Word: rossellini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American audiences which go one night to see Antonioni and the next Godard, and like them for the same things, are implicitly recognizing a clear line of aesthetic influence. A healthy chunk of the French New Wave's conception of film comes from Neo-Realism (Antonioni, visconti, Rossellini, de Sica, Fellini). Neo Realism's original choice of social reality for subject-matter and its tendency to documentary as method had a tremendous influence in France, giving rise to a large school of French documentarists (Jean Rouch, Chris Marker) and a larger consciousness of film as more that a purely fictional...
Nevertheless, none of the new film movements really makes documentaries. The films of the Neo-Realists were the action of social reality on a particular sensibility: Open city (Rossellini), far from being objective, details at every moment Rossellini's outrage at the Nazi occupation of Rome. Godard's films similarly document the meeting or reality and sensibility, instead of documenting reality in a direct, objective manner. Thus fiction and fantasy abound in his works. The same is true of newer Eastern and Western European films, which delight in twisting old dramatic old dramatic forms and inventing new and yet more...
...difference between the way things were "out there" and their representation in the work of art. ". . . you get the impression," Pauline Kael has written, "that such cinema theorists think that Griffith shot The Birth of the Nation while the battles were raging, that Eisenstein was making newsreels, and that Rossellini and Bunuel were simply camera witnesses to scenes of extraordinary brutality...
...Michelangelo, Garibaldi and the Medicis there reigns a vast and unusual variety of contemporary heroes. The Italians idolize Grand Prix drivers, artists, novelists and occasionally Sicilian banditti. They fall barely short of adoring Nino Benvenuti, the boxing champion. They lavish attention on their celebrated movie directors-Antonioni, Fellini, Rossellini. And who, of course, could overlook Gina or Sophia...
...camera is constantly pulling away from the action to examine the locations or pause on details. Consequently Bogdanovich gives us more visual information than we need to enjoy a crisp narrative, or (take your pick) too much narrative to enjoy a reflective stylistic bent normally associated with Mizoguchi or Rossellini. It is hard to determine what director has influenced Bogdanovich, but the outcome exists largely in terms of meaningless tracking shots which bear down on their subjects. In any case, Targets owes nothing to Hawks, despite a televised quotation from The Criminal Code, followed by Bogdanovich's line, "That...