Sunday,
April 3 at 7:00pm
Written
by Fellini
Introduced
by Professor Millicent Marcus
Federico
Fellini's formative inspirations can be found in the popular
Italian culture of the period. In his youth, Fellini supported
himself as a free-lance caricaturist until hired by Marc'Aurelio
in 1939. The popular humor bi-weekly served as training
ground for scriptwriters and directors of the postwar period.
The caricatures and radio comedy sketches that were his popular
art form brought him to the cinema as a gagman and scriptwriter.
Writer Italo Calvino described the influence of mass culture
on Fellini's later sophisticated cinematic language as a "forcing
of the photographic image in a direction that carries it from
an image of caricature toward that of the visionary." Fellini
trained for a professional life as a visionary with over ten
years of scriptwriting and on-the-set apprenticeship. With Senza
pietà and Il miracolo, we find that Fellini
is still writing for a relatively realist cinema that generally
conceals the act of filmmaking itself. As a veteran of the scripting
team responsible for two canonical pieces of Italian Neorealism,
Roma città aperta and Paisà (both Roberto
Rossellini, 1945 and 1946), Fellini wanted to redefine his artistic
credo to "looking at reality with an honest eye - but any
kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual
reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him."
In Senza pietà and Il miracolo, Fellini
is pointing towards a more self-conscious examination of cinematic
and narrative technique that will culminate with works such
as I vitelloni and La strada.
The
Miracle (Il miracolo) -
a segment from the film L’Amore
dir. Roberto
Rossellini, Italy, 1948, 16mm, 69 mins, b/w,
Italian w/ English subtitles
 Anna
Magnani is a crazed peasant woman who claims her pregnancy is
the result of a conception by a man she believes to be San Giuseppe
(played by Fellini himself). Rossellini intended this film to
be a study of personal faith in the face of social ridicule,
but the film was denounced by the New York Catholic League as
"heretical". Protests, bomb scares and the threat
of fines and jail terms forced the distributors to withdraw
the film and initiate a landmark lawsuit. The case went to the
Supreme Court and established that film is a form of free speech
and protected by the First Amendment.
Without
Pity (Senza pietà)
dir.
Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1948, 16mm, 95
mins, b/w,
Italian w/ English
subtitles
Taking
place in Livorno, circa 1947, the tragic story pairs Angela
(Carla Del Poggio) with Jerry (John Kitzmiller), a black G.I.
embroiled in a robbery at the U.S. Army base in Tombolo. In
the post-war era, organized gangs stole from U.S. depots to
resell the goods at black market prices, often with the complicity
of camp guards. Wounded by the gangsters, Jerry is helped by
Angela; they fall in love and try to escape to the United States
with the hoohlums' money.
Millicent
Marcus is the Mariano DiVito Professor of Italian Studies and
Director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University
of Pennsylvania. Film
@ International House thanks Alan Cylinder for the
use of this rare 16mm print of Senza pietà.
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