Fellini’s Fantastic TV Commercials for Barilla, Campari & More: The Italian Filmmaker Was Born 100 Years Ago Today

in Film, Television | January 20th, 2020

To help cel­e­brate the 100th anniver­sary of the birth of the great Ital­ian film­mak­er Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, we present a series of lyri­cal tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments made dur­ing the final decade of his life.

In 1984, when he was 64 years old, Felli­ni agreed to make a minia­ture film fea­tur­ing Cam­pari, the famous Ital­ian apéri­tif. The result, Oh, che bel pae­sag­gio! (“Oh, what a beau­ti­ful land­scape!”), shown above, fea­tures a man and a woman seat­ed across from one anoth­er on a long-dis­tance train.

The man (played by Vic­tor Polet­ti) smiles, but the woman (Sil­via Dion­i­sio) averts her eyes, star­ing sul­len­ly out the win­dow and pick­ing up a remote con­trol to switch the scenery. She grows increas­ing­ly exas­per­at­ed as a sequence of desert and medieval land­scapes pass by. Still smil­ing, the man takes the remote con­trol, clicks it, and the beau­ti­ful Cam­po di Mira­coli (“Field of Mir­a­cles”) of Pisa appears in the win­dow, embell­ished by a tow­er­ing bot­tle of Cam­pari.

“In just one minute,” writes Tul­lio Kezich in Fed­eri­co Felli­ni: His Life and Work, “Felli­ni gives us a chap­ter of the sto­ry of the bat­tle between men and women, and makes ref­er­ence to the neu­ro­sis of TV, insin­u­ates that we’re dis­parag­ing the mirac­u­lous gifts of nature and his­to­ry, and offers the hope that there might be a screen that will bring the joy back. The lit­tle tale is as quick as a train and has a remark­ably light touch.”

Also in 1984, Felli­ni made a com­mer­cial titled Alta Soci­eta (“High Soci­ety”) for Bar­il­la riga­toni pas­ta (above). As with the Cam­pari com­mer­cial, Felli­ni wrote the script him­self and col­lab­o­rat­ed with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ennio Guarnieri and musi­cal direc­tor Nico­la Pio­vani. The cou­ple in the restau­rant were played by Gre­ta Vaian and Mau­r­izio Mau­ri. The Bar­il­la spot is per­haps the least inspired of Fellini’s com­mer­cials. Bet­ter things were yet to come.

In 1991 Felli­ni made a series of three com­mer­cials for the Bank of Rome called Che Brutte Not­ti or “The Bad Nights.” “These com­mer­cials, aired the fol­low­ing year,” writes Peter Bon­danel­la in The Films of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, “are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, since they find their inspi­ra­tion in var­i­ous dreams Felli­ni had sketched out in his dream note­books dur­ing his career.”

In the episode above, titled “The Pic­nic Lunch Dream,” the clas­sic damsel-in-dis­tress sce­nario is turned upside down when a man (played by Pao­lo Vil­lag­gio) finds him­self trapped on the rail­road tracks with a train bear­ing down on him while the beau­ti­ful woman he was din­ing with (Anna Falchi) climbs out of reach and taunts him. But it’s all a dream, which the man tells to his psy­cho­an­a­lyst (Fer­nan­do Rey). The ana­lyst inter­prets the dream and assures the man that his nights will be rest­ful if he puts his mon­ey in the Ban­co di Roma.

The oth­er com­mer­cials (watch here) are called “The Tun­nel Dream” and “The Dream of the Lion in the Cel­lar.” (You can watch Rober­to Di Vito’s short, untrans­lat­ed film of Felli­ni and his crew work­ing on the project here.)

The bank com­mer­cials were the last films Felli­ni ever made. He died a year after they aired, at age 73. In Kezich’s view, the deeply per­son­al and imag­i­na­tive ads amount to Fellini’s last tes­ta­ment, a brief but won­drous return to form. “In Fed­eri­co’s life,” he writes, “these three com­mer­cial spots are a kind of Indi­an sum­mer, the gold­en autumn of a patri­arch of cin­e­ma who, for a moment, holds again the reins of cre­ation.”

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fellini’s Three Bank of Rome Com­mer­cials, the Last Thing He Did Behind a Cam­era (1992)

Watch All of the Com­mer­cials That David Lynch Has Direct­ed: A Big 30-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Wim Wen­ders Cre­ates Ads to Sell Beer (Stel­la Artois), Pas­ta (Bar­il­la), and More Beer (Car­ling)

Ing­mar Bergman’s 1950s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

All of Wes Anderson’s Cin­e­mat­ic Com­mer­cials: Watch His Spots for Pra­da, Amer­i­can Express, H&M & More

The Poetry of Mining Beautiful White Italian Marble Captured in a Short Film

in Art, Film, Life | September 2nd, 2016

Did any­one ever tru­ly want to be a coal min­er? The work was dirty, dan­ger­ous, and poor­ly com­pen­sat­ed, the work­ers exploit­ed and their unions blocked by cal­low employ­ers.

Coal pro­duc­tion is in a state of ter­mi­nal decline, but the old phrase “it’s not min­ing coal” endures.

How­ev­er hard your job may be, it’s not coal min­ing.

It’s prob­a­bly not con­tem­po­rary mar­ble min­ing either. This may strike you as a pity, after view­ing excerpts from Il Capo, film­mak­er Yuri Ancar­ani’s dreamy 15-minute doc­u­men­tary, set in the Bet­togli quar­ry in Tus­cany.

As cap­tured above, the shirt­less quar­ry boss’s silent instruc­tions to work­ers pry­ing enor­mous slabs of mar­ble from the bar­ren white land­scape with indus­tri­al exca­va­tors are unbe­liev­ably lyri­cal.

Con­sid­er your­self lucky if your job is even a frac­tion as poet­ic.

Mar­ble min­ing seems as though it might also be a secret to stay­ing fit—and tan—well into mid­dle age.

I do won­der if van­i­ty caused our mid­dle aged hero to doff his noise-can­cel­ing head­phones while the cam­era rolled. These mas­sive slabs do not go down light­ly, thus the neces­si­ty of non-ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

The film­mak­er states that he was with the del­i­ca­cy of his subject’s “light, pre­cise and deter­mined” move­ments. The quar­ry crew might not find their boss’ phys­i­cal­i­ty rem­i­nis­cent of a con­duc­tor guid­ing an orches­tra through a par­tic­u­lar­ly sen­si­tive move­ment, but those who caught the film at one of the many gal­leries, fes­ti­vals, and muse­ums where it has screened report­ed­ly do.

Clear­ly, Ancar­ani has an attrac­tion to work tran­spir­ing in unusu­al land­scapes. Il Capo is a part of his Mal­a­dy of Iron tril­o­gy, which also doc­u­ments time spent with divers oper­at­ing from a sub­ma­rine deep below the ocean’s sur­face and a sur­gi­cal robot whose move­ments inside the human body are con­trolled via joy­stick.

via Now­ness

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

The Mak­ing of a Stein­way Grand Piano, From Start to Fin­ish

Elec­tric Gui­tars Made from the Detri­tus of Detroit

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est script, Fawn­book, is avail­able in a dig­i­tal edi­tion from Indie The­ater Now.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

40,000 Film Posters in a Wonderfully Eclectic Archive: Italian Tarkovsky Posters, Japanese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

in Art, Film | April 8th, 2016

Here we have a poster for a film many of you will have heard of, and some of you will have watched right here on Open Cul­ture: Stalk­er, wide­ly con­sid­ered the most mas­ter­ful of Sovi­et auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s career full of mas­ter­pieces. Need­less to say, the film has inspired no small amount of cinephile enthu­si­asm in the 37 years since its release, and if it has inspired the same in you, what bet­ter way to express it than to hang its poster on your wall? And why not take it to the next lev­el by hang­ing a Stalk­er poster from anoth­er coun­try, such as the Ital­ian one here?

We found it on Pos­ter­i­tati, a New York movie poster gallery whose online store also func­tions as a dig­i­tal archive of over 40,000 of these com­mer­cial-cin­e­mat­ic works of art, all con­ve­nient­ly sort­ed into cat­e­gories: not just Tarkovsky posters, but posters from the for­mer East Ger­many and Iran, posters from the Czech New Wave, and posters designed by the Japan­ese artist Tadanori Yokoo (whose works, said no less an observ­er of the human con­di­tion than Yukio Mishi­ma, “reveal all of the unbear­able things which we Japan­ese have inside our­selves”). And that’s just a small sam­pling of what Pos­ter­i­tati has to offer. If you dig deep enough, you can even find posters from Poland and the Czech Repub­lic with cats in them.

Avid Open Cul­ture read­ers might find Pos­ter­i­tati’s phi­los­o­phy sec­tion espe­cial­ly worth­while, con­tain­ing as it does posters for movies we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured and movies about thinkers we like to write about, like Der­ri­da, Exam­ined Life, Wittgen­stein, and of course the Slavoj Žižek-star­ring The Per­vert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy and Žižek! 

They also sell posters at the site, though even the ones not in stock remain avail­able to view as images: just tog­gle the “IN STOCK ONLY” switch to the OFF posi­tion, and you can then see all of the posters in the col­lec­tion.  No mat­ter what your cin­e­mat­ic, intel­lec­tu­al, or aes­thet­ic inter­ests, you’ll find at least a few posters that pique your inter­est. The Japan­ese poster for Orson Welles’ F for Fake just above, for instance, rep­re­sents a near-per­fect inter­sec­tion of most of my own inter­ests. Just as well Pos­ter­i­tati does­n’t have it in stock — I’d prob­a­bly pay any­thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark

The Strange and Won­der­ful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More

Japan­ese Movie Posters of 10 David Lynch Films

Down­load Vin­tage Film Posters in High-Res: From The Philadel­phia Sto­ry to Attack of the Crab Mon­sters

A Look Inside Mar­tin Scorsese’s Vin­tage Movie Poster Col­lec­tion

100 Great­est Posters of Film Noir

Strik­ing French, Russ­ian & Pol­ish Posters for the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

Watch Stalk­er, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bend­ing Mas­ter­piece Free Online

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Adapting the Unfilmable Story of Pinnochio — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #143

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | January 31st, 2023

Your Pret­ty Much Pop A‑Team Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Bak­er dis­cuss the orig­i­nal 1883 freaky chil­dren’s sto­ry by Car­lo Col­lo­di and con­sid­er the recent rush of film ver­sions, from a new Disney/Robert Zemikis CGI take to Guiller­mo del Toro’s stop-motion pas­sion project to a heav­i­ly cos­tumed Ital­ian ver­sion by Mat­teo Gar­rone, which is the sec­ond to fea­ture Oscar win­ner Rober­to Benig­ni in a lead role. Benig­ni’s pre­vi­ous try was a 2002 ver­sion that is the most true to the beats of the orig­i­nal sto­ry and maybe because of this has a 0% on Rot­ten Toma­toes. Why do peo­ple keep remak­ing this sto­ry, and how has the orig­i­nal moral of “be a good boy and obey” changed over the years?

Read the orig­i­nal sto­ry. Some arti­cles going through the film ver­sions include:

• “The twist­ed his­to­ry of Pinoc­chio on screen” by Cindy White
• “Pinoc­chio: Top 10 Best Movie And TV Adap­ta­tions, Ranked by IMDb” by Olivia Hay­ward
• “Pinoc­chios, Ranked” by Bar­ry Levitt
• “The Trans­for­ma­tions of Pinoc­chio” by Joan Aco­cel­la
• “Pinoc­chio: The scari­est chil­dren’s sto­ry ever writ­ten” by Nicholas Bar­ber

Fol­low us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Watch Free Cult Films by Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Streaming Service

in Film | October 31st, 2022

For many Open Cul­ture read­ers, the Hal­loween sea­son offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty — not to say an excuse — to re-expe­ri­ence clas­sic hor­ror films: F.W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we sug­gest a home screen­ing of the for­mi­da­ble work of vin­tage cin­e­ma that is 1968’s The Astro Zom­bies? Writ­ten, pro­duced, and direct­ed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Dev­ils — it fea­tures not just “a mad astro-sci­en­tist” played by John Car­ra­dine and “two gore-crazed, solar-pow­ered killer robot zom­bies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door vic­tims; Chi­nese com­mu­nist spies; dead­ly Mex­i­can secret agents led by the insane­ly volup­tuous Tura Satana” and an “intre­pid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zom­bies for free, and new­ly remas­tered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new stream­ing site from film and video dis­trib­u­tor Kino Lor­ber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treat­ed to a wealth of tit­il­lat­ing view­ing options of a vari­ety of eras and sub­gen­res: “Dri­ve-in favorites” like Ape and Beware! The Blob; “gold­en age exploita­tion” like Reefer Mad­ness and She Shoul­da Said ‘No’!; and even clas­sics like Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis and Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Fear and Desire.

True cult-film enthu­si­asts, of course, may well go straight to the avail­able selec­tions, thought­ful­ly grouped togeth­er, from “Mas­ter of Ital­ian Hor­ror” Mario Bava and pro­lif­ic Span­ish “B‑movie” king­pin Jesús Fran­co. Those look­ing to throw a fright night might con­sid­er Kino Cult’s offer­ings filed under “hard­boiled hor­ror”: Kill­bil­lies, The House with 100 Eyes, Bun­ny: The Killer Thing.

Few of these pic­tures skimp on the grotesque; few­er still skimp on the humor, a nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent in even the most har­row­ing hor­ror movies. Far from a pile of cyn­i­cal hack­work, Kino Cult’s library has clear­ly been curat­ed with an eye toward films that, although for the most part pro­duced inex­pen­sive­ly and with unre­lent­ing intent to pro­voke vis­cer­al reac­tions in their audi­ences, are hard­ly with­out inter­est to seri­ous cinephiles. The site even includes an “art­sploita­tion” sec­tion con­tain­ing such taboo-breach­ing works as Cur­tis Burz’s Sum­mer House. Among its gen­er­al recent addi­tions you’ll also find Dog­tooth by Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, per­haps the most dar­ing high-pro­file provo­ca­teur cur­rent­ly at work in the medi­um. Since Kino Cult has made all these films and more avail­able to stream at no charge, none of us, no mat­ter our par­tic­u­lar cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties, has an excuse to pass this Hal­loween un-enter­tained — and more to the point, undis­turbed. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: Full of Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

What Scares Us, and How Does this Man­i­fest in Film? A Hal­loween Pret­ty Much Pop Cul­ture Pod­cast (#66)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch the Hugely-Ambitious Soviet Film Adaptation of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

in Film | July 5th, 2022

On the ques­tion of whether nov­els can suc­cess­ful­ly be turned into films, the cinephile jury remains out. In the best cas­es a film­mak­er takes a lit­er­ary work and rein­vents it almost entire­ly in accor­dance with his own vision, which usu­al­ly requires a book of mod­est or unre­al­ized ambi­tions. This method would­n’t do, in oth­er words, for War and Peace. Yet Tol­stoy’s epic nov­el, whose sheer his­tor­i­cal, dra­mat­ic, and philo­soph­i­cal scope has made it one of the most acclaimed works in the his­to­ry of lit­er­a­ture, has been adapt­ed over and over again: for radio, for the stage, as a 22-minute Yes song, and at least four times for the screen.

The first War and Peace film, direct­ed by and star­ring the pio­neer­ing Russ­ian film­mak­er Vladimir Gardin, appeared in 1915. Japan­ese activist film­mak­er Fumio Kamei came out with his own ver­sion just over three decades lat­er. Only in the nine­teen-fifties, with large-scale lit­er­ary adap­ta­tion still in vogue, did the mighty hand of Hol­ly­wood take up the book. The project went back to 1941, when pro­duc­er Alexan­der Kor­da tried to put it togeth­er under the direc­tion of Orson Welles, fresh off Cit­i­zen Kane.

For bet­ter or worse, Welles’ ver­sion would sure­ly have proven more mem­o­rable than the one that opened in 1956: King Vidor’s War and Peace expe­di­ent­ly hacked out great swathes of Tol­stoy’s nov­el, result­ing in a lush but essen­tial­ly unfaith­ful adap­ta­tion. This was still ear­ly in the Cold War, a strug­gle con­duct­ed through the amass­ing of soft pow­er as well as hard. “It is a mat­ter of hon­or for the Sovi­et cin­e­ma indus­try,” declared an open let­ter pub­lished in dthe Sovi­et press, “to pro­duce a pic­ture which will sur­pass the Amer­i­can-Ital­ian one in its artis­tic mer­it and authen­tic­i­ty.”

The gears of the Sovi­et Min­istry of Cul­ture were already turn­ing to get a supe­ri­or War and Peace film into pro­duc­tion — supe­ri­or in scale, but far supe­ri­or in feal­ty to Tol­stoy’s words. This put a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge in front of Sergei Bon­darchuk, who was select­ed as its direc­tor and who, like Gardin before him, even­tu­al­ly cast him­self in the star­ring role of Count Pyotr “Pierre” Kir­illovich Bezukhov. As a pro­duc­tion of Mos­film, nation­al stu­dio of the Sovi­et Union, War and Peace could mar­shal an unheard-of vol­ume of resources to put ear­ly nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Rus­sia onscreen. Its fur­ni­ture, fix­tures, and oth­er objects came from more than forty muse­ums, and its thou­sands of uni­forms and pieces of mil­i­tary hard­ware from the Napoleon­ic Wars were recre­at­ed by hand.

The most expen­sive pro­duc­tion ever made in the Sovi­et Union, War and Peace was also rumored to be the most expen­sive pro­duc­tion in the his­to­ry of world cin­e­ma to date. With a total run­time exceed­ing sev­en hours, it was released in four parts through­out 1966 an 1967. Now, thanks to Mos­film’s Youtube chan­nel, you can watch them all free on Youtube. 55 years lat­er, its pro­duc­tion val­ues still radi­ate from each and every frame, some­thing you can appre­ci­ate even if you know noth­ing more of War and Peace than that — as a non-Russ­ian film­mak­er of com­par­a­tive­ly mod­est pro­duc­tion sen­si­bil­i­ties once said — it’s about Rus­sia.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Should We Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (and Fin­ish It)? A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Leo Tol­stoy, and How His Great Nov­els Can Increase Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence

The Art of Leo Tol­stoy: See His Draw­ings in the War & Peace Man­u­script & Oth­er Lit­er­ary Texts

Free: Watch Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and Oth­er Films by Sergei Eisen­stein, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Sovi­et Film­mak­er

Free Online: Watch Stalk­er, Mir­ror, and Oth­er Mas­ter­works by Sovi­et Auteur Andrei Tarkovsky

Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russ­ian Stu­dio Mos­film: Clas­sic Films, Beloved Come­dies, Tarkovsky, Kuro­sawa & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Italian Advice on How to Live the Good Life: Cigarettes, Tomatoes, and Other Picturesque Small Pleasures

in Life, Philosophy, Travel | May 31st, 2022

“I guess everybody’s got a dream and we’re all hop­ing to see it come true,” mus­es Gio­van­ni Mim­mo Man­cu­sou, a philo­soph­i­cal native of Cal­abria, the love­ly, sun-drenched region form­ing the toe of Italy’s boot, above. “A dream com­ing true is bet­ter than just a dream.”

Film­mak­ers Jan Vrhovnik and Ana Kerin were scout­ing for sub­jects to embody “the very essence of nos­tal­gia” when they chanced upon Man­cu­sou in a cor­ner shop.

A lucky encounter! Not every non-actor — or for that mat­ter, actor — is as com­fort­able on film as the laid­back Man­cu­sou.

(Vrhovnik has said that he invari­ably serves as his own cam­era oper­a­tor when work­ing with non-actors, because of the poten­tial for inti­ma­cy and intu­itive approach that such prox­im­i­ty affords.)

Man­cu­sou, an advo­cate for sim­ple plea­sures, also appears to be quite fit, which makes us won­der why the film’s descrip­tion on NOWNESS dou­bles down on adjec­tives like “aging”, “old­er” and most con­fus­ing­ly, “wis­ened.”

Mer­ri­am-Web­ster defines “wiz­ened” with a z as “dry, shrunk­en, and wrin­kled often as a result of aging or of fail­ing vital­i­ty” … and “wis­ened” not at all.

Per­haps NOWNESS meant wise?

We find our­selves crav­ing a lot more con­text.

Man­cu­sou has clear­ly cul­ti­vat­ed an abil­i­ty to savor the hell out of a ripe toma­to, his pic­turesque sur­round­ings, and his cig­gies.

“Seren­i­ty, joy, ecsta­sy” is embroi­dered across the back of his ball cap.

His man­ner of express­ing him­self does lend itself to a “poet­ic thought piece”, as the film­mak­ers note, but might that not be a symp­tom of strug­gling to com­mu­ni­cate abstract thoughts in a for­eign tongue?

We real­ly would love to know more about this charm­ing guy… his fam­i­ly sit­u­a­tion, what he does to make ends meet, his actu­al age.

Home movies accom­pa­ny his nos­tal­gic rever­ie, but did he pro­vide this footage to his new friends?

Did they hunt it down on ebay? It def­i­nite­ly fits the vibe, but is the man with the eye­brows Man­cu­sou at an ear­li­er age?

Our star pulls up to a small petrol sta­tion, declares, “All right, here we go,” and the next frame shows him wear­ing a head­lamp and mag­ni­fi­er as he peers into the work­ings of a pock­et watch:

Time out of mechan­i­cal. It’s mag­ic.

Is this a hob­by? A pro­fes­sion? Does he repair watch­es in a dark­ened gas sta­tion?

The film­mak­ers aren’t say­ing and the blurred back­ground offers no clues either. Curse you, depth of field!

We’re not even giv­en his home coor­di­nates.

The film, part of the NOWNESS series Por­trait of a Place, is titled Par­adiso, and there is indeed a vil­lage so named adja­cent to the town of Belvedere Marit­ti­mo, but accord­ing to cen­sus data we found on line, it has only 14 res­i­dents, 7 male.

If that’s where Man­cu­sou lives, he’s either 45–49, 65–69, 70–74, or one of two fel­lows over age 74…and now we’re real­ly curi­ous about his neigh­bors, too.

No shade to Sign­or Man­cu­so, but we’re glad to know we’re not the only view­ers left unsat­is­fied by this por­trait’s lack of depth.

One com­menter who chafed at the lack of speci­fici­ty (“this video is a ran­dom por­trait of basi­cal­ly any­one in the world that is hap­py with the lit­tle he has”) sug­gest­ed the omis­sions con­tribute to an Ital­ian stereo­type famil­iar from pas­ta sauce com­mer­cials:

Peo­ple in Italy actu­al­ly work and have ambi­tions you know? And often are very well-edu­cat­ed and hard-work­ing. The per­spec­tive of Italy that you have comes from the Amer­i­can media and Ital­ian post-war neo­re­al­ism. Indeed, Oscar-win­ning Ital­ian peo­ple com­plained about the fact that what the media wants is see­ing Ital­ians wear­ing tank tops doing noth­ing if not mafia or smelling the ros­es.

Watch more entries in the NOWNESS Por­trait of a Place series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Botton’s Doc­u­men­tary Shows How Niet­zsche, Socrates & 4 Oth­er Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Online Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

The Sci­ence of Well-Being: Take a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale University’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Forgotten Women of Surrealism: A Magical, Short Animated Film

in Art, Film | May 12th, 2022

“The prob­lem of woman is the most mar­velous and dis­turb­ing prob­lem in all the world,” — Andre Bre­ton, 1929 Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo.

“I warn you, I refuse to be an object.” — Leono­ra Car­ring­ton

Fash­ion mod­el, writer, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lee Miller had many lives. Dis­cov­ered by Condé Nast in New York (when he pulled her out of the path of traf­fic), she became a famous face of Vogue in the 1920s, then launched her own pho­to­graph­ic career, for which she has been just­ly cel­e­brat­ed: both for her work in the fash­ion world and on the bat­tle­fields (and Hitler’s tub!) in World War II. One of Miller’s achieve­ments often gets left out in men­tions of her life, the Sur­re­al­ist work she cre­at­ed as an artist in the 1930s.

Hailed as a “leg­endary beau­ty,” writes the Nation­al Gal­leries of Scot­land, Miller stud­ied act­ing, dance, and exper­i­men­tal the­ater. “She learned pho­tog­ra­phy first through being a sub­ject for the most impor­tant fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers of her day, includ­ing Nick­o­las Muray, Arnold Gen­the and Edward Ste­ichen.” Her appren­tice­ship and affair with Man Ray is, of course, well-known. But rather than call­ing Miller an active par­tic­i­pant in his art and her own (she co-cre­at­ed the “solar­iza­tion” process he used, for exam­ple) she’s most­ly referred to only as his muse, lover, and favorite sub­ject.

“Sur­re­al­ism had a very high pro­por­tion of women mem­bers who were at the heart of the move­ment, but who often get cast as ‘muse of’ or ‘wife of,’ ” says Susan­na Greeves, cura­tor of an all-women Sur­re­al­ist exhib­it in South Lon­don. The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of women Sur­re­al­ists is not a his­tor­i­cal over­sight, many crit­ics and schol­ars con­tend, but a cen­tral fea­ture of the move­ment itself. When British Sur­re­al­ist Eileen Agar said in a 1990 inter­view, “In those days, men thought of women sim­ply as mus­es,” she was too polite by half.

Despite their rad­i­cal pol­i­tics, male Sur­re­al­ists per­fect­ed turn­ing women into dis­fig­ured objects. “While Dalí used the female fig­ure in opti­cal puz­zles, Magritte paint­ed porni­fied faces with breasts for eyes, and Ernst sim­ply decap­i­tat­ed them,” Izabel­la Scott writes at Art­sy. Sur­re­al­ist artist René Crev­el wrote in 1934, “the Noble Man­nequin is so per­fect. She does not always both­er to take her head, arms and legs with her.” Edgar Allan Poe’s love for “beau­ti­ful dead girls” esca­lat­ed into dis­mem­ber­ment.

Dalí employed no lyri­cal obfus­ca­tion in his thoughts on the place of women in the move­ment. He called his con­tem­po­rary, Argentine/Italian artist Leonor Fini (who nev­er con­sid­ered her­self a Sur­re­al­ist), “bet­ter than most, per­haps.” Then he felt com­pelled to add, “but tal­ent is in the balls.”

When writ­ing her dis­ser­ta­tion on Sur­re­al­ism in the 1970s at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Glo­ria Feman Oren­stein found that all of the women had been total­ly left out of the record. So she found them — track­ing down and becom­ing “a close friend to many influ­en­tial female sur­re­al­ists,” notes Aeon, “includ­ing Leono­ra Car­ring­ton and Meret Elis­a­beth Oppeneim” (anoth­er Man Ray mod­el and the only Sur­re­al­ist of any gen­der to have actu­al train­ing and expe­ri­ence in psy­cho­analy­sis).

Through her research, Oren­stein “became the aca­d­e­m­ic voice of fem­i­nist sur­re­al­ism,” recov­er­ing the work of artists who had always been part of the move­ment, but who had been shoul­dered aside by male con­tem­po­raries, lovers, and hus­bands who did not see them on equal terms. In the short film above, Glo­ri­a’s Call, L.A.-based artist Cheri Gaulke “man­i­fests Oren­stein’s jour­ney into the sur­re­al with col­lage-like ani­ma­tions.” It was a quest that took her around the world, from Paris to Sami­land, and it began in Mex­i­co City, where she met the great Leono­ra Car­ring­ton.

See how Oren­stein not only redis­cov­ered the women of Sur­re­al­ism, but helped recov­er the essen­tial roots of Sur­re­al­ism in Latin Amer­i­ca, also erased by the art his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship of her time. And learn more about the artists she befriend­ed and brought to light at Art­space and in Pene­lope Rose­mon­t’s 1998 book, Sur­re­al­ist Women: An Inter­na­tion­al Anthol­o­gy.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch His Appear­ances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view (1958)

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How Postwar Italian Cinema Created La Dolce Vita and Then the Paparazzi

in Film, History, Media | May 4th, 2022

Those who love the work of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni must envy any­one who sees La Dolce Vita for the first time. But today such a view­er, how­ev­er over­whelmed by the lav­ish cin­e­mat­ic feast laid before his eyes, will won­der if giv­ing the intru­sive tabloid pho­tog­ra­ph­er friend of Mar­cel­lo Mas­troian­ni’s pro­tag­o­nist the name “Paparaz­zo” isn’t a bit on the nose. Unlike La Dolce Vita’s first audi­ences in 1960, we’ve been hear­ing about real-life paparazzi through­out most all of our lives, and thus may not real­ize that the word itself orig­i­nal­ly derives from Fellini’s mas­ter­piece. Each time we refer to the paparazzi, we pay trib­ute to Paparaz­zo.

In the video essay above, Evan Puschak (bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer) traces the ori­gins of paparazzi: not just the word, but the often both­er­some pro­fes­sion­als denot­ed by the word. The sto­ry begins with the dic­ta­tor Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, an “avid movie fan and fan­boy of film stars” who wrote “more than 100 fawn­ing let­ters to Amer­i­can actress Ani­ta Page, includ­ing sev­er­al mar­riage pro­pos­als.” Know­ing full well “the emo­tion­al pow­er of cin­e­ma as a tool for pro­pa­gan­da and build­ing cul­tur­al pres­tige,” Mus­soli­ni com­mis­sioned the con­struc­tion of Rome’s Cinecit­tà, the largest film-stu­dio com­plex in Europe when it opened in 1937 — six years before his fall from pow­er.

Dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, Cinecit­tà became a vast refugee camp. When peace­time returned, with “the stu­dio space being used and Mus­solin­i’s thumb removed, a new wave of film­mak­ers took to the streets of Rome to make movies about real life in post­war Italy.” Thus began the age of Ital­ian Neo­re­al­ism, which brought forth such now-clas­sic pic­tures as Rober­to Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Vit­to­rio De Sica’s Bicy­cle Thieves. In the nine­teen-fifties, major Amer­i­can pro­duc­tions start­ed com­ing to Rome: Quo Vadis, Roman Hol­i­day, Ben-Hur, Cleopa­tra. (It was this era, sure­ly, that inspired an eleven-year-old named Mar­tin Scors­ese to sto­ry­board a Roman epic of his own.) All of this cre­at­ed an era known as “Hol­ly­wood on the Tiber.”

For a few years, says Puschak, “the Via Vene­to was the coolest place in the world.” Yet “while the glit­terati cavort­ed in chic bars and clubs, thou­sands of oth­ers strug­gled to find their place in the post­war econ­o­my.” Some turned to tourist pho­tog­ra­phy, and “soon found they could make even more mon­ey snap­ping pho­tos of celebri­ties.” It was the most noto­ri­ous of these, the “Volpe di via Vene­to” Tazio Sec­chiaroli, to whom Felli­ni reached out ask­ing for sto­ries he could include in the film that would become La Dolce Vita. The new­ly chris­tened paparazzi were soon seen as the only ones who could bring “the gods of our cul­ture down to the messy earth.” These six decades lat­er, of course, celebri­ties do it to them­selves, social media hav­ing turned each of us — famous or oth­er­wise — into our own Paparaz­zo.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“The Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse”: A Video Essay on How Films Cin­e­ma­tize Cities & Places, from Man­hat­tan to Nashville, Rome, Open City to Taipei Sto­ry

Fed­eri­co Felli­ni Intro­duces Him­self to Amer­i­ca in Exper­i­men­tal 1969 Doc­u­men­tary

Cin­e­mat­ic Exper­i­ment: What Hap­pens When The Bicy­cle Thief’s Direc­tor and Gone With the Wind’s Pro­duc­er Edit the Same Film

Cinecit­tà Luce and Google to Bring Italy’s Largest Film Archive to YouTube

Mus­soli­ni Sends to Amer­i­ca a Hap­py Mes­sage, Full of Friend­ly Feel­ings, in Eng­lish (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Francis Ford Coppola Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films: The Godfather, Apocalypse Now & More

in Film | March 30th, 2022

Fifty years after its the­atri­cal release, The God­fa­ther remains a sub­ject of live­ly cinephile con­ver­sa­tion. What, as any of us might ask after a fresh semi-cen­ten­ni­al view­ing of Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s mafia mas­ter­piece, is this movie about? We need only ask Cop­po­la him­self, who has our answer in one word: suc­ces­sion. In the recent GQ inter­view above, he also explains the themes of oth­er major works with sim­i­lar suc­cinct­ness: Apoc­a­lypse Now is about moral­i­ty; The Con­ver­sa­tion is about pri­va­cy. Such clean and sim­ple encap­su­la­tions belie the nature of the film pro­duc­tion process, and espe­cial­ly that of Cop­po­la’s nine­teen-sev­en­ties pic­tures, with their large scale, seri­ous­ness of pur­pose, and prone­ness to severe dif­fi­cul­ty.

“What we con­sid­er real art is a movie that does not have a safe­ty net,” Cop­po­la says, and that applies with­out a doubt to movies like The God­fa­ther and Apoc­a­lypse Now. Much as Orson Welles once said of his own expe­ri­ence mak­ing Cit­i­zen Kane, the young Cop­po­la went into The God­fa­ther igno­rant of more or less every­thing involved in its con­tent but life in an Ital­ian-Amer­i­can fam­i­ly. But he had, in the­ater school, learned the tech­niques of “out­wit­ting the fac­ul­ty,” and deal­ing with the high­er-ups at Hol­ly­wood stu­dios turned out to require that same skill set. He thus found a way to include every ele­ment ruled insis­tent­ly out by the exec­u­tives, from New York loca­tions and a peri­od set­ting to per­form­ers like the then-unknown Al Paci­no and then-washed-up Mar­lon Bran­do.

Bran­do did­n’t take part in The God­fa­ther Part II, but he did show up at the end of Apoc­a­lypse Now for a vivid­ly mem­o­rable turn as the pow­er-mad Colonel Kurtz. As Cop­po­la remem­bers it, “when Bran­do arrived, he looked at me — he’s so smart — and he said, ‘You paint­ed your­self in a cor­ner, did­n’t you?” The actor meant that the sur­re­al qual­i­ties of the film had reached such an inten­si­ty that no con­ven­tion­al form of res­o­lu­tion could pos­si­bly suf­fice. This was the result of the fact that, as Cop­po­la puts it, “one of the things that make a movie is the movie: it con­tributes to mak­ing itself.” In oth­er words, as Cop­po­la and his col­lab­o­ra­tors shot each scene (a process that famous­ly result­ed in over one mil­lion feet of footage), the very film tak­ing shape before them sug­gest­ed its own direc­tion — in the case of Apoc­a­lypse Now, toward the ever dark­er and stranger.

Always can­did about his pro­fes­sion­al strug­gles, Cop­po­la has also been gen­er­ous with tech­ni­cal and artis­tic expla­na­tions of just how his pic­tures have come togeth­er. God­fa­ther fans will delight in his direc­tor’s-com­men­tary tracks on the first and sec­ond parts of that tril­o­gy; as for The God­fa­ther Part III, Cop­po­la released a new edit (in the man­ner of Apoc­a­lypse Now’s Redux and Final Cut) called The God­fa­ther Coda: The Death of Michael Cor­leone in 2020. He dis­cuss­es that project in the GQ inter­view, and also his work-in-progress Mega­lopo­lis. Hav­ing described The God­fa­ther as essen­tial­ly a Shake­speare­an tale, he’s now reach­ing fur­ther back in time: “Would­n’t it be inter­est­ing if you made a Roman epic but did­n’t set it in ancient Rome — set it in mod­ern New York?” He also lets us in on Mega­lopo­lis’ sur­pris­ing key word: not mega­lo­ma­nia, nor ambi­tion, nor pow­er, but sin­cer­i­ty.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Cast­ing of The God­fa­ther with Cop­po­la, Paci­no, De Niro & Caan

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

What Is Apoc­a­lypse Now Real­ly About? An Hour-Long Video Analy­sis of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Viet­nam Mas­ter­piece

How Wal­ter Murch Rev­o­lu­tion­ized the Sound of Mod­ern Cin­e­ma: A New Video Essay Explores His Inno­va­tions in Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti, The God­fa­ther & More

Great Film­mak­ers Offer Advice to Young Direc­tors: Taran­ti­no, Her­zog, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Ander­son, Felli­ni & More

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.