Word: fellinis
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...mean that Godard, Bergman, Fellini, they were stretching film form. Adult movies now are adult in content: the equivalent of the Elia Kazan movies...
...iconography of the late 1980s and '90s: Isabella Rossellini posing as an actress in the style of the neorealistic cinema that her father founded; Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington dressed as showgirls falling in love with Italian boys in New York City's Little Italy; Monica Bellucci re-enacting Fellini's La Dolce Vita. The designers' ad campaigns alone?most shot by Steven Meisel?are a lesson in vintage Italian style...
Some of these films broke out of the art houses to the general audience. A Man and a Woman, I Am Curious (Yellow), Z--all were hits. Fellini's 3-hour La Dolce Vita, released in subtitled and dubbed versions, grossed the 1961 equivalent of $80 million. Part of its appeal was in the panoramic views of Roman naughtiness and Anita Ekberg's cleavage. But Fellini, along with many other directors, was experimenting with visual language. Imagine: here were new ways of seeing the world on film...
...foreign genre wasn't dead, it was missing. Some of the best directors died (Truffaut) or retired (Bergman). Others kept working, but in the U.S. their work was shown sporadically at best. The last films Fellini and Satyajit Ray made never opened here; neither have the most recent films by Godard, Resnais, Antonioni and Kurosawa. The Netherlands' Paul Verhoeven (Spetters) joined a century-long exodus of European talent to Hollywood (where he made Robocop and Showgirls). Denmark's Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) stayed in Europe but made films in English. That leaves a new generation of world masters...
...stress heart over art. The three breakout foreign-language hits of the '90s--Cinema Paradiso and Il Postino from Italy and Like Water for Chocolate from Mexico--are nice romantic dramas about love and loss. They were brilliantly promoted by Miramax. But they didn't extend film language as Fellini's or Godard's films did; instead, they gave audiences that warm-puppy feeling. Any Disney movie can do that. So can many of the American independent films that have filled the old foreign-language slots at art houses. And you don't have to read subtitles...