Borderline 1959: European Cinema Conference program

EUROPEAN CINEMA

1959

BORDER LINE March 1-3, 2018 Whitney Humanities Center Yale University

BORDER LINE

EUROPEAN CINEMA

1959

Generously Sponsored By

The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center; Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale; Department of French; Department of the History of Art; Program in Film & Media Studies; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; the Yale Center for British Art; and the Yale Film Study Center, courtesy of Paul L. Joskow

Acknowledgements The 14th European Film Conference was made possible by the hard work of many people.

We would like to thank the members of the faculty committee from Film & Media Studies who selected the films to be screened this weekend: Professors Katerina Clark, Dudley Andrew, John MacKay, Charlie Musser, and Katie Trumpener. Foremost, our deep gratitude to Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies, for conceptualizing and organizing the conference, and finely curating the films and program notes. Christina Andriotis and Marianne Lyden, the managing staff of the European Studies Council, have been instrumental in planning and navigating the logistics of the conference. We are grateful for Tony Sudol's expertise as a projectionist and substantial help with print traffic. Lorenz Hegel, Ph.D. student in German and Film and Media Studies, provided English subtitles for the North American premier of They Called Him Amigo. Krystyna Illakowicz and Annette Insdorf helped us find a copy of The Noose.

Kirsty Dootson and Mal Ahern, former graduate curators of this conference, offered invaluable advice over the past three months. Jenny Tang, Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies and History of Art, designed our beautiful publicity materials. For invaluable assistance to make this conference a smoothly operating success, the European Studies Council student assistants: Weronika Betta, Mariia Muzdybaeva, Jeffrey Michels, Irina Bakhareva, Michelle Printsev and Sarah Holzworth.

Multiple FIAF archives loaned 35mm prints to us to be screened this weekend, including the Yale Film Archive, Harvard Film Archive, Instituto de la CinematografĂ­a y de las Artes Audiovisuales, and Gosmofilmofond. Finally, many thanks to all introducers and panelists who turn this screening series into an ongoing discussion.

BORDER LINE

EUROPEAN CINEMA

1959

In 1959, European cinema hovered like a question mark on the borderline of a new decade and a new generation of young experimental filmmakers. The first year of the French New Wave, which saw Francois Truffaut win Best Director at Cannes for The 400 Blows, brought with it a bevy of budding auteurs and national film movements. Our program is full of names that dominated European cinema throughout the 1960s—RESNAIS, ROHMER, BRESSON, ANTONIONI, VISCONTI, SAURA, KALATOZOV—but mingles the early efforts of angry young men with mid-career masterpieces. Disparate genres jangle together on the borderline: neorealism and melodrama, documentary and ethno-fiction, sentimentalism and satire fight for dominance within narratives of migration, memory, community in the country and isolation in the crowd.

Some films look back to World War II for answers, conjuring shaved heads and striped pajamas as totemic bridges into more intimate relationships: between lovers from two sides of the rubble in Hiroshima Mon Amour; between a Communist concentration camp prisoner and a young German boy in They Called Him Amigo. Other films herald the technocratic future: sprawling, cosmopolitan, and made of plastic. In the formless present, first plans fall by the wayside: cynical urbanites lose touch with reality while exploring a small island, a Hungarian refugee seeking a single address loses his way in the labyrinthine streets of London, and a Siberian hunt for diamonds, thwarted by forest fires, turns into a battle for survival. On the cusp of a youth uprising, hinted at by the restless young men in Le Signe du Lion and Los Golfos, European films from 1959 still overwhelmingly emphasize futile struggle and the power of chance over collective action. Free to wander where they please, the heroes of Pickpocket and The Noose make their own prisons. Arguably I’m All Right Jack, the only comedy in our program, is also the most cynical. How can we take capitalism and its actors seriously, Boulting’s film asks, if the actions of a single oblivious man from a wealthy family can bring the entire system crashing down? Now, at a moment when a version of this question is on many of our minds, it is worth revisiting this liminal year to see a reflection of our own rudderlessness and draw inspiration from its nascent revolt.

Acknowledgement:

SCHEDULE March 1 Thursday 7:00pm

REFUGE ENGLAND

7:30pm

I'M ALL RIGHT JACK

All foreign-language films will be subtitled in English

Robert Vas | UK | 27min |16mm Introduced by Professor Charles Musser John Boulting | UK | 105min |16mm Introduced by Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art

March 2 Friday 1:30pm

LE CHANT DU STYRÈNE Alain Resnais | France | 14min [THE SONG OF STYRENE] Introduced by Barbora Bartunkova

2:00pm

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

Alain Resnais | France | 90min

Introduced by Professor Rizvana Bradley

3:45pm

MOI, UN NOIR Jean Rouch | France | 73min [I, BLACK MAN]

Introduced by Professor Laure Astourian (Columbia University)

5:15pm

PANEL DISCUSSION: FRENCH NEW WAVE CINEMA Jean Rouch | France | 73min

Professor Dudley Andrew, Professor Rizvana Bradley, Professor Laure Astourian (Bentley University), and Barbora Bartunkova

6:00pm

OPENING RECEPTION Whitney Humanities Center, Room 108

Co-sponsored by Films at the Whitney

7:30pm

PICKPOCKET

Robert Bresson | France | 76min | 35mm Introduced by Professor John MacKay

9:00pm

L'AVVENTURA Michelangelo Antonioni | Italy | 143min | 35mm [THE ADVENTURE] Introduced by Luca Peretti

SCHEDULE All foreign-language films will be subtitled in English

March 3 Â Saturday 8:30am 9:00am

Breakfast for Participants

LOS GOLFOS [THE DELINQUENTS]

Carlos Saura | Spain | 80min | 35mm Introduced by Professor Leslie Harkema

10:30am

SIE NANNTEN IHN AMIGO [THEY CALLED HIM AMIGO]

Heiner Carow | GDR | 63min Introduced by Professor Katie Trumpener Subtitled by Lorenz Hegel

12:00pm

PETLA [THE NOOSE]

1:30pm

Lunch for Participants

2:30pm

NEOTPRAVLENNOYE PISMO [LETTER NEVER SENT]

Wojciech Jerzy Has | Poland | 96min Introduced by Professor Krystyna Illakowicz

Mikhail Kalatozov | USSR | 96min | 35mm Introduced by Viktoria Paranyuk

4:15pm 5:00pm

PANEL DISCUSSION: EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA Professor Katerina Clark, Professor Katie Trumpener, Professor John Mackay, and Victoria Paranyuk

LE SIGNE DU LION [THE SIGN OF LEO]

Eric Rohmer | France | 105min Introduced by Professor Dudley Andrew

8:00pm

ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI [ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS] Luchino Visconti | Italy | 177min | 35mm Introduced by Alexandra Catrickes

REFUGE ENGLAND United Kingdom | 27 min | 16mm Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art

Director: Robert Vas Cast: Bill Collins, Abdul Hamid Khan, Tibor Molnár

“The last of the Free Cinema programmes was one of the best. It could not have been easy to find a film which We Are the Lambeth Boys would not overshadow; but Robert Vas’s Refuge England proved to be one of the movement’s most sympathetic productions. We are shown the first day in England of a Hungarian refugee with no English, little money, and a scrap of paper with an address that might be in any district of London. As he wanders backwards and forwards across the city, his lack of connection with the crowds about him twists his original cheerful optimism towards despair. No one is interested in his plight or, it seems, his existence. The awful indifference of the city and its people nearly makes him give up, until finally he receives hospitality at the address he has been trying to trace. Without self-pity this film hauntingly presents an individual picture of isolation, subtly changing through a whole series of moods from the first, wondering survey of the contradictions among the passers-by to the eventual unhappy gaze at the gaudy self-sufficiency of the West End in the evening. […] The unostentatious use of evocative effects and music is particularly telling, and the performance of Tibor Molnar has a rare exactness.”

- Derek Hill, Sight and Sound, 1959

I'M ALL RIGHT JACK United Kingdom | 105 min | 16mm Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art

Director: John Boulting Cast: Peter Sellers, Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas

“There is nothing timorous about the Boulting Brothers and nothing half-hearted about the way in which they take up their cudgels and rush to the attack whenever this sceptered race seems to them in need of a reminder that it is by no means perfect. In their latest swingeing satire, I’m All Right Jack, they deplore the callous egocentricity discernible, these days, almost everywhere—but especially in industrial relations. Who’s to blame? Why, the entire shooting match, according to the busy Boultings—and with blithe enthusiasm and a splendid impartiality they proceed to trounce the trade unions on the one hand, while belabouring the bosses on the other…The outstanding performance in this biting and hilarious film comes from Mr. Peter Sellers as a shop steward who is capable of interpreting the management’s lightest word as justification for a strike: he rattles off reams of polysyllabic text-book patter but the simple phrase ‘Everybody Out!’ is never far from his lips. As Mr. Sellers plays him, he is a decent, honest man—and when his wife, the divine Miss Irene Handl, leaves him to his own devices, he makes of the striker stricken a most touching figure. The Goon has blossomed into a superb actor.”

- Elspeth Grant, The Tatler and Bystander, 1959

LE CHANT DU STYRÈNE [THE SONG OF STYRENE] France | 14 min | DVD

Director: Alain Resnais “Le Chant du Styrène, a collaboration between director Alain Resnais and writer Raymond Queneau, originated in a commission from the petrochemical firm Pechiney for a promotional and educational film about the production of plastic.

The ironic tone of the resulting film did not please its sponsors, however. For Le Chant du Styrène combines many mock-heroic elements: the title alludes to an episode in Homer’s Odyssey, replacing the fateful Sirens with the polymer Styrene; Queneau’s text, although devoted to a scientific or technical subject, is written in alexandrines, the line of classical French poetry; the film is shot in widescreen (Dyaliscope, a French variation on CinemaScope), the large-scale horizontal format of the 1950s Hollywood spectacular, the Biblical epic or Roman peplum. In an article of 1946, Queneau had previously expressed skepticism about the veracity of documentary cinema and he was subsequently dismissive of his own contribution to Le Chant du Styrène, all of which implies that the film is a consciously parodic subversion of its ostensible marketing purpose. Resnais, however, denied that the film did not take its subject seriously. The documentary can in fact be viewed as a celebration of the technical ingenuity of the petrochemical industry through the technical ingenuity of cinema.”

- Douglas Smith, Modern and Contemporary France, 2007

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR [HIROSHIMA MY LOVE]

France/Japan | 90 min | DCP

Director: Alain Resnais Cast: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas “If Alain Resnais, producer-director of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, may be classified a member of the French ‘new wave,’ then he also must be listed as riding its crest. For his delicately wrought drama [...] is a complex yet compelling tour de force—as a patent plea for peace and the abolition of atomic warfare; as a poetic evocation of love lost and momentarily found, and as a curiously intricate but intriguing montage of thinking on several planes in Proustian style. Although it presents, on occasion, a baffling repetition of words and ideas, much like vaguely recurring dreams, it nevertheless leaves the impression of a careful coalescence of art and craftsmanship.

With the assistance of Marguerite Duras, one of France’s leading symbolic novelists, as well as the Nipponese technicians involved in this Franco-Japanese co-production, Resnais is not merely concerned with the physical aspects of a short (two-day) affair between a Gallic actress and a Japanese architect. He also explores the meanings of war, the woman’s first love and the interchange of thoughts as they emerge during the brief but supercharged romantic interlude. […] For the first fifteen minutes, our lovers, in intimate embrace, seemingly savor the ecstasies of their moment.

Simultaneously, however, they discuss Hiroshima, the 200,000 dead, the remembrance (shown in harrowingly stark newsreel and documentary footage of that monumental holocaust) of that frightful period in history. It is, in striking effect, an oblique but vivid reminder of the absolutes of love and death.”

- A.H. Weiler, The New York Times, 1960

MOI, UN NOIR [I, BLACK MAN] France/Côte d'Ivoire | 73 min | DCP

Director: Jean Rouch Cast: Oumarou Ganda, Gambi, Petit Touré “As far back as the making of my conventional ethnographic film Les fils de l’eau, I tried to avoid the traps of exoticism. [Robert] Flaherty had already shown me a way of directing the documentary: by organizing and ordering the authentic elements of a culture, the filmmaker takes them out of their alien framework and renders them accessible to a world public… I tried another path, that of giving a voice to Africans themselves and asking them to comment directly on their behavior, actions, and reactions. In 1957 I used this method in the Ivory Coast with Moi, un Noir. During the shooting, I projected the silent film footage tracing the life of a poor dockworker from Abidjan to this same docker who had acted his own part, and asked him to improvise a narration. The result was remarkable: the docker, Robinson, stimulated by the projection of his own image, improvised an astounding monologue in which he not only reconstructed the dialogues for the action but explicated and even judged his own actions and those of his fellow actors…The attempts that I have just discussed have arrived at their own limits. For when all is said I done, neither [Lionel] Rogosin, [Sean] Graham, not I will ever be Africans, and the films that we make will always be African films by Europeans.”

- Jean Rouch, “The Situation and Tendencies of the Cinema in Africa,” 1975

PICKPOCKET France | 76 min | 35mm

Director: Robert Bresson Cast: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pélégri “Pickpocket is Robert Bresson’s first film. The ones he made before were only sketches. Which is as much as saying, if one is familiar with the director’s worth, that the release of Pickpocket is one of the four or five great dates in the history of cinema. It is remarkable that, in contrast to Bresson’s preceding films, this new one was conceived, written, shot, edited, and released all within ten months, as if the period of trial and error were past. Pickpocket is a profoundly inspired film, a free film, instinctive, burning, imperfect, and overwhelming. It resolves every misunderstanding; if you deny this film, it is cinema itself as an autonomous art that you call into question…How does [Bresson] proceed? He starts by strangling realism by the throat, that touchstone of cinema which, quite often, is still only an instrument of reproduction. Bresson is held to be revolutionary because he works with everything, image, sets, faces, gestures, voices, the generally accepted way of reproducing a sound environment…What he shows us, finally, is not a false universe, but a corrected, rectified universe, an original universe from which is missing convention, the convention of the ‘right’ gesture, of the ‘right’ voice, theatrical convention…By the simple and definitive relationships it establishes between content and expression, Pickpocket is a film of dazzling originality. On its first viewing, it risks burning your eyes. So, do like me: go back to see it again every day.”

- Louis Malle, 1960

L'AVVENTURA [THE ADVENTURE]

Italy | 143 min | 35mm

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni Cast: Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, Lea Massari Which of your own films satisfies you most?

“Apart from La Notte, and of course I can’t judge that yet, I would say that L’Avventura is the best… Superficially, this film may look like a rather complicated and perhaps mysterious love story. During a holiday trip, a girl disappears; and the fact of this disappearance creates a gap which is immediately filled by other factors. For the missing girl’s fiancé and her friend, the search becomes a kind of sentimental journey, at the end of which they’ve reached a new and unforeseen situation. On one level, it could be a kind of thriller, with enough sophistication and enough weight to the characters to give it the pseudo-dignity of the psychological thriller. Well, there are elements of that in the story construction. But L’Avventura has other ambitions… Not towards a message but, more humbly, a demonstration. I wanted to show that sentiments which convention and rhetoric have encouraged us to regard as having a kind of definite weight and absolute duration, can in fact be fragile, vulnerable, subject to change. Man deceives himself when he hasn’t courage enough to allow for new dimensions in emotional matters—his loves, regrets, states of mind—just as he allows for them in the fields of science and technology. Well, what’s to be done? L’Avventura naturally does not pretend to have the answer to the disturbing questions it raises. It’s enough for me to have posed them in cinematic terms.”

- Michelangelo Antonioni, Sight and Sound, 1960

LOS GOLFOS [THE DELINQUENTS] Spain | 80 min | 35mm

Director: Carlos Saura Cast: Manuel Zarzo, Luis Marín, Óscar Cruz In 1959 you debuted your first full-length film, Los Golfos. It was the year of L’Avventura and A Bout de Souffle, both revolutionary, the first one thematically and the second one in terms of technique. Neorealism as a genre had died and we saw the arrival of ‘critical realism,’ headed up by young people. Nevertheless, Los Golfos is talked about in terms of neorealistic cinema.

"I don’t exactly know why. Los Golfos, like all of my films, is a consequence of the one before. I endeavored to make something that was similar to a documentary, a documentary entertainment. At any rate, I don’t think that it has anything to do with neorealism. Besides, I know two types of realism. On the one hand, the films of Rossellini, and especially the first part of Rome, Open City which is purely a documentary about a specific situation, made precisely out of reality itself; and the other, a type of neorealism that De Sica and Zavattini make, which sometimes falls into sentimentalism and which are normal stories. Neorealism wasn’t so much the capturing of reality as the narrating of a story. Of course all of us who were making films at that time where attracted to the movement, but that doesn’t mean that we were making that kind of cinema. Look, I’d even say that we found ourselves closer to the New Wave, and I in particular to the cinema of Bunuel. But, finally, with Los Golfos, rather than neorealism and its influence, one can talk in terms of a search for Spanish reality and its formation.”

- Juan Carlos Rentero, Interview with Carlos Saura, 1976

SIE NANNTEN IHN AMIGO [THEY CALLED HIM AMIGO]

German Democratic Republic | 63 min | DVD Director: Heiner Carow Ernst-Georg Schwill, Angelika Hurwicz, Wilhelm Koch-Hooge In 1949, four years after the end of World War II, the German Democratic Republic was founded in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. From this moment, and for the first time in history, two Germanys began to coexist. On one side, the Federal Republic, a self-styled relaunch of the failed Weimar Republic and liaison of capitalism and liberal democracy; on the other, the GDR, a socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state,” unprecedented in German history. The latter’s national identity is from the outset marked by the conviction that the creation of a “new” and “better” Germany is not only politically and economically possible but, in the light of its devastating history, also inevitable. The idealistic spirit of the GDR’s early years was expressed in the first lines of its national anthem: From the ruins risen newly/To the future turned, we stand/let us serve your good weal truly/Germany, our fatherland.

Heiner Carow’s film Sie nannten ihn Amigo (1959) reminds us in its very first scenes of the opposition between these two political models, between continuity and historical break: over a striking montage of images of concentration camps, we hear a militaristic version of the Haydn melody that has served as a national anthem in Germany since 1922, through the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, West Germany, and until today. Throughout, Carow’s visually and acoustically elaborate film is marked by emphatic unambiguity vis-à-vis a past successfully defeated. It insists on the possibility of resistance and solidarity against authoritarian mechanisms of social control and revels in the joyful anarchy of a children’s world in which the reaction to a brown uniform can, rightly so, only take the form of scorn and laughter. The antagonism of “socialism or barbarism” (Rosa Luxemburg) is illustrated with the highest possible evidence, and the film leaves no doubt that, in answering this question, tertium non datur [no third possibility is given]. By the film’s end, we have understood that, while the criminal can be absolved, the Nazi cannot.

By Lorenz Hegel, Ph.D.student in German and Film and Media Studies

PETLA [NOOSE]

Poland | 96 min | DVD Director: Wojciech Jerzy Has Cast: Gustaw Holoubek, Aleksandra Slaska, Teresa Szmigielówna “The Noose is a remarkable first feature, for both its formal mastery and uncompromisingly dark vision of postwar Poland. While the cinematic tale of an alcoholic trying the kick the habit is hardly unique—Louis Malle made Le Feu Follet in 1963—the existential despair that is palpable in the protagonist’s environment makes it specific to Poland in the 1950s. We follow, over a period of twenty-four hours, Kuba (Gustaw Holoubek), a wry and lucid lush who plans to begin treatment to overcome his addiction. However, from the very first shot, the camera narrates Has’s adaptation of Marek Hlasko’s story with images of circularity that imply no exit… Figgis’s screenplay is based on a novel by John O’Brien, who committed suicide at the age of thirty-four. Marek Hlasko also died in his mid-thirties after a few suicide attempts. Born in Warsaw in 1934, the revered, edgy writer acknowledged Hemingway as an influence and led a nonconformist life in many countries. When he lived in Paris in the late 1950s, the press labeled him an Eastern European James Dean. The despair of The Noose can be found throughout his work.

For example, Hlasko wrote, ‘It was not I who made the Warsaw in which people trembled with fear; it was not I who made the Warsaw in which the greatest treasure of the poor was a bottle of vodka; it was that Warsaw that made me. Who and by what right is telling me to keep quiet about it?’”

- Annette Insdorf, Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has, 2017

NEOTPRAVLENNOYE PISMO [LETTER NEVER SENT] USSR | 96 min | 35mm Director: Mikhail Kalatozov Cast: Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, Tatyana Samoylova, Vasiliy Livanov “When that now famous shot of an upside-down tank in Chukrai’s Ballad of a Soldier appeared on the screen at last year’s Cannes Festival, the tremendous applause which greeted it was also striking proof that the dull days of a rigid, Zhdanovian camera were definitely over in the Soviet cinema. Things were taken even further in Kalatozov’s The Letter That Was Not Sent, which was withdrawn from festival showing at the last moment. A pity, for it could have made up a trilogy (completed by The Lady with the Little Dog) which would have effectively reflected some major trends in present-day Soviet cinema: a vigorous rediscovery of the ‘how’ alongside the ‘what’, and a determined pursuit of the contemporary idiom… There is an obvious effort to fit this contemporary, intimate method into the traditional sweeping Russian epic formula and the ideological context of Soviet realism. In The Letter That Was Not Set (still, unfortunately, without a British distributor) the boundless landscape of the Taiga ensures the first, while the second is provided by a heroic though unusually pessimistic story about four geologists, searching for a Siberian gold field, of whom only one survives. Kalatozov, though, seems much less interested in the humanist conception of the whole than in technical experiment and the visual thrill of the details: a most convincingly staged forest fire; long, hurtling tracks along thickets in the Kurosowa manner; the interaction of close-up (the individual) and extreme long shot (Nature). With his photographer, the inimitable Urusevsky, he manoeuvres his camera with the gusto of a Dziga Vertov.”

- Robert Vas, Sight and Sound, 1961

LE SIGNE DU LION [THE SIGN OF LEO] France | 105 min | DCP

Director: Eric Rohmer Cast: Jess Hahn, Michèle Girardon, Van Doude How was Le Signe du Lion received when it was released?

“Badly. It wasn’t released at the height of the New Wave but at the ‘ebb tide’, in 1962.

Quite naively—they weren’t being nasty—Chabrol’s new producers thought the film would be less boring if they shortened it. Moreover, since the music in Le Signe du Lion was modern and atonal and, it was thought, might hurt people’s ears, it was replaced with very conventional music… Chabrol did this without my knowledge, but luckily the profession harboured certain honest souls who alerted me. The editors told me what he’d done. I tried to do what I could. I turned to Henri Langlois, and he helped. Finally, the producer and I came to an agreement: only my original version would be shown in theaters. In any case, no theater in Paris would have shown the edited version. But finally, the original version was shown at La Pagoda in Paris. And the version they’d cut, the ‘amputated’ version, itself was shown—I really don’t know where. Unfortunately, I think it was shown in England, even though they promised not to exhibit it abroad… Le Signe du Lion is the story of a man who was born under the sign of Leo and who falls into the greatest misery at that time of the year. It’s the story of a man alone in Paris in the month of August, without friends or money, and who gradually becomes a bum. He’s played by an American who lives in France and became an actor there – Jess Hahn. He plays the part of an expatriate who lives in France and has composed a sonata which is heard in the film, a sonata for the violin alone.”

- Eric Rohmer, TVOntario, 1977

ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI [ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS] Italy | 177 min | 35mm

Director: Luchino Visconti Cast: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot “There is the distinct likelihood that audiences will come away from Rocco and His Brothers feeling cheated. For, while onlookers are asked to take the Italian film seriously, Luchino Visconti plays practically every old melodramatic trick around to make his movie come off successfully. Rather than real people, stereotypes plod across the screen... rather than credible situations, hackneyed happenstance is the film’s rule… A series of effects for the sake of shock, rather than true-to-life cause and effect relationships, appear to be behind Visconti’s work.”

- Ben Kubasik, Newsday, 1961 “The idea of producing a Luchino Visconti film appealed to me because I knew Visconti to be a director who makes a film only when he has something to say…

Until Rocco and His Brothers, no Italian film had ever treated the subject of the emigration of the essentially agrarian southerners to the north. The cinema seems to have accepted, for the most part, the universal stereotypes—the busy, wise, and sophisticated urban resident as opposed to the slow-moving, naïve and bumbling country bumpkin. In the main, films—particularly Italian films—have presented the theme humorously… Rocco, I believe, is an important and objective study of a social—and therefore historical—reality of Italy.”

- Goffredo Lombardo, The New York Herald Tribune, 1961

NOTES

BORDER LINE

EUROPEAN CINEMA

1959

Generously Sponsored By The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center; Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale; Department of French;Â Department of the History of Art; Program in Film & Media Studies; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; the Yale Center for British Art; and the Yale Film Study Center, courtesy of Paul L. Joskow

Acknowledgement:

europeanstudies.macmillan.yale.edu