Diapositiva 1

Cinema is not at all or not only or not simply
a folk entertainment, it is even more, even
better; in fact it has been defined the
seventh art, the total art, because it both
hosts and needs all the other arts such as
music, moving sculpture, dynamic painting,
dancing, playing, poetry: so it is a true
sublime artistic synthesis. “Auteur Cinema”
conveys and breeds emotions, enriches and
creates culture.
Italy has always expressed great directors.
Important people of our
culture
Vittorio
De
Sica
Vittorio De Sica (7 July 1901 or 1902 – 13 November 1974) was an Italian
director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement.
Four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: “Sciuscià” and “Bicycle
thieves” were awarded honorary Oscars, while “Ieri, Oggi e Domani” and “Il
giardino dei Finzi - Contini” won the Best foreign language film oscar.
S
“
hoeshine”
(the
English
translation
of
the
Italian
title “Sciuscià”) is a 1946 film and
the first major work directed
by Vittorio De Sica. In it
two shoeshine boys get into
trouble with the police after trying
to find the money to buy a horse.
Shoeshine is among the first of
the Italian neorealist films.
In 1948 it received an Honorary
Award at the Academy Awards for
its high quality. This award was the
precursor of what would later
become the Academy Award for
Best Foreign Language Film.
“
Bicycle Thieves” is one of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism. It received an
Academy Honorary Award in 1950 and, just four years after its release, was deemed the
greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's poll of filmmakers and critics; fifty
years later the same poll ranked it sixth among greatest-ever films.
Bicycle thieves
In post-World War II Rome, Antonio Ricci is
desperate for work to support his family. He
is offered a good position in posting
advertising bills, but he needs a bicycle. So his
wife Maria resolutely strips the bed of
her dowry bedsheets (prized possessions for
a poor family) and takes them to the pawn
office, where they are exchanged for a
bicycle.
On his first day of work Antonio is atop a
ladder when a young man snatches the
bicycle. The police take a report but warn
there is little they can do.
Antonio tries to find it, but he doesn’t
manage it. Then Antonio sees an
unattended bicycle and he tries to steal it,
but he is immediately stopped and
attacked by the crowd. Only the desperate
cry of his son Bruno, who moves to pity the
bicycle owner, avoids him the prison.
The film ends with the sad return home of
the two protagonists with Bruno shaking his
father's hand to comfort him.
“
Yesterday
Today and Tomorrow” (perfect
translation of the Italian title “Ieri, Oggi e
Domani”) is a 1963 Italian comedy film, with the
Italian best actor (Marcello Mastroianni) and the
Italian best actress (Sofia Loren).
The film consists of three amusing short stories
about three couples in three different parts of
Italy. The film won the Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film.
“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”
is a 1970 Italian film,
directed by Vittorio De Sica. The film is based upon Giorgio
Bassani's novel of the same name. In the late 1930s, in
Ferrara, a group of young friends get together for playing
tennis and enjoying happy times. Some of them are Jewish
and a rising tide of Fascism has imposed increasingly antiSemitic restrictions in their lives. Barred from regular
tennis clubs, they go to play at the estate of a wealthy and
intellectual Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis. The two
young Finzi-Continis, Alberto and his sister Micol, organize
a tennis tournament. Oblivious to the threats around them,
life still seems to be sunny at the large Finzi-Contini estate,
keeping the rest of the world at bay. Their large estate is
attended by the other young, above all Giorgio and Bruno,
both of them fallen in love with Micol. The political events
close in: Bruno is recruited and sent to the Russian front.
By 1943 all the young Jews visiting the Garden of the FinziContinis are arrested and Bruno is killed in the Russian
front. The Finzi-Continis are abruptly taken away from
their contentment and illusory isolation. The fate of the
Jews of Ferrara is being deported to the concentration
camps. Final images show “far” happy days of Nicole,
Alberto, Ernesto and Bruno playing tennis and, soon after,
the empty tennis field, the hard present. The sequence is
accompanied by the “El male rachamim”, a Jewish lament
for the dead. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis won the
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was
nominated for Best Screenplay Based on Material from
Another Medium. It won the Golden Bear at the 21st Berlin
International Film Festival in 1971.
Federico Fellini
 Federico Fellini ( 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film
director and scriptwriter. He is considered one of the most influential
filmmakers of the 20th century and is widely revered. He won
five Academy Awards, becoming the person who won (together with
Vittorio De Sica) the highest number of Oscars (four) for Best foreign
language film in history.
L
“ a Strada”
is a 1954 Italian neo-realist drama
directed by Federico Fellini. The film
portrays the journey of its two main
characters: the brutish strongman played
by Anthony Quinn and a naïve young
woman (Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife)
whom he bought from her mother and
took with him to see the world; their
encounters with his old rival the Fool are
their road to destruction. It won the
inaugural Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film in 1956. It was
placed fourth in the 1992 British Film
Institute directors' list of cinema's top 10
films. This film influenced important
songwriters: Bob Dylan cites La Strada as
an influence for the song “Mr.
Tambourine Man” ; Kris Kristofferson has
said that La Strada was an inspiration for
the song “Me and Bobby McGee”, which
is heard in the road movie Two-Lane
Blacktop.
“
Nights of Cabiria” is a 1957 Italian romantic drama film based on an original story by
Fellini. The film is about a romantic prostitute wandering the streets of Rome and
looking for true love but finding only heartbreak.
Forty years later, the Times carried an important review by the critic Janet Maslin who
called the film "a cinematic masterpiece" and added that the final shot of Cabiria is worth
more than "all the fire-breathing blockbusters Hollywood has to offer".
It was awarded the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1958.
“
8½” is a 1963 Italian comedy-
drama shot in black-and-white. Its title
is ironic and refers to Fellini's eighth
and a half film as a director. As a
matter of fact the main character is a
director suffering from the artist’s
creative block. In this film Fellini
included
veiled
autobiographical
references.
“8½” won two Academy Awards
for
Best
Foreign
Language
Film and Best Costume Design (blackand-white). Acknowledged as an
avant-garde film and a highly
influential classic, it was ranked third
best film of all time in a 2002 poll of
film directors conducted by the British
Film Institute.
“
Amarcord” is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-
age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of
characters in a little village in 1930s Fascist Italy. The film’s title is a neologism taken
from the Emilia Romagna slang which stands for "I remember".
In this film the great Italian director mocks both Mussolini's ludicrous posturings and
those of a Catholic Church that "imprisoned Italians in a perpetual adolescence" as it is
easy to understand from the poster.
The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for two
Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Roberto Benigni
 Roberto Remigio Benigni is an Academy Award winning Italian actor, comedian,
screenwriter and film director, and a true showman in television.
“Life Is Beautiful” is a 1997 Italian
tragicomedy drama film where
Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a
Jewish bookkeeper employing his
naïf fertile imagination to protect his
son from the “human” horrors
during the three years internment at
the
Nazi
Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp .
Part of the film comes from
Benigni's own family history: before
his birth Roberto's father had
survived three years of internment
at
the
same
camp.
The film has been and is still a critical
success, winning Benigni the
Academy Award for Best Actor as
well as the Academy Award for the
Best Original Dramatic Score and the
Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film.
The film also received mostly positive reviews. Despite the acclaim, the actordirector Roberto Benigni received criticism for the comedy elements incorporated
into the backdrop of the Shoah. But Roger Ebert stated: "At Cannes, it offended
some left-wing critics with its use of humor in connection with the Holocaust.
What may be most offensive to both wings is its sidestepping of politics in favor of
simple human ingenuity. The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate
subject matter".