Word: sica
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Sunflower cannot totally extinguish De Sica's guttering genius. A scene of returning Italian soldiers, for instance, is a fine reminder of the noon of neo-realismo. Wives, mammas and children of the missing gather at the railroad station, holding aloft glossy little snapshots, a forest of question marks. Does anyone know the fate or whereabouts of these vanished? The soldiers move on; the incomplete tragedies remain. A bigger puzzle also lingers: Why should so many proven talents squander themselves on Sunflower? For pane? Certainly-but also to counter the sexual revolution with the kind of romantic movie they...
...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...
...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 close up and excluding others from the frame. In an early scene de Sica enters Nazi headquarters. The camera tracks after him through a dark archway while a Gestapo motorcycle runs by him from the interior courtyard. Inside, de Sica enters an anteroom to find it full of people waiting to ask for amnesty for prisoners. Instead of holding him in a distant shot...
...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...