By Annalisa Coppolaro
In the Italian cinema the female characters reflected the changes happened in the feminine universe of the Italian society, and sometimes they were ahead of their time. To remind us the influence that they have had is a retrospective, dedicated to them: Signore e Signore: Leading Ladies of Italian Cinema. The review dedicated to the best actresses of classic Italian cinema, which opened on the 27th September at the Riverside Studios in London, is part of the review Italian Film Festival UK, at its 14th year.
The retrospective covers more than four decades, with film from the 1940s to the 1980’s, will be screened at the Riverside Studio, at the Film Theatre in Glasgow and at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh.
Produced by Cinecitta’ Holding, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Department and the Italian Cultural Institutes of London and Edinburgh, the retrospective has been made up by Piera De Tassis, cinema expert and editor of the Italian magazine Ciak.
All films are screened in Italian with English subtitles.
The Signore e Signore review includes films in which star actresses such as (in alphabetical order) Lucia Bose’, Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lollobrigida, Sofia Loren, Anna Magnani, Silvana Mangano, Giulietta Masina, Mariangela Melato, Sandra Milo, Ornella Muti, Tina Pica, Stefania Sandrelli, Franca Valeri and Alida Valli.
Many legendary Italian directors, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti among the others, worked with these women, making them their muses and creating some of their greatest films around their leading ladies.
In the night of the inauguration it has been screened like first movie of the review La ragazza con la valigia – The Girl with the Suitcase (1960)by Valerio Zurlini, in which an enchanting Claudia Cardinale performances a nightclub singer linked to a wealthy man and his teenage brother. Claudia Cardinale’ magnetic glance will be the character, a few years later, de Il gattopardo – The Leopard (1963) by Luchino Visconti – screened some months ago at the Riverside – which consecrated Claudia Cardinale as one of the most brilliant starts of Italian cinema.
During the inauguration, the Trio Cinema Paradiso (formed by the pianist Maurizio Malagnini, by the violinist Mireira Ferrer Yabar and by the cello player Alessandro Sanguineti), performed some tunes from Italian films like Amarcord, Il postino, La vita e’ bella and La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano. (ALC)
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As names such as Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida, Lucia Bose sparkle in the Olympus of the cinema stars, clearly the legendary Tina Pica – which started her career in 1916 in theatres with Eduardo De Filippo, followed by the leap in TV production at the age of 50 – could not be missed.
Her cinematographic activity went through the fifties to the beginning of the sixties and it lists titles such as Il voto (1950) and Ergastolo (1952),not to be forgotten the famous series of movies Pane, amore e fantasia (1953), Pane, amore e gelosia (1954), Pane, amore e… (1955)in which she is the character Caramella.
La Nonna Sabella (Oh Sabella) is the title chosen by the IFF for this retrospective.
The comedy has been welcomed by an adult as well as “mixed” public: in between giggles and laughs some very English accents resounded in the rooms as if to prove the appreciation for the old, sometimes naïve, humour, the misunderstanding caused by the predominant character of the grandmother Sabella – stereotypical Mediterranean matronly woman – which comically tries to impose her will on all the members of the family.
An original project whose aim is to bring back the good memories of the old quality cinema, the one of the neorealist tradition which gave birth to some of the more internationally known directors such as Dino Risi, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini to summon some, who gave a remarkable contribution to the Italian myth overseas, highlighting, without many lies, the characteristics that made us famous. (RB)
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The talent of a real Leading Lady, the creative genius of two great stars of Italian cinema, the undeniable charme of the olden times and of black and white photography: ingredients which, on their own, could make any film extraordinary.
If the creation is Pane, amore e fantasia – Bread, Love and Dreams (1953), we also have to add the charm, humour, lightheartedness and the need of lightening up a historical period where poverty did not always mean sadness and depression. On the contrary.
The portrait that Luigi Comencini delivers, directing four extraordinary artists like Vittorio De Sica, Gina Lollobrigida, Tina Pica and Marisa Merlini, is set in a mountain village where religion, superstition, gossip, tricks and infatuations are entwined to create a plot which is light, agile, imaginative and often surprising, portraying a different world, compared to that of Neorealism (the film came out in 1953). It’s a world where people look to the future with hope, and seems not to care much about living in a stone house and to have to get by struggling to find a piece of bread, people who fall in love and get emotional, have rows and enthusiasms. These universal feelings make this film an undisputed masterpiece, a real unmissable classic to understand the history of Italian cinema.
The film made Lollobrigida a star, and it was chosen by the Riverside cinema, within the Signore and Signore: Leading Ladies of Italian Cinema event. With Gina Lollobrigida, among the others Anna Magnani, Sofia Loren, Giulietta Masina, Stefania Sandrelli, Alida Valli, Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti, are the protagonists of different ways of narrating women and their life in the course of time.
The women of Bread, Love and Dreams are strong and determined, and, if some parts appear naïve and far from our way of thinking, surely some characters are really modern. The midwife (Merlini), for example, is a working woman, who is single and independent, and who goes to Rome every month to come back “with a radiant face”. Next to this strong personality, we also find the tragi-comical verve of the Maresciallo (De Sica), the sharp comic skills of Caramella (Tina Pica), the fresh eroticism of Maria la Bersagliera (Lollobrigida), the pathologic shyness of the carabiniere Stelluti (Roberto Risso). With them, there is the irresistible presence of those village characters that everybody who has lived in a small country place can easily recognise. Comencini portrays also the small hypocritical ways of the parishioners, the art of getting by, the poverty of a mountain village martyrised by bombing and earthquakes. Here, one falls in love, gossips, prays, but always looking forward with hope.
The film is fast, ironic, played on amazing performances, with legendary comical moments like the description given by Caramella of the midwife taking a bath in a metal tub…
The film, restored to its old beauty, is now available on DVD: one of those classics that stay, iconical, to remind us that our film industry has gone a long way from 1953… But rarely reaching, alas, better results. (AC)
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The Festival del Cinema di Roma has paid homage to her with a film review covering the whole outstanding and eclectic career as actress of one among the greatest (maybe the greatest) leading actresses of Italian cinema. She is “Nannarella”, that is the unforgettable Anna Magnani. To this absolute star, as well as to many other superstars of classic Italian cinema, is dedicated the retrospective Signore & Signore: Leading Ladies of Italian Cinema, a section of the Italian Film Festival in London. Different women according to their style, character and beauty but all of them are akin for the incomparable talent that made them distinguished icons of the cinematographic Italian art.
Emblem and symbol of the Italian cinema of the second post-war period is without any doubts Anna Magnani. Her legendary interpretation in the Neorealism manifest movie, Roma citta’ aperta (1945, Roberto Rossellini), inaugurated a new film movement. Italian Film Festival in London chooses to remind her by screening one among the many films where she gave a proof of her unique individual acting style, together dramatic and contagiously comic. Bellissima (1951), one of the masterpieces by Luchino Visconti, derived from a subject by Cesare Zavattini.
It is the story of Maddalena Cecconi, a working-class woman from Rome who, being attracted by the apparent glittering cinema industry, transfers on her young daughter her own frustrated illusions she fostered since she was young. When Maddalena hears about an audition the director Alessandro Blasetti is taken to chase a young girl for his next movie, she rushes together with her child Maria (Tina Apicella) to Cinecitta’. Among the chaotic crowd of mothers and children, Maria disappears. While searching for her, Maddalena meets for accident Alberto Annovazzi (Walter Chiari), who pretends to be the director assistant and to be able to help her child getting the role by giving him money. The mother, who is determined to get her little daughter into movies even through a huge economical sacrifice, yielded to the demands of the alleged assistant, who just cheated her. Maria is allowed to the audition, but when Maddalena sees her crying and embarrassed daughter while was humiliated by the laughs of the director and all his assistants, breaks up with anger and indignation and runs away with her. Maddalena is now mortified and disappointed and she realises that it was a mistake trying to push her daughter towards an uncertain future as actress. She finally refuses the fructuous contract the film director proposes to her daughter, whose uncommon expressive capacity he had indeed appreciated.
Anna Magnani plays in this film one of her best and most complicated character. She embodies the painful awareness of a disillusion and the dramatic consciousness of the impossibility to achieve her own dreams that shatter against the cynicism of reality. Her folkloristic spontaneity, her irreverent sense of humour, her volcanic and instinctive temperament arouse excitement and laugh to those who watch her. Meantime, she is able to draw moments of deep tragic emotion as well, thanks to her exceptional and inimitable dramatic flair.
This out-of-rules, passionate, ironic and unique actress first begins in the early Thirties both as a prose and dialectal theatre player. Thanks to her dramatic quality and to her warm spontaneity she soon obtains great success from public and critics. However, it is the cinema that gives her an international popularity. Besides the masterpiece by Rosellini, her name is associated with films that constitute landmarks of Italian post-war screen. The last one is the memorable 1962 Mamma Roma, shot by the great Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Anna Magnani is actually a leading lady and not only in the history of the Italian cinema. She still represents a symbol of the female courage and strength, of the passionate authenticity, of the timeless and non-conventional beauty. (MTS)
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