Giorno e nuvole (2008)

Vad betyder det att vara arbetslös? Intressant nog är det en fråga som ett antal filmer tagit itu med, under de senaste decennierna också utifrån varierande klassperspektiv. Jag kommer att tänka på åtminstone två olika varianter (en med regi av mästaren Laurent Cantet) av filmatiseringar av berättelsen om en man som blir uppsagd och som inte klarar av att berätta för sin familj om detta utan låtsas jobba för WHO. Och sen mördar han familjen. 

Giorno e nuvole ("Days and Clouds") börjar på ett liknande sätt. Michele (Antonio Albanese) ordnar en stor fest för sin fru Elsa (Margherita Buy) som äntligen blivit färdig konsthistoriker. På det knappt avlönade, men givande, jobbet ägnar hon sig åt att restaurera fresker. Sen kryper det fram att Michele blivit uppsagd från sitt chefsjobb redan för flera månader sedan. Deras tillvaro i den övre medelklassen slits sönder: frun har kunnat ägna sig åt konst och de har bott i en flärdfull våning med städhjälp och allt. Nu gäller det att snabbt sälja bostaden och på något sätt hitta ett jobb. Samtidigt knakar det i alla möjliga fogar, för relationen med dottern Alice (Alba Rohrwacher) är inte den bästa, eftersom pappa tycker att dotterns pojkvän är för arbetarklassig och hennes jobb på restaurang tycker han inte heller är fint nog. 

Regissören Silvio Soldini (Pane e tulipani) har gjort en brutalt rolig och rörande film om arbetslöshet, klass och klassresor neråt. Nästan allt funkar. Genua-miljöerna, skådespeleriet (Albanese i synnerhet är i toppform) och en dialog som ofta är på pricken, som när far och dotter grälar om pojkvännen och Michele drar in något dottern sagt om att nån tidigare pojkvän inte ens visste vem Thomas Bernhard är. Visst, visst, somliga scener går kanske lite överstyr vad gäller dramatiken men som helhet är det en film jag helt och hållet dras in i. 

Klassresan neråt har många trappsteg. Det handlar om allt från att främmande människor klampar in i hemmet under lägenhetsvisningarna till att berätta för vännerna (med fina jobb) om att man kanske inte har råd att äta ute så mycket i fortsättningen. Elsa börjar arbeta som telefonförsäljare och sen blir hon sekreterare med en chef som gör närmanden (har hon råd att spjärna emot?). Michele i sin tur skäms över sin situation och den skammen har flera bottnar. Bland annat handlar det om att han känner sig sviken av vännerna som han grundat firma med. Nu ska han då kasta sig ut i ett arbetsliv som består av små snuttar av inhopp som arbetskraftsuthyrarfirmorna erbjuder. Michele prövar lyckan bland annat som bud. Men framför allt ligger han på soffan, oförmögen att göra något alls. När han genom olika förvecklingar börjar greja med fumligt renoveringsarbete (jfr fruns sirliga restaurationer) nås botten: hans kompanjoner, tillika arbetslösa, är killar som tidigare jobbat som hans underordnade. Och nu ska de låtsas kunna något om hur man fixar upp tapeter. Solidaritet över klassgränserna? Mja, inte så lätt är det.

Ytterst sett tangerar Giorno e nuvole prekariseringen av samhället överlag. Också den som har sitt på det torra kan en dag befinna sig i en position där den osäkra arbetsmarknaden också är ens egen lott, och där det inte finns någon given väg in i en framtid av ekonomisk trygghet. 

Någon kritiker har gruffat över att det inte händer så mycket i Giorno e nuvole. Själv var jag uppslukad, det är ju inte i varje film man får se karaktärerna i detalj gå igenom sin personliga ekonomi som de gör här. Trots att det egentligen varken till tematik eller stil är någon jätteoriginell framställning av temat lyckas Soldini få detaljerna rätt. Det han också lyckas med är att få åtminstone mig att bry mig om de här ganska osympatiska karaktärerna. Den här filmen borde plockas fram ur distributörernas gömmor och placeras bredvid exempelvis Robert Guédiguians katalog. 

Terraferma (2011)

Ett par äldre män talar med några yngre på en strand. "Deras lagar står i strid med havets lagar", säger en solbränd, skäggig fiskare. De yngre protesterar. Vad det handlar om? De äldre, garvade fiskare, talar om en absolut skyldighet ("havets lag") att försöka rädda drunknande migranter. Vi befinner oss på en liten siciliansk ö, Linosa, där fiskerinäringen krymper medan turismens roll tilltar snabbt genom byns ivriga entreprenörer. Ortsborna som vill skapa sig ett bättre liv stretar vidare på land, och vissa anser att de som kämpar på havet (för sitt liv och sin framtid) förtjänar att drunkna, det är enligt dem att skapa sig ett bättre liv på fel sätt. 

När jag ser scenen med de äldre herremännen tänker jag på Gianfranco Rosas dokumentär Fire at Sea. Att leva vid och på havet är att förstå havet och att förstå havet är att förstå vilket ansvar det är förbundet med att . Det sade flera personer i den på Lampedusa inspelade filmen. Fiskare, en läkare, en ung gosse. Och allt detta medan vardagslivet rullade på med sysslor och bekymmer.

Scenen jag nämnde ingår i Emanuele Crialeses Terraferma (2011). Det här ögonblicket är en höjdpunkt, här konkretiseras en konflikt mellan generationer. De yngre vill få turismen att blomstra och att det finns drunknande migranter är för dem bara en olägenhet för affärerna. Crialese har helt klart ett öga för de här spänningarna i ett samhälle. Han låter allt detta växa fram gradvis, här finns mycket stoff och många sårigheter som river upp varandra. Fotot domineras av starka färger och natursköna vyer, men turisternas semesterdrömmar ställs vid sidan av ortsbornas grubbleri om försörjning och, framför allt, de människoliv som sätts på spel alldeles i närheten.

Huvudpersonerna tillhör en familj vars liv på flera sätt tappat fästet. Farfar Ernesto (Mimmo Cuticchio) sörjer fiskeriets borttynande på orten och de politiska beslut som bidrar till detta gör honom arg. Filippo (Filippo Pucillo) dras mellan farfaderns älskade fiskeri och hans mammas (Donatella Finocchiaro) drömmar om att tjäna en hacka på turisterna och kanske komma bort från obygden. Familjens hem förvandlas till ett b&b där de tar emot stojande, rika italienska ungdomar norrifrån, kidsen vill ut på nöjestur med båten (fiskebåten/nöjesyachten/gummibåten). Sen när Filippo och Ernesto under en tur med båten ser migranter som håller på att drunka ställs allt på sin spets, både gamla konflikter och nya. (Ett scenario, en motsättning, som påminner mig om Mark Jenkins oförglömliga Bait.) Terraferma är bra just när det gäller att gestalta de här spänningarna, men sedan går manus över styr med sånt som helt uppenbart är tänkt att lite krydda upp en historia, vilket filmen förlorar på. En sak jag funderar på är också hur Crialese väljer att skildra migranterna bara som stackars människor i behov av hjälp. Visst, det är ortsbornas beskrivningar vi får ta del av, men det här draget är också en inarbetad konvention på film.

Kort sagt, en ojämn men ändå viktig film. Den påminner om det outsägligt uppåtväggarna med att människor som följer "havets lag" kan straffas för detta på land, genom politiska beslut som ser precis allt genom den territoriella linsen. Beskrivningen av fiskeriet som mer än en näring, som ett sätt att leva, är också övertygande och dessutom rörande.

Terraferma spelades förresten in på Lampedus.



Terraferma, 2011.
Regi: Emanuele Crialese.
I rollerna: Mimmo Cuticchio, Donatella Finocchiaro, Filippo Pucillo.

La classe operaia va in paradiso (1971)

Om Cyril Schäublins Unrueh (2022) är den mest lågmälda av alla skildringar av arbetskonflikter jag har sett är Elio Petris La classe operaia va in paradiso från 1971 eventuellt den mest högljudda. Detta är nämligen en film som tar i så att den nästan spricker för att basunera ut splittringen inom den italienska arbetarrörelsen. Studentrörelsen krockar med den traditionella fackföreningsrörelsen, och någonstans finns också den marxistiska teorins förkämpar. Vad är det kampen handlar om, vad omfattar den och var lämnas utanför? Vem ska man samarbeta med, och vem är förtryckaren? Är idealet en någorlunda dräglig arbetsplats och ett välbetalt jobb eller kapitalismens totala avskaffande och en omstöpning av samhället som sådant? Vem är arbetarklass? Ska man kämpa för mer arbete och bättre lön eller mindre arbete och högre lön eller nåt helt annat? Det är några konfliktlinjer. 

Mera konkret handlar det om Lulù Massa (spelas med enorm frenesi av Gian Maria Volontè) som stiger upp på morgonen och börjar orera för sin flickvän (Mariangela Melato) om varför hans kropp är som en maskin. Men om kroppen är en maskin blir i mannens yviga prat fabriken en levande varelse, och ackordarbetet närmast en erotisk akt. För det är nämligen så att Lulù är en hejare på att jobba. Han är snabb och effektiv och han säger sig tänka på sin kvinnliga kollegas rumpa när han jobbar. Ja, han tycks ta ledarskapets budskap om att behandla maskinen som någon man älskar bokstavligt. Älska maskinen, men samtidigt inte ha en aning om vad det är som man producerar (så säger Lulù i en scen). De andra på fabriken är förbannade på karlen, som riskerar att pressa upp produktivitetskraven genom sin hejdlösa takt. "Det var ju inte jag som uppfann ackordsystemet", så försvarar sig Lulù. Utanför skriker studenter med megafoner och palestinasjalar slagord: fabriken är ett fängelse! Sen råkar Lulú ut för en arbetsolycka. Plötsligt blir han en del av en pågående arbetskonflikt, frågan är hur "medveten" han är (och, i förlängningen, vad det betyder att "vara medveten" i en kamp som handlar om annat än folks individuella tänkande). Kanske han har blivit som sin kompis Militina (Salvo Randone), som sitter på mentalhospitalet och pratar om att slå sönder "väggen"?

Maken till hemsk huvudrollsinnehavare har man sällan skådat, hans gränslöshet får mig ibland att tänka på Fassbinders Satansbraten). Lulù är bullrig, vulgär och kolerisk. "Varför måste du alltid skrika?" frågar någon honom. Det är som att varje ord för honom blir något att mässa inför världsalltet, rörelsen från arbetets hjälte till en krossad man är inte så förvånande. 

Elio Petri (bekant för mig via Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) låter hela filmen skälva av uppdämd energi. Det är inte bara Lulù som härjar, Ennio Morricones musik lyfter fram fabrikens oväsen. Allt är uppskruvat. Förutom i några scener, som därför bli än viktigare. För det mesta rör sig kameran bland skeendena så att tittaren verkligen känner sig omsluten och delaktig, delaktig av energin, av rörelsen, av konflikterna. (Att ordet energi är viktigt förstår man p.g.a. att en del verkar ganska influerat av Marcuse-liknande saker.)

Elio Petris film slutar på ett alla sätt ambivalent sätt som kan tolkas på flera vis. Själv ser jag den som en berättelse om en konflikt, konflikter i flertal, snarare än att den tydligt tar ställning för något läger. Hur som helst är det en rörlig och konstnärligt slående grej, med djävulsk intensitet. Kort sagt: som film är detta fantastiskt och mångbottnat också. 

La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven), 1971
Regi: Elio Petri
I rollerna: Gian Maria Volontè, Miriangela Melato, Gino Pernice, Luigi Diberti, Dinato Castellaneto, Salvo Randone m.fl.

Teorema (1968)

En ung man (Terence Stamp) dimper ner hos en familj i Milano vars överhuvud (just det) äger en fabrik. Den unga mannen slår genast an en ton, ja inte bara en ton utan massor av toner hos samtliga som befinner sig i huset. Den trånande dottern som drömmer om familjeliv, sonen som får sällskap i tonårsrummet, mamman som uttråkat stakar omkring i hemmafruns tillvaro, pappan som läser Tolstojs Ivan Illich och slutligen den människotörstande husan. Lite helbrägdagörande också, Gästen besitter oanade krafter (kameran söker sig dock gärna till Stamps skrev). Men sedan är han försvunnen, och hela familjen är ifrån sig och allt bryter ihop eller  bryter loss kanske.

Detta är bågen i Pier Paolo Pasolinis Teorema.

Att gästen är på väg meddelas av en ung man som kommer skuttande som en ängel, om han är en god eller ond sådan är oklart och samma gäller Gästen – för kanske poängen här är att cirklarna rubbas, ur förstörelsen av det gamla kan kanske något nytt uppstå, eller i varje fall väck med det livsförnekande? Och kanske slutet är som början: arbetarna ska äga fabriken?

Vandringen i öknen (ett vulkaniskt landskap) blir ett ledande motiv; är gästen/ängeln en frestare eller någon som för personerna bort från de frestelser som satts i system och blivit livsform? Citatet från Jeremia 20:7-8 ger upphov till nya frågor: 

"7. Du, HERRE övertalade mig, och jag lät mig övertalas; du grep mig och blev mig övermäktig. Så har jag blivit ett ständigt åtlöje: var man bespottar mig. 8. Ty så ofta jag talar, måste jag klaga. Jag måste ropa över våld och förtryck, ty HERRENS ord har blivit mig till smälek och hån beständigt." 

Att olika översättningar rör sig med begrepp som "bedra", "förledde" (engelska även: "förföra", "vilseleda") och "övertyga" visar kanske just problematikens sidor?

Jag är ingen Pasolini-kännare. Genom åren har jag sett några av hans kändare filmer och slagits av spännvidden, de stilistiska kasten och lagren av politik/religion/sex.  Teorema är naturligtvis ett av Pasolinis mer berömda verk. Jag slås av hur gåtfullheten förverkligas genom ett roligt spretigt filmspråk där det intertextuella finns med överallt, det vimlar av referenser och associationer. Från Mozart till Francis Bacon och Rimbaud. Var vi landar? Säg det.

Teorema, 1968

Regi: Pier Paolo Pasolini

I rollerna: Silvana Mangano,Terence Stamp, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, Laura Betti

Shoeshine (1946)

De Sica's Shoeshine is a rough-hewn, sometimes a bit shaky, film about two kids trying to fulfill their dream - buying a horse - in post-war Italy. Despite its mannerisms and technical flaws (strange cuts and so on) this story about youngsters trying to get by tugs at your heart. Things start going bad when the two boys are commissioned by a calculating brother to sell blankets. They visit a fortune teller and sell a blanket to her. With that money, they are finally able to buy the horse they have been dreaming of. In gloriously joyous scenes, we see the kids riding outside the city on their horse. But the cops are after them. They are accused of having stolen money from the fortune teller, and are sent to a juvenile detention center. The rest of the film is a harsh study of the conditions in the juvenile detention center. The kids are separated. The police try to force them to admit their guilt or to reveal who stole the money. After one of the kids thinks that his friend is beaten, he reveals the truth. The kids have their hearing and are sentenced to several years in prison. One of the kids try and escape with another friend. There is a prison riot and one youngster dies. The kid who is left behind is angry and seeks revenge.... Shoeshine is not a pretty film. The acting is not perfect, but the roughness in these actors make it all work. The brutality goes all the way from lines to settings - the story starts with a Dream, and ends with - you guessed it. Even if this is far from de Sica's best film, Shoeshine is worth watching because of its fearless attempt to shed lights on the outsiders of society and the cruelness they are met with. The disintegration of the boys' friendship is linked to the authoritarian prison system. The kids' former bond is broken and the kids start to act like the calculating brother - each thinking of his own interest. De Sica simply confronts us with this brutal set of social conditions that transform people into scheming behavior, never falsely relying on sentimental tricks. Here, its all about dog eat dog.

Ludwig (1972)

Finnish state television made a bold move by broadcasting a rather unconventional movie on Christmas Eve - Visconti's Ludwig is not your standard chrimstmassy Capra fare but rather a zany, bombastic (in a good way) movie about Ludgwig II, king of Bavaria, who became king in 1864 . The film has not always gained positive reviews. Ebert calls it "lethargic". But for me, it was the wonderfully gloomy lethargy that drove this film to its conclusion, and doing it in unfaltering style. One may complain about Visconti's strange obsession with decadence (as in others of his movies from this period) - there are some scenes in which you are not sure whether you are watching this movie or The Damned. But here what he does conjures up a culture, what that culture creates.

Ludwig the king is a melancholy fellow who is friends with Wagner. This friendship is rendered in an odd way - we see the two huddle in Wagner's rooms, accompanied by the composer's big and fluffy dog. Wagner is acted with a sort of understatement - he is a workaholic and a supremely self-centered man. The film follows Ludwig's progression, or digression/depression) from shy young man to the king who built crazy castles and tried to rule the world from his bed. But we know very little about the world outside Ludwig's bedroom. We get the sense that Ludwig has very little insight into the world around him. His being king is a heavy burden he cannot handle.

Instead of relying on the traditional biography movie pattern - creating historical panoramas, as it were - Visconti opts for a much more enigmatic and, well, personal path. Which makes Ludwig much more interesting than most films about historical figures. Idiosyncratic, yes, hard to follow at times, yes, tedious moments, yes. But all in all - the weirdness and the brooding, heavy atmosphere (not to mention the sets) saves this movie. The shadows loom depressingly over rotten civilization while the hollow-eyed characters sleep-walk through ridiculously ornamental hallways. Ludwig may be a shallow film that doesn't teach you a lot about Germany in the 19th century, but what it loses in seriousness it wins in decadent splendor.

Time stood still (1959)

Ermanno Olmi is the director of one of my favorite movies, the gloomy coming-of-age story Il posto in which an office boy is introduced to the drudgery of work. But to me, his films seem very under-appreciated. I very rarely hear people talk about them or write about them.

That's why I haven't heard anything about one of his early films, Time stood still, a small gem of a movie about two people, a middle-aged man and a boy, who have to endure one another's company. These two guys are caretakers of an isolated working site in the Italian Alps. It's winter, and the conditions are harsh. The boy is a newcomer, replacing another guy who is having a vacatin. Time stood still explores the tension between the two using quiet humor and unhurried takes. We see them in their hut, huddling over books (the boy is trying to prepare for an exam) or preparing food. The boy marvels at the older man's habits and the simplicity of this life in the Alps. He likes to play his rock n' roll records and have a merry time. One day there is a storm, and their quiet habits are disturbed. The story could easily have become cartoonish: the boy with his youth culture and the grumpy oldtimer. But youth culture is not derided, nor is the robust ways of the mountainside romanticized. Olmi breaks down the clichés and lets us see the small nuances of human interaction. A twitch of the mouth, a displeased gesture, a rebellious swag - all of these everyday elements matter. One could say that the mastery he shows in doing this bears a similarity to a movie from a different time and place, Nuri Ceylan's Uzak. The last segment of the film shifts its tone a bit, introducing what might be called a religious dimension. These scenes take place in a church, and even the church is imbued with the same earthy qualities as the rest of the film.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Even though I am no connoisseur of Dario Argento's films (having seen only one or two, many years ago), I highly enjoyed the utterly stylish and stylized horror sleaze of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The standard fare story involves a bystander in a labyrinthine quest - its unclear what this quest is, but at first he sets out to find a murderer, then he is accused of the murder himself, and then he is chased by the murderer. The images evoke a world of cat-eating weirdos, stuttering pimps and dark alleys. Cheap tricks are used to great effect. The main character, the American bystander, has the sort of innocent mania that is propulsive in this kind of context. During the first dramatic part of the film, we see him witnessing a horrifying scene in an art gallery, where a man is trying to kill a woman. The American enters the gallery by breaking the window, but is then trapped. The images immediately create a splash; colorful, kitschy and evocative. Argento knows his craft and plays on the viewer's worry about what will happen the next second. Some argue that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage hints at broader social topics and that it contains several references to patterns of social domination. I must admit I did not pay much attention to such undercurrents. I just noticed that cages were an important image (birds kept in a cage, a lunatic artist keeping cats in cages, the apartment that becomes a leathal cage), and is also mentioned in the title. The ending scene shows a boxy television and on the screen we see a cheesy studio, in which a murder is transformed into sensationalism - a sort of entertainment cage.

Paisan (1946)

I have mixed feelings about Roberto Rossellini. He has produced some of the most shattering images of post-war trauma in the history of film (Germany Year Zero), but he can also be a sentimental director enamored with convetional storytelling and film archetypes. Paisan is also a movie about war. The film has a rushed style and I get the sense that the material is assembled in a sort of panic. This might seem a clear weakness, but there is also the historical aspect of this. The film was made in 1946, one year after the war. The events of the war were still part of the present in many ways. Paisan comes out as a restless, frenzied document, a form of testimony. Instead of a neat narrative with a start and a resolution, this film delves into six different incidents. They are connected by one theme: people's lives are torn apart during the events of WWII. All incidents are set in Italy, but some of the characters are soldiers from the US. Many of the stories chronicle cruel and incomprehensible encounters between soldiers and civilians. In one of these, an American black soldier meets a small boy. The boy steals the soldier's shoes, and later on, the meet again. The tragedies on display are not heroic; the many killings we see in the film are rendered with a sense of hopelessness and even absurdity. The last segment of the film is bloody and merciless. The pictures are raw and no diversions are offered: we are forced to watch. Even though this film can seem cluttered and disorganized, its chaos can be said to have a purpose: it teaches us something about different aspects of war without taking a recourse to familiar plots about heroes or villains. The effect of these incidents: war is portrayed without a hint of glorification or romanticism.

I am love (2009)

On paper, I am love (Luca Guadagnino) does not seem to add up to much more than a conventional romance set in the most conventional (I guess) of cinematic contexts: the bourgeois family. The reason I wanted to watch this film is - Tilda Swinton. Even in the crappiest movies, her luminous performance makes a viewing endurable. Swinton plays the Russian-born wife of a wealthy Milanese textile factory owner. She is the perfect wife, the perfect host, the perfect supervisor of the orchestration of upper-class events: she perfects the institutional role assigned to her. Guadagnino presents a family eager to live up to this institutional function. There are dinners where everybody tactfully plays along in the expected way. In the beginning of the film, the fate of the dynasty is revealed: the patriarch announces that Emma's husband, and her son, are to inherit the business. Emma is an outsider, even though she acts her part. It is hard to know what kind of person she is. Something starts to change when she meets her son's friend, who is a chef. There are mutual erotic feelings, and from there. - - This, of course, sounds like the usual, run-of-the-mill depiction of a monied family, its neuroses and also its escapes. What's special here? Emma is a distant, almost icy person. Swinton is naturally in her element her: elusive, as always (but how she manages to be elusive in so many different ways), but Swinton also interprets her characters lust, her imagination, with an unusual presence. But it's not only Swinton. There's a dizzying sense of overwhelming emotions that the director - and the cinematographer (some reviewer calls the visual style 'baroque', which, I think, hits the mark) - evokes in a, well, surging, way (which borders on the phony - as someone has remarked: there is something of Douglas Sirk in here). Even so, there are quite a few unnecessary dramatic turns and half-hearted subplots that the audience could well do without - this film does not not need them. But, in any case, I was surprised by how well some segments of I am love worked.

Germany Year Zero (1948)

Unflinching is the word that best describes Rossellini's Germany Year Zero. It might have taken me two screenings to realize how great this film really is, but when I think back on it now I am impressed not only by its famous depiction of a war-stricken city, but also by the deadpan acting by the very young protagonist, whose presence on screen betrays no hint of sentimentality. For me, this film is very different from Rome, Open City which had a much more conventional emotional and narrative structure.

The protagonist's family struggles with poverty. Dad is sick and the sister may be a prostitute. Edmund hustles goods and tries to look for a job, but he is too young. He drifts through the traumatized city, trying to make a buck. We get the immediate sense that his fate is shared by many, many others. The camera pans on the streets on Berlin. Rubble and starving people. Bombed buildings and desperation.

Germany Year Zero has no character development, no story to talk about. It follows Edmund's wanderings through the city and registers his encounters with young criminals, children his own age and a former teacher who has a dubious interest in kids. The only consolation the film offers is the purity of its testimony. It might seem strange to talk about testimony given that this is a fictional narrative, but the approach of the film elicits that concept - testimony. The concept of testimony shows the moral urgency at hand. To talk about testimony is also perhaps to say that these images are connected with a specific responsibility with regard to how something is said, or revealed. I am not sure what status one should lend to the fact that Rossellini used non-professional actors who have lived in the same kind of environment. What matters the most is, I think, the emotional rawness of the film, the way it takes one to the end of the world, so the speak, a world in which there is no hope, no future, no possibilities. I think I have seen no other film in which grief resonates so ravagingly. I wouldn't judge this film from the perspective of technicalities ('innovations' of the neo-realist traditions and how they have fared today) but rather in what way the perspective still rings true.

Two Cents Worth of Hope (1952)

Two kids fall in love but their relationship is an on-off affair. It's the fifties and they live outside a big city. The guy wants to leave for the city, to work. The girl is what you call a 'personality'. There is so much in Castellani's film Two Cents Worth of Hope that bears the promise of a beautiful film. There's plenty of life, the camera moves around and takes a look at the still agrarian village. Still, I had trouble engaging. The problem is spelled b-a-d c-o-m-e-d-y. The film tries all it can to create a jolly, cheerful mood. The humor never strikes hard and the more social observations (a band of guys are trying to start up a truck company, the social roles associated with marriage - just to mention to examples) are left at sketches. The best thing in the film is the main character, a strange girl called Maria. She's an outsider and she does whatever she wants: she's above the system of marriage deals and village gossip.

Corpo Celeste (2011)

It's hard to believe that Alice Rohrwacher's Corpo Celeste is her debut film. The medium of film is handled with self-assurance, ease and imagination. The story and the way of telling it avoids the well-trodden path but does not indulge in self-conscious provocation either. One could say that the focus of the film is a community, a community of people in a poor neighboorhood in an Italian city. Marta, a girl who grew up in Switzerland, is about to receive her confirmation. She is bullied by her sister and she takes comfort in the relation to her mother. The church is led by a priest who most of all is eager to collect votes for a politician who favors the church. A volunteer, a middle-aged woman, administrates the catechism classes for the kids. Rohrwacher sticks to Marta's story, but this story is closely knit to the community of which she is a part. Without a trace of cynicism, the film looks at the pretense, but also the care and the fear that these people are shaped by. Marta is seen as an outsider and towards the end of the film, she embraces this role.

The spirit of the Dardenne brothers haunt Corpo celeste. The camera energetically tracks the movements of the main character and there is a subtle assemblage of an urban world with its characteristic sounds and paths. This is by no means a bad thing and I never get the feeling that Rohrwacher is emulating their style. She has her own angle. The transitory and disrupting character of adolescence is treated freshly, without few recourses to reductive images of girlhood or sexuality (but yes, the addition of a scene about Marta getting her period for the first time borders on a problematic hang-up). One could say that Rohrwacher's perceptive images present the complexity of Marta's situation. We get a glimpse of her world when we see what she sees. In a stunning scene, Marta stands on a roof, looking at a group of elderly ladies practicing a song. The rumble of the city surrounds their singing and gives it an eerie shape.

Corpo celeste's rendering of religion remains open-ended. It focuses on the corruption of the church, the frailty of some of its servants along with a surprising take on faith in an urban setting. The church tries to maximize its membership and its appeal: but rather than letting this remain a sign of institutional decline, Rohrwacher portrays very different representatives of the church: the world-weary priest, the crouching volunteer, the powerful bishop and the aging priest who has saved his own unorthodox faith.

Some of the images and ideas of Corpo celeste may be a bit heavy-handed and clunky, but this did not bother me much.  One can complain about the use of religious imagery towards the end of the film (how a person-size crucifix appears in the story as a symbol of the corruption of the church) but these more allegorical elements are integrated in a visual language full of life and ideas.

The Damned (1970)

Nazism, sexuality, capitalism - the old rule is exchanged for a new system of values. These are the building blocks of Visconti's The Damned, a film that starts out as an interesting exploration of class society only to end in a hodgepodge of Nazi uniforms, violence, sex and incestuous relations. Some of this is, I suspect, added most of all for shock value. But Visconti also seems to have something he wants to say about sexuality and a historical situation - it's just not that clear what it is. The only thing we see is various eruptions of repressed Desire. Sexuality, in this film, seems to come from a dark place. The conclusion is not, I think, that Visconti sets out to capture the wickedness of "perverse" sexuality. The film has very little of moralism to it. What we see is rather a world that under its sterile surface is boiling with repressed urges. To be honest, I found The Damned to be an extremely failure in this respect: I did not at all understand what kind of perspective the film takes on repression, and how it hangs together with the disciplinary system of Nazism (or capitalism). At the center of the film we have the steel dynasty. There is the question of who will manage the company in the future. The film opens with a grand party and here we see some important tensions among the business "family" having to do with the relation to the nazi power elite. Mostly, the central events take place within the persons associated with the firm and how the lineage of power is continued and disrupted. The only scene that really stands out from this is the very lengthy portrayal of the night of the long knives in which we see member of the SA having a drunken party only to be massacred by the SS (some of the main characters are involved in this killing spree). What works best in this confusing film is perhaps the settings, darkly lit, stylized, sinister; decaying elegance. The other good thing is Ingrid Thulin who plays the mother whose partner is scheming to change the power system and whose son has some - um - tendencies of his own. 

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

To say the truth, I am not crazy about political parodies/dystopian political dramas like Costa-Gavras' Z. It's just something about these movies that fail to move me. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri) is a film like this: I think I can guess at what the parody is supposed to be about and the meandering, swirling aesthetics is enjoyable but still - the film didn't make much of an impression on me. The story contains no mysteries and no thriller-like suspension; instead already from the get-go we know the main character, a high-rank police inspector, to be an arrogant killer. He kills, but nobody would accuse him of anything, so he just goes on with his business. The film follows this megalomaniac police inspector in his quest to prove that he can do ANYTHING. He's above the law - he IS the law! He intentionally scatters evidence all around him, but nobody would take it as evidence. What I liked about the film was how it played around with the concept of proof and evidence: what does it mean to see something as a proof if nobody would take it as such, if nobody would even pay any attention to it? A second meaning of proof also emerges when we realizes that the inspector is trying to prove something to himself; he doesn't seem that cock-sure, after all, or there are strange cracks in his demanor. It is as if the main character is bearing a cloak of invisibility, like Gyges, but he is constantly trying to test people's attention, to make them catch sight of the cloak. Unsurprisingly, there are a few scenes in which leftists are accused of the crimes committed by the authority. Some of these are rather funny, while other are just .... predictable. Investigations .... is soaked with cheesy details: silk ties, grimacing faces, over-the-top music (by Ennio Morricone). Even the lines are wildly stylized: "Repression is civilization!" The lust for power and control on display is dressed in an almost Deleuzian form of machinic desire: frantic and productive and excessive. The entire society starts to appear like a machinic fantasy, a fansty about control but also a fantasy about revelation.

Dillinger Is Dead (1969)

It's hard to describe what goes on in Dillinger Is Dead (dir. Marco Ferreri), one of the weirdest films I'v seen in a good while, with a straight face. Yeah.... it's about this guy - in his day-job, he designs gas masks - who makes a late-nite dinner at home, he listens to some otherworldly pop music on the radio and then he eats and watches a couple of home movies and meanwhile he, um, fixes up an old gun he accidentally found in a messy closet. And every now and then, he goes into the bedroom to check on his wife (which means do cruel things to her) who sleeps deeply after having taken a few sleeping pills. No story. No obvious character development. No logical denouement. Or maybe, yeah, in some sense. I watched Dillinger Is Dead late at night. The house was asleep. My head was spinning after a long day. This was the perfect setting for this strange little film. I will readily confess that at times, this is an awfully boring film. Hell, you are watching a guy making dinner and disassembling a gun! But I continued watching, and somehow, I was pulled into this dreamy world of druggy pop music (good choices of tunes) and tasteless yet fascinatingly odd home interior design. At the same time, I am completely aware that the director is an asshole who throws in a bunch of frames with nakes woman parts just for the titillation of it. Ferreri directs like an Antonioni who has kept his penchant for good-looking alienation (the first minutes could be a scene in Red Desert), but who has thrown all notions of radical politics (at least I don't see any) and 'good taste' into the bin-bag. The film is over the top, it is a bit pervy and it makes the oddest choices. In some ways, Dillinger Is Dead is beyond good and bad. It is what it is. In other ways, that I say that might reveal a personal flaw of character. I could, as one reviewer put it, say that this is a film about 'corrupt responses to a corrupt world'. I could also say that it is a sexist and self-indulgent heap of trash. Another reviewer says that the film is a direct cinematic translation of Marcuse's ideas about late industrial society. Well, maybe. Along with a gun that the gas mask designer paints red, with white polka dots.

Zabriskie point (1970)

Antonioni is generally a director that I like. One might say that he trades in the europa-chic - that he makes alienation look quite appealing in films such as The Night, The Eclipse and Avventura. Not to mention Blow-Up. Red desert is a very typical film about the world falling apart in hollow human beings and dead surroundings, but it seemed like a less fashion-sensitive film than the others. I expected Zabriskie Point to be a similiarly alienation-chic movie as most of the other Antonioni movies. And it was, but in an even worse way, and in a way that really is a grotesquely familiar image of the disgruntled European director going to the US and A to make a cynical movie. Here we have American kids in the late sixties, enamored with counterculture politics and alternative lifestyles in a country of advertisement, business and repulsive urban architecture. From the get-go, we know that this is Hell. We are thrown into a student organization meeting. The sound is jarring. People are shouting slogans, others are smoking, or looking bored, or doing something else - just a bunch of diverse people ending up in the same 'movement'. It's hard to hear what they say, and it's easy to guess that it doesn't really matter anyways. There is a riot of some sort, and we see a man who seems to shoot a cop, but it isn't really him. He steals an airplane and in the desert he meets a girl with a buick and they fall in love (add quotatin marks) and they hang out in the desert and then the guy paints the airplane in bright colors and the girl goes to her business meeting but she's not interested in that so she leaves the building and then she stands outside, imagining that the building explodes. THE END. Some of my friends interpreted the film as providing an image of back-to-nature-bliss, exodus from civilization, the Nomadic transformatory non-people turning into animals. Well, I can see the sense in that, but for my own part I saw the film as an attempt to depict a deadlock. There is nowhere to go. The city is hell. It's hell up in the air. And the desert is boring (this is sex as immense joyless tedium) and business is hell. Everything is hollow and desolate, shallow and narcissistic. People talk and look like robots. There were things I liked about Zabriskie point, aspects that were not too self-occupied and self-important. Antonioni has always had a brilliant way of treating architecture and design as an important dimension of the characters' life. As one reviewer put it: Antonioni transforms his own time into sci-fi. And that always works. This also goes for Zabriskie point which renders American urban streets, cluttered with ugly buildings and signs, more hellish than I've seen anywhere else. I find Antonioni's message quite sympathetic: the rebel is just the shadow form of the commercial idiot, but that message is drummed into my mind in a too cynical way, leaving me with no greater understanding of anything, just a vague feeling: this whole lot sucks, it really does. - - - Ending verdict: good visuals, depressing story - good use of sounds & music at times.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

I re-watched Bicycle Thieves (dir. de Sica) and the second time around it was even better than the first time. A gritty social realist movie about a society driven by dog-eat-dog. Post-war Rome. A man looks for a job, but the job he finds requires that he has a bike. A bike is expensive, but he acquires one and starts to work. His bike is stolen after a little while, and together with his young son, he tries to catch the thief. No luck. The man's miserable state worsens as he tries to steal a bike himself, and has to deal with being pointed out as a thief. The man's odyssey takes him to a crowded marked, a church and a restaurant. de Sica focuses as much on the life of the streets as the story, which makes this film a thrillingly bustling affair. In one of the best scenes, the father decides that they should sit down in a restaurant and celebrate for a bit. In the table next to them, a rich bunch of people gobbles food and the small kid longingly gazes at their abundance of tasty food. Bicycles thieves is a restrained film. There is little sentimentality or attempts at humor. The dramatic events are not dramatic in the ordinary sense, where we are eager to see whether the looming catastrophy will actualize. In this film, there are plenty of situations that have a particular open-endedness to them, the kind of open-endedness that characterize human encounters. We never quite know what will happen next; it's not the kind of film that builds on straight narrative moves. Bicycle Thieves is about humiliation, but also about defiance and single-mindedness, perhaps. The man won't give up: he runs through the street, and it is hard not to care about his quest, or about the boy who witnesses his father's humiliation, and how is dragged along in the city on this impossible mission. - - - Lots of times, I thought about how this film is such a great inspiration for other good directors, the Dardenne brothers in particular, just think about Rosetta's anxious battle against unemployment and how the Dardenne brothers conjure up her stubborn defiance. Both films never adopt the quasi-neutral, almost disdainful gaze some forms of documentary-like cinema is plagued by: every second of both films is characterized by moral engagements. Moral engagement never preaches, it shows, evokes, brings forth.

The Caiman (2006)

I liked Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room quite a lot, so therefore I was excited about watching another Moretti movie. The Caiman turned out to be very different from the aforementioned film, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember The Son's room as a serious film about grief - serious, but not sentimental. This film might be serious as well, but it is a far more whimiscal affair. A producer of B-movies has not been making any movies for a long time. Now he should be making a film for the big audiences but that doesn't happen. In this precarious situation, he gets involved with a project the political dimension of which he has not realized. The problem with the film is that it is plenty of things at the same time and that everything seems to be done a bit half-heartedly (in this case, the film-within-the-film trick doesn't work so good, because there is no real tension between the two segments). Yes, the film's satire is sometimes funny, but somehow making successful satire based on Silvio Berlusconi is a challenging endeavour, as the man seems to be a parody of himself. The Caiman has the heart in its right place but as a film - it doesn't really happen.

This must be the place (2011)

Sorrentino again! In This Must be the Place, Sean Penn plays an ageing rock musician (who talks with a lisp, and wears granny glasses), Cheyenne, who initially seems to sleepwalk through his Dubliner life. I couldn't stop thinking of him as a kind of Robert Smith-copy; a person a bit out of step with the present. In the film, Cheyenne undergoes some form of inner change, but it is up to the viewer to decide what change this really is. It is interesting that even though Sorrentino paints with broad streaks (big hallucinatory moment, deadpan jokes, breathtaking locations) he hardly ever drums a specific idea into the viewer's mind. To me, this is a virtue, even though some segments of the film become too disparate and open-ended. The part that deals with Cheyenne's attempt to find the Nazi who tormented his father did not work very well, in my opinion.

What we have here is the familiar story about an alienated rock star, but this picture is drawn into its most surreal corner and the film never dwells on celebrity. In the beginning of the film, he lives in a mansion, spending his days on frozen pizza dinners or contemplating whether he should sell his tesco shares. He hangs out with a teenage fan and also her mother (or that's who I think this woman is). His relationship with his wife is uncomplicated. The death of his father brings him to the US, and the film takes a different turn. Some reviewers have mentioned about Wim Wenders, and yes, as Cheyenne travels to America Wenders' colorful landscapes clearly haunt the film. There is even a blunt reference to Wenders through the appearance of Harry Dean Stanton (yeah!) as a man obsessed with his invention of a suitcase with wheels. But what the film - thankfully - lacks is Wenders' sentimentality. In one of the film's stand-out scenes, Cheyenne has ended up in the home of a young widowed woman and her child. The child puts a guitar on Cheyenne's lap and tells him about this Arcade fire song. No, it's Talking heads, Cheyenne insists. The man plays a quiet guitar melody and the boy sings. It was a heart-warming, gentle moment which had nothing to do with calculation (I think). Byrne himself appears in the film - in a most wonderful way.  

Both here and in Il divo, Sorrentino never lets go of the human as embodied. He has a better sense of small bodily quirks than almost any other contemporary director. I think this is what makes his characters interesting - that they are full-blown beings (their history and so on seem to have only a secondary interest for Sorrentino, and maybe this is why the Nazi hunt part of the film is a bit out of place). For this reason, the contrast between Cheyenne, who is presented as a stranger to/in the world, and his wife Jane, is quite stunning to watch.

This Must be the Place is the kind of film that I wanted to watch again as the end credits were rolling. It's a beautiul film with plenty of funny details.