Richmond Moving Image Co-op - Events - Italian Film and Food Fest

RMIC Events >> 2005

Italian Film and Food Festival
Saturday, January 29, 2005

10 am "Open City" (Roma, citta aperta) (1945, 101 mins.) Director Roberto Rossellini and co-writers Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini garnered international acclaim with this anthem to the Italian resistance movement of WWII. "Open City" became the prototype for a style that came to be known as Italian "neorealism," and was remarkable for its documentary-like texture. Shot in grainy black and white, and mostly on location (only 2 studio sets were used), Rossellini also post-dubbed his actors' voices for budgetary reasons. The finished film resembled the newsreels that often preceded the feature film, and audiences in the States thought they were watching actual footage that the director had somehow slipped past the Nazis. Winner of the Grand Prix in 1946 at Cannes, "Open City" is still considered one of the great films of all time. It so overwhelmed American critic James Agee that he publicly refused to review the film. With Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi. Sub-titled. Introduction by Trent Nicholas (VCU Film Studies, VMFA)
1 pm "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (Il vangelo secondo Matteo) (1964, 142 mins.) Neither a sudden surprise in subject-matter from notorious Marxist director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, nor a simple transposing of the Christ story into a convenient working class dialectic, "The Gospel..." is clearly born of adult concern and child-like nostalgia. The wondrously framed and captured imagery (photographed by Tonino Colli) is not mere ornament for sermonizing, not fine dressing for polemics. Pasolini crafted this work to invite the audience into the mystery and beauty of both storytelling at its most imaginative and filmmaking at its most immediate. For audience and critic alike, this is political art with a high measure of grace and integrity--a result which most marriages of the spiritual and the secular fall woefully short of achieving. Featuring non-professional actors and music from Billie Holliday to Bach. Sub-titled. Introduction by Robert Ellis (VCU, English)
4 pm "Swept Away, by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August" (Travolti da un insolito Destino nell'Azzuro Mare d'Agosto) (1974, 120 mins.) Director Lina Wertmuller raised a considerable number of feminist eyebrows with this allegorical love story set on a deserted Mediterranean island. Blonde, jet-setter Raffaela (Mariangela Melato) becomes stranded with the dark, working-class Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) when their dinghy founders far from the yacht. A tongue-in-cheek reworking of the war between the sexes, Wertmuller enriches the formula with keen observations on capitalism and labor, the nature of desire, and the politics of sex. Actor Giannini also starred in Wertmuller's "The Seduction of Mimi" and "Seven Beauties" and became an international star in the seventies. Recently remade by Guy Ritchie starring Madonna. Sub-titled. Color. Introduction by Elizabeth Canfield (VCU, English)
8 pm "8 1/2" (Otto e mezo) (1963, 138 mins.) From its birth, film has always been about the dynamics and powers of dream, the liberties and burdens of the dreamer. Here, director Federico Fellini takes the natural dream logic of cinema and the chaotic flow of his own memories and reveries, joining art and life in a now slow, now frenzied dance, and culminating at last in the most honest, joyful processional ever designed for the lens. At a difficult time in his own life and mirrored through alter-ego Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini's private visions get trotted out before the viewer--clumsy, agonized, conflicted--until suddenly and inevitably we are all invited to the dance where whore and madman, clown and tyrant link arms to move, once more, like angels. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1964; with Claudia Cardinale and Anouk Aimee. Sub-titled. Introduction by F. T. Rea (writer/artist)