Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/24/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

L'Amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Anna Magnani in the "Una Voce Umana" segment of L'Amore

Federico Fellini and Anna Magnani in the "Il Miracolo" segment of L'Amore

Una Voce Umana
The Woman on the Telephone: Anna Magnani

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Anna Benevuti
Based on a play by Jean Cocteau
Cinematography: Robert Juillard, Otello Martelli
Production design: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Il Miracolo
Nannina: Anna Magnani
The Vagabond: Federico Fellini
The Monk: Peparuolo
The Teacher: Amelia Robert

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini
Based on a novel by Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Cinematography: Aldo Tonti
Art direction: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's L'Amore, designed as a tribute to Anna Magnani, comprises two short films, Una Voce Umana and Il Miracolo. The first is based on Jean Cocteau's monodrama La Voix Humaine and its cast consists entirely of Magnani as a woman whose lover is not only breaking up with her but also going off to marry another woman. In a long telephone call she pleads with and rages at him. Unfortunately, in the print shown by the FilmStruck Criterion Collection, the dialogue goes seriously out of sync with what's on screen for a long period -- a flaw also to be found for a shorter span in the other film, Il Miracolo. The English subtitles keep pace with the on-screen action, but those of us who have a little familiarity with Italian find the disjunction of sight and sound distracting. In Il Miracolo, Magnani is Nannina, a simple-minded woman who, while herding goats in the hills above her village, encounters a hiker whom she takes to be St. Joseph. He gets her drunk and leaves her pregnant. (The hiker is played by 28-year-old Federico Fellini, who doesn't speak a word in one of his few on-screen appearances.) When Nannina learns that she's having a child she takes it to be a miracle from God, but the townspeople, who already treat her as the village idiot, torment her so much that she flees into the hills, where she gives birth in what seems to be an abandoned monastery. In one of the landmark moments in the decline of film censorship, the Catholic National Legion of Decency charged Il Miracolo with sacrilege and persuaded the New York state film censors to pull it from release. The lawsuit brought by the American distributor, Joseph Burstyn, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1952 ruled that the ban was an unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech. Magnani's performance is fuller and more varied in Il Miracolo than in Una Voce Umana, in which she gives a lacerating performance that feels more theatrical than cinematic -- her torment becomes monotonous. But both films accomplish what Rossellini set out to do: showcase Magnani's intense commitment to her art.