I. The First Beauty Rome is the first (and perhaps the only) Beauty in La Grande Bellezza. Artists, editors, mobsters, magicians, and businessmen are drawn to its splendor and immortality. Classical ruins only become more […]
Tag: Italian film
The Wonders dir. Alice Rohrwacher
Alice Rohrwacher, as shown by her lovely first feature film, Corpo Celeste, and her latest, The Wonders, is a first-rate filmmaker and thoroughly original storyteller. Her films convey confidence in her work, ability and subject […]
The Futility of the Past: Vaghe Stelle Dell’Orsa/Sandra (1965)
In an early scene, Sandra (Claudia Cardinale) and her American husband, Andrew (Michael Craig) drive through Volterra. Volterra is the Tuscan town she calls home and to which she returns for the dedication of a […]
Creativity and Constraint: Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963)
In many ways, director Guido Anselmi is just a grown-up version of Fellini’s earlier I Vitelloni. He is absurdly if charmingly irresponsible, but without a hint of malice (to his credit the understated Marcello Mastroianni […]
Pier Paolo Pasolini @ MoMA: Teorema (1968)
While Teorema is difficult for me to watch (talk about disrupting the bourgeois expectation of linearity), I adore its dreamy quality. Dreamy because of the unhampered Milanese bourgeois life, because of the random, misplaced, but […]
