Word: rossellinis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...single film could justify the entire film festival, then this year that film is certainly Ermanno Olmi's One Fine Day. It harks back in some ways to the tradition of postwar Italian realism and its masters, among them Rossellini and De Sica. Yet Olmi's films seem more precise, more tightly constructed, more acute. He has a film maker's sense of composition and a novelist's sense of rhythm and construction. The plot of One Fine Day is much like an anecdote by Chekhov. A middle-aged Milanese advertising executive (Brunette Del Vita...
LIKE most of Roberto Rossellini's films, General della Rovere has the simplest of plots. It's parasitic hero (Vittorio de Sica) takes the money of prisoners' relatives to buy their safety from the Nazis occupying northern Italy. Caught halfway through the film and faced with a death sentence, he accepts a German officer's plan to disguise him as the Resistance hero General della Rovere, whom a German patrol has just shot. In prison he encounters the spirit of the underground he is supposed to penetrate and reveal. Near the end he is given the choice of betraying...
...wartime situation allows Rossellini sequences in bombed-out Milan, scenes in prison cells, even montages using newsreels of bombing raids. But it's his visual style more than his settings that makes General della Rovere profoundly realistic. Another director might take the space of a certain scene as a fixed reality, and hold his camera in a long deep-focus shot while dramatic action takes place nearer or farther from the camera. Rossellini's spaces are no less real, but he reveals the truth of a scene by following the characters with his camera, strengthening certain actions by showing them...
...INDEED, Rossellini's camera motions are perfectly responsive to the emotional progress of a scene. They are not invisible-they have too much integrity and power-but they do not impose a certain mood upon any scene. Instead one feels them as an intelligent penetration of the action, moving with one's sympathies. Rossellini's camera does not assume positions according to some formal conception of the space and moral setup in which he is shooting. It follows human actions, emphasizing them without stylizing appearances...
...that Rossellini does not use his camera to heighten dramatic moments. But his means at such times lead him away from abstract, formal stylization, where another director would change the lighting or choose a portentous camera angle for emotional emphasis. At one point de Sica, fresh from the torture room, is dragged back to his cell by two guards. A fellow prisoner walks by him away from the camera, then turns to stare. The camera zooms with unbelievable rapidity or rather, jolts-into his face, and zooms out to a long shot as the man begins running to cells, banging...