By MIchela Centioni
Cinema has always been a privileged meeting place of different cultures. Darkness and the screen, in which the spectator can freely dive and dream, or reflect, create a peculiar magic and allow crossing space-time boundaries.
To celebrate the 50 years of the European Union, the Cultural Institutes in London have chosen exactly cinema, thus organising a festival at the Ciné Lumière with the masterpieces representative of six countries: Poland, Sweden, Germany, Czech Republic, France and Italy.
The films have in common the fact of being realised in 1957, the year of the birth of the European Union, recalling a distant and significant dimension, enjoying the beauty and the suggestive power of the cinematographic means.
The Polish Cultural Institute has selected Kanal (Canal) by Andrzej Wajda, winner of the Special Jury Award at Cannes in 1957, to recount to the public about its own country. Kanal is a story of war and honour, of courage and humanity: it tells us about a military company that during the battles in Warsaw in 1944, exhausted and decimated by Germans, running underground. The soldiers, in their desperate search for salvation, are little by little killed by tiredness and privations, by the wounds and madness, and only the commander and a subordinate will manage to see the light again.
Ingmar Bergman and his Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) take us to a nostalgic dimension, to the condition of the human solitude, to the awareness of the protagonist, a well known doctor and professor who, during his old age, bitterly realises to have not built any deep relationships with his fellowmen. An anguished dream marks this consciousness, in a poetic and genial film by which the Swedish Cultural Institute has paid homage to its country.
Germany presents itself with Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Confessions of Felix Krull), by Kurt Hoffman, drawn from a tale by Thomas Mann. The film tells the social ascent of the protagonist, who from elevator boy becomes viveur, stakeholder, up until losing everything for fraudulent bankruptcy. This will not prevent him from starting everything from the beginning, changing his name, friends, and becoming a rich and respected man in Latin America.
As for the Czech Republic, Vlcí Jáma (The Wolf Trap), film by Jirí Weiss, is a dramatic story of an orphan girl adopted by a couple living in a quite village. The unhealthy and dependent relationship between the two is soon undermined by the arrival of the young girl, with whom the stepfather falls, returned, hopelessly in love. It is a subtle and psychological drama, realised with incredible strength and mastery.
The Institut Français presents the film by a great French director, Louis Malle, Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold). The plot, quite complicated and intricate among murders, circumstantial evidences, flight attempts and a claustrophobic and disturbing atmosphere, is a valid example of noir cinema, in which the wonderful jazz soundtrack by Miles Davis is the protagonist together with an acute investigation of sentiments.
Italy is celebrated with a masterpiece by one of the most worldwide-loved directors: Le Notti di Cabiria (Cabiria’s Nights) by Federico Fellini. The story of a streetwalker, Maria, who nicknamed herself Cabiria for business, is narrated with all the poeticality that the Maestro was able to donate through his camera. The extreme skill of Giulietta Masina, then, completes the work which has received dozens of prizes, first above all the Oscar award in 1957. The character to whom Fellini gives birth is real and ideal at the same time, is immersed in a materiality that never falls off to vulgarity, is completely tied to reality but her nights lead her to dream about a different life, normal, away from the street.
The excellence of the actors, who play in a suburban Rome, among prostitutes and pimps, actors sucked up by the dolce vita of the capital city and religious processions, outlines an extremely convincing picture of a faraway world, still alive and real in the humanity and in the sentiments. Fellini enlightens the outcasts, the misfits and the paupers, and exalts their souls, purity and particularity.
In the hall, during the screening, 50 years later, the audience have laughed, have been moved, have even cried.
This is the present to all the European citizens from the Cultural Institutes, a dive in the past to remember and observe the evolutions of our countries, to affirm, aloud, the will of pursuing and cultivating art and culture, always, anyhow.
The photographs of the party held after the screening of Le Notti di Cabiria are available on our photoalbum.
Copyright 2007 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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