CINEMA
Italian style
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Viva L'Italia! (National Film Theatre, 21 and 22 July) Before the Revolution (National Film Theatre, 2, 3 and 5 August) The National Film Theatre's big summer season of Italian films deserves much more support than it seems to be getting. Maybe the idea of a very long season is itself daunting (this one, which began back in the spring, runs through to 9 August) perhaps audiences are deterred by the inevitable, but immensely irritating, depen- dence on earphone translations instead of sub- titles. But if this really major catching-up operation, mostly now fairly recent films which for one reason or another haven't reached Britain before, isn't attracting the audiences it should, it may partly be a demonstration that Italian cinema as such has never entirely caught on here. The French contrive to be always more or less in fashion. Italian cinema hangs here on its big-name reputation: Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, three or four others, and then we're off into unknown territory. Which is odd, since the Italian film-making temperament—more of the sober, socially aware, conscience-ridden north than the volatile south—has on the face of it so much in common with our own.
Back in neo-realist days, anyone's list of Italian film-makers would have opened with Roberto Rossellini—the Rossellini of Open City and Paisd. Then came Ingrid Bergman; a journey to India; his involvement in an im- mensely long documentary about steel. As far as commercial distributors were concerned, British audiences were virtually allowed to for- get Rossellini's existence. His La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV was the surprise chal- lenger at last year's London Festival. Now we've had the chance to catch up on this elusive, enig- matically open film-maker, who rides narrative with such a loose rein and seems to feel that a film ought to be the most direct (which doesn't mean the shortest) way of getting from A to B.
A sense of historical time, never far away, stirs in his Viva L'Italial Made in 1960, to cele- brate the centenary of Garibaldi's Thousand, this opens with the decorous solemnity of a classroom exercise : a map, lines shooting across it to mark the divided Italian states, a bleak little sequence of abortive uprising in Sicily, the first sight of the national hero, wearily step- ping out of a coach to embark on the long cam- paign. It's a very unoperatic treatment of a grand opera war—the antithesis, one might say, of Visconti's Senso. An early battle 'finds the Bourbon troops, a parade-ground army in powder blue, commanding a hill; down in a field Garibaldi's men are lunching before the fight (they're picnicking!' complains an enemy officer, as though at some outrageous breach of soldierly conduct); and the camera pulls back to show another distant group: the Sicilian par- tisans, waiting to see who wins.
These are the forces Rossellini holds in balance. Later, the Sicilian women will throw the mattresses out of their windows for street barricades; the Bourbon King Francis will be seen bidding a solemnly touching farewell to his palace and the lines of tearfully bobbing housemaids; Garibaldi's men, in a sequence which might fit into a classic western, lick their wounds after victory and bury their dead. By holding his distance, filming battles in beautiful long shot as parade manoeuvres in the partisan country of scrub and dust and rocky hillsides, Rossellini keeps a sense of the historical pat- tern. Alexandre Dumas looks floridly in on the campaign; a trousered woman journalist skips about the barricades; Garibaldi (Renzo Ricci),
near-pink hair and beard competing with scarlet blonse-, stumps his conquered territory, gentles his men, wins battles but loses out to politics. Characters are momentarily spotlighted, then lost : the film's theme is more involving than its personnel. Viva L'Italia! is resoundingly sober, which presumably explains why it wasn't snapped up years ago with the rest of the his- torical spectaculars.
Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution is total contrast: very young (Bertolucci was twenty-three when he made it in 1964), nervous, temperamental, sometimes seeming about to stumble over its own rhetoric, until the control visibly tightens as the director perfectly meets the hurdle of a big scene. The setting is Parma, and Bertolucci has audaciously borrowed the great Stendhalian names: Fabrizio, Gina, Clelia. From his safe bourgeois anchorage, this Fabrizio ventures into a small rebellion : Com- munism, conscientious outsiderism (though this is the outsider in the grey flannel suit), an affair with his very young and very neurotic Aunt Gina from Milan. The sentimental education ends in a return to the safely mapped out path.
It's a film of raw nerve ends, camera virtuo- sity, allusions and apparent digressions (quota- tions from Jean-Luc Godard, Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx), held together by Bertolucci's ability to sink his story deep in its settings. The big final scene between Fabrizio and Gina takes place on the night when Verdi's Macbeth opens the Parma opera season : music billowing from the stage, the great cliff-face of tiered seats, as the house lights blaze and dim, the heightened theatricality of the cool white corridors where the couple meet. It takes plenty of control to carry off such a grand opera moment without diving clean over the edge; and Bertolucci parallels it earlier in the film, when he turns his camera on a panorama of mist and marshes— outrageously romantic, outrageously beautiful— to match the lament of a decayed aristocrat.
But a film which takes its title from Talley- rand (Only those who lived before the revolu- tion know how sweet life could be') couldn't exist on visual romanticism alone. Bertolucci's characters go to Godard movies and slay love scenes to pop songs, but the nineteenth century lingers about them; his settings are an emphasis on the weight of the past. The Stendhal allusion, more than a conceit, is a reference point: Ber- tolucci's real achievement, one suspects, has been to seek out exactly the right context for his own sensibility.
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