Cinema Tuesdays Review

Anyone who has read an in-depth interview with director Martin Scorsese, or seen him speak, knows the enthusiasm he has for the movies of the past. He's as much a film historian as he is a great director. His nearly four-hour documentary "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies" is an excellent resource for movie lovers, both novice and expert. In that film Scorsese looked back on the American movies that affected and influenced him as a student. Four years later, Scorsese did the same for Italian movies, and now his film "My Voyage To Italy" is available on DVD.

My Voyage To Italy concentrates on three distinctive areas of Italian cinema: neorealism, opulent costume dramas, and the fantastical early 1960s films of Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Scorsese begins the film by giving us a short introduction to his boyhood neighborhood, even showing a few brief home movie clips of his father and grandfather. His block, as he explained, was like a little piece of Sicily in New York. And the local television station capitalized on the high concentration of Italians in New York by showing (often poorly dubbed or edited) Italian movies on Friday nights. The young Scorsese could see a Roy Rogers Western on Friday afternoon, and then go home to watch a film like Roberto Rossellini's Paisan the same evening.

With each new film he shares with the audience, Scorsese talks a little bit about the acting, cinematography, and directing in the film. Ample time is given to each movie - My Voyage To Italy, is, after all, just over four hours long!

Scorsese talks about Vittorio De Sica's extraordinary ability to find and cast non-professional actors in his films, and rightfully compares De Sica's poignant films to those of Charlie Chaplin, also noting De Sica's gift for working with children. He talks about early neorealist films from Luchino Visconti (La Terra Trema) and Federico Fellini (I Vitelloni), but special attention is given to Roberto Rossellini, a filmmaker that the young Scorsese obviously connected with.

Rossellini's films discussed in My Voyage To Italy include Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, Flowers of St. Francis, Stromboli, Europa '51, and Voyage In Italy. Open City, filmed in 1945, is considered to be the first of the great neorealist pictures. And Scorsese's analysis of Stromboli acknowledges the scandal that surrounded the picture (when star Ingrid Bergman became pregnant with Rossellini's child), but only in passing. It is the movie itself that is the star here, not the crew's personal lives. Scorsese is here only for the films themselves. Scorsese describes Flowers of St. Francis as the first down-to-earth depiction of a saint he had ever seen. After seeing some of the excerpts of the film, I myself have been looking for a copy, so I might see the whole movie.

Luchino Visconti is represented by his early works, La Terra Trema, and Ossessione, and also by one of his great period pictures, Senso (which, like The Leopard, takes place as Italy is struggling to unify in the 19th Century). Scorsese's analysis of the classic opera house scene in the film is revealing.

Of course, one cannot look at Italian cinema without examining the revolutionary works of Fellini and Antonioni, and Scorsese gives nearly equal time to both. Most intriguing is his discussion of Antonioni's mysterious L'Avventura, a revolutionary film that still haunts and confuses viewers today, nearly 45 years after it was simultaneously cheered and booed at the Cannes Film Festival. And for this occasionally jaded viewer, who, in 2004, has seen many cinematic tricks pulled, Scorsese's story of his fist viewing of Fellini's 8½ makes the film fresh once again.

There are no special features on this two-disc DVD set. In a sense, the entire film is a "special feature." My Voyage To Italy is a great way to spend the afternoon (or a couple of evenings), and is a great introduction to several films I had not seen or even heard of. Since the discs are divided into individual chapter stops, the set also functions as a handy reference guide for lovers of world cinema. My Voyage To Italy is a trip you'll want to take again.

7/17/04

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