering what the audience might want, and into exploiting it to the full, seem prodigious now. In 1957 a director, Pietro Francisci, cast an American muscle-man as Hercules, in an improbable pseudomythological, pseudo-colossal, low-budget fantasy piece; it made money, and more than 170 'pepla' — as the French film historians called them — were shot in seven years, while the fashion lasted. Chaste striptease movies in the late Fifties, cheap imitations of the Bond films in the Sixties, all sorts of trends were created and exhausted in the same way. Most memorable of all, of course, was the 'spaghetti Western', an incredible enterprise in retrospect: 350 such films were made in eight years, beginning in 1964, when a director, Sergio Leone, found that Italian toughs and Italian horses could be accepted as plausible surrogates for the vanishing heroes of the John Ford tradition. A later, tongue-in-cheek, development of the genre is still doing very well on the home market. It created the two best-paid Italian stars of the Seventies, Ter ence Hill, ne Mario Girotti, and Bud Spencer, alias Carlo Pedersoli.
Cinema in Italy, in other words, held for many years a sort of monopoly of free, information and satire. It was the nation pastime; it was the constant focus of everr body's interest; it attracted the best brains. For a long time television left such supre" maey unchallenged. Indeed, unlike what happened in most Western countries, for two decades Italian television did very little to keep people away from movie theatres. Television was a state monopoly, calling itself a public service, and allegedly con' centrating on 'quality' or 'culture', rather than on trying to be popular. The idea was that anything shown on the box would attract attention anyway. The programMes, were unenterprising: the great majority 0' them was heavily censored, edited, sterilised, and therefore incredibly boring. Then one day, about three years ago, the, Constitutional Court suddenly pronounee,u such a monopoly illegal. Hundreds of pry vate broadcasting companies immediatelY mushroomed everywhere, offering whatever the official one seemed to lack: inde' pendent information, all-night shows, local news, porn. Too small, and too many to concoct really good programmes, all these, companies soon settled down to a routine 0' cheap old movies, commercials, and street' interviews. But there had been a gust of fresh air. The State television was obliged to reorganise itself, and to become more appetising. The two major channels were divided up between the two political blocks in power, and put into competition for the first time. Despite its nonsensical side " contradictory weather reports, for instance — this competition did make programMes more interesting. Better films were chosen. Sports were dealt with by technicians not bY rhetoricians. The news coverage becarne snappier and more outspoken. CensorshiP became less severe. Bare nipples were exhlbited, and the Word (five letters, in Italian) was uttered. But most of all, live programmes — interviews, variety shows — were encouraged, again practically for the first, time. Politicians ceased delivering official speeches, and began to wrangle, to everr one's delight. Staying at home now meant at least a chance of good entertainment, while inflation was swelling the cost of an evening out; petrol, parking and pizza, to say nothing 01 the price of a ticket for a show. What reallY made the difference, however, was the fact that now television seemed to some extent relevant, alive; close to what was going on in the country. It was beginning to do whajt films, and films alone, had been doing. Arlo of course, once it chose to do it, television had unfair advantages. Rising costs, the loss of American back' ing, and most of all unprecedently apPe,a,1 ing television programmes, have made lire for the Italian cinema harder than it has ever been since the war. One final cause for the decay may be the dearth of younger directors of undisputed talent. Germi, sellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, all died Within a couple of years; of those still in their thirties, only Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, and possibly Salvatore Samperi may be said to be of comparable standing. Still, the situation is not entirely dismal. For one thing, television has been giving back to the cinema something of what it took from them, financing non-profit, 'quality', ventures (among which were the three award-winning pictures mentioned above, by Olmi, the Tavianis, and Nocita). And although it must now share some of its relevance with the other media, the Finema is still, with its most glorious tradition, the satirical comedy, very much in the 'cart of its audience. Significantly, the new great hope among the younger directors is a 24-year-old comedian, Nanni Moretti, Whose Ecce Bombo, an independently produced, wildly funny portrait of conlernporary youngsters. was doubtless the "aPPiest surprise of the year. engaged in an heroic struggle with angst, the 20th-century condition.
Perhaps general elections induce a mood of intense personalism, and perhaps also because affected by Eliot's preoccupation with the causality of past and present, but I found myself entirely receptive to the tone and the mood and, indeed, the argument of Bodies, that is until the very end when it settled — somewhat glibly I thought — for Art as the meaning of life. I don't think the similarity with Eliot is entirely coincidental; the success of Bodies first on the fringe at Richmond, then at Hampstead and now, assuredly and deservedly in the West End, may have something to do with a revival of human innerness in once again troubled times littered with dead gods. The Family Reunion is for me a Thirties period piece, more powerful in the pessimism of its mood than in any meaning I can grasp. Eight years have also intervened for Harry since he left Wishwood. His homecoming — to the present — is bound to be painful Agatha warns him. Why, painful? I can imagine Bodies as a disaster with less than the superb acting it receives under Robin Lefevre's direction but, as it is, it must be the most enriching evening to be spent in a London theatre. Direction and performance are also the makings of The Family Reunion at the Round House where Michael Elliot, as he explains in a programme note, has tried to bring Eliot alive as theatre by throwing the banality of drawing room manner (and every day verse) into the starkest possible contrast with the poetic flights and dark forebodings of the piece. I thought that he succeeded in the terms he set himself — aided by an outstanding cast — but I found myself as irritated as ever by Eliot's portentous and allusive obscurity and, at the end of the evening, impressed but utterly, utterly unmoved.
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