(under great reconstruction)
Talking about great videos, I mean first of all old european movies. My man is Michelangelo Antonioni. My love to his films started suddenly, though before that day I watched some of his movies, never thinking about the director. That day I just was searching for movies with Marcello Mastroianni and found in one shop La Notte. I bought that video and was paralized with the effect it gave me. I came back to the shop next day and bought all videos by Antonioni they had. I like all his movies from my collection and love some of them.
Fellini is another hero of mine. Nights of Cabiria - is my favourite film.
When I thought about creating this page, my first words should be: "Comparing Fellini and Antonioni, I think that Fellini makes movies about soul's growing up, about soul's becoming older and wiser, about those who are scared to become adult, who're scared to lose or make a mistake, about those who trying to change something, to find love and happiness, who receive slap in the face from fate, but in the end they are able to find theirselves in simple things, in eternal things. While Antonioni makes films about love, about those who go on living in the name of love, about those who are able to find love even if it's hidden in eternal darkness, and about love, which will find them wherever they trying to hide."
Some days ago I found these words of Antonioni: "Some people believe I make films with my head; a few others think they come from the heart; for my part, I feel as though I make them with my stomach."
Ok, then, here is a list of their-mine favourite movies:
By Antonioni:
La Notte / The Night (1961)
It is a journey of a single night in the relationship of a novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife (Jeanne Moreau) as they confront, but do not resolve, the crisis in their marriage. Set in Milan, Italy's most modern and industrial city, the film examines themes of failed communication and the sterility of modern life. By this time, Antonioni was less concerned with plot and story development in his films, and more with his characters' reactions. As a result, the imagery in La notte often takes on a symbolic quality, with sterile cityscapes, reflections, characters separated by glass, and stark, almost architectural compositions. All of these are used to express the characters' isolation and disaffected ennui. In one memorable scene, Moreau and another character are shot entirely from outside a car, and we see them through the car window talking, but cannot hear their conversation.
On the other hand, Monica Vitti, playing the third point of the marital triangle, was becoming the ideal Antonioni actress. In La Notte, as in L'Avventura, and later in L'Eclisse and Il Deserto Rosso (1964), Vitti allowed herself to be used as a blank canvas on which Antinoini could paint his bleak images, a "luminous cipher perfectly suited to her director's austere formalism," as one critic called her.
L'Avventura / The Adventure (1960)
Anna (Lea Massari), a woman engaged in a troubled love affair, takes an ocean cruise with a yacht full of rich passengers. When they disembark on a small island near Sicily, Anna disappears and, for much of the film, the woman's besr friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Anna's lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her, while dealing with the emotional impact of her disappearance.
L'Avventura is a landmark film in the international art cinema for its dramatically unconventional storyline, which rambles from Sandro and Claudia's search for Anna, to their own developing love affair. Eventually the film becomes a more amorphous tale of human alienation and incommunicability.
The film marked the initial collaboration between Antonioni and stage actress Monica Vitti, who, like Jean-Luc Godar's Anna Karina or Josef von Sternberg's Marlene Dietrich, would go on to appear as Antonioni's muse in a number of productions and to embody his mood of troubled alienation.
Using the widescreen frame to effective ends, Antonioni had his actors spread out across the frame to emphasize their physical and emotional distance from each other. Such existential chilliness could also be attributed to a production that ran months over shedule, so that summer scenes had to be shot in wintertime.
L'Avventura was the first film in Antonioni's loose trilogy including La Notte (1961) and The Eclipse (1962), films which shared a thematic interest in what critic William S. Pechter calls "the death of feeling."
Al Di La` Delle Nuvole / Beyond The Clouds (1995)
Antonioni shot the film in winter in France and Italy, with assistance from German director Wim Wenders. He was 82, and the fact that he made it at all, a decade after a stroke had robbed him partly paralyzed, is remarkable.
Film is based on four novels.
The first story is about love at first sight between Silvano and Carmen in a small place ner Ferrara. It's about fight between heart and mind, dreams and reality. What is better to take dream and make it real or left romantic fantasy untouched forever in your heart?
Malkovich steps out of his narrator role in the second vignette, when he meets and stalks a young shop clerk played by Sophie Marceau in Portofino. She is full of fears and maybe she attracts him with that electricity inside. He will try to free her soul using simple cure - love.
Next story collides two people, who's marriages are broken - Fanny Ardant and Jean Reno. New lovestory is able to destroy the old one; is it able to burn another love, standing on ruins?
The fourth tale is as interlude starring two aging greats (Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau) observing the difference between Cezanne's view of Mont Sainte-Victoire and the much-less-pleasing prospect of the famous mountain today. This story is about Love and Love. This story I like the most. Can the same heart love both God and man?
This movie is full of ... silence and beauty. I love watching this movie, being wraped up in plaid with a cup of hot milk in half dark room.
By Fellini:
Le Notti Di Cabiria / Nights Of Cabiria (1957)
Giulieta Masina (director's wife) plays prostitute in this movie. Her work is dirty, but her heart is clean. She still believe in people, she believe she will find a real love. She has unkillable sense of hope, which is help her to survive. And she will do it, though life tries her strength every day.
This movie is very hard to watch, because she looks like small girl while people around trying to abuse her. But desire to live, desire to be happy win it all.
La Dolce Vita
8 1/2 (1963)
Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), a celebrated filmmaker riding high on the success of his recent picture, suddenly finds himself at a loss for new ideas. Hounded by his wife, mistress, the press, and his fans, he begins to retreat into childhood memories and sexual fantasies, before finding the inspiration to begin his current project, a science fiction tale about the survivors of a nuclear war.
The title is drived from the fact that Fellini had previously completed six features and three short films, adding up to 7 1/2. So he named his new picture 8 1/2.
The real-life parallels between Guido and Fellini are more than obvious and the director once commented, 'I am Guido.' It was no secret that the director was in Jungian psychoanalysis shortly before and during the making of 8 1/2 and some of his dreams and anxieties became manifest on the screen. Fellini also had very specific requirements during the casting process and often placed ads in newspaper, his standart ploy, to find actors who matched the look of his characters. For the role of Carla, he wanted 'someone old-fashioned, with a pink and white complexion, a small head on a Rubens body, very soft, flowery, maternal, and opulent.' In Fellini A Life by Hollis Alpert, the author wrote "There were those who took the ads as a joke, but Fellini, who needed this woman and would travel, went as far as Milan and Trieste to see women of Rubenesque proportions who might be suitable. Thousands answered the ads. Also, during these travels he kept an eye out for the even more opuently figured Saraghina. Camilla Cederna, a journalist present at some of the screen tests, wrote about the applicants: 'Enormous women; they were like enormous chests of drawers, like elephants on two feet.' Fellini tested dozens, but found his Saraghina in Milan... He saw her walking along the street, approached her, and learned she was a young opera singer, an American of Czech descent, who was on her way to a music lesson. Blonde and shy, her name was Edra Gale, and it took some convincing before she agreed to be tested and was given the role,' As for the role of Carla, Anita Ekberg was first considered but Fellini later hired Sandra Milo who had considerable difficulty adjusting to the requirements of her character, one who had a lusty appetite. Milo had just lost a considerable amount of weight and didn't want to gain it back with the numerous eating scenes the part required.
In one intervew, Fellini commented on the core idea behind 8 1/2: 'Self acceptance can occur only when you've grasped that the only thing that exists is yourself, your true deep self which wants to grow spontaneously, but which is fettered by inoperative lies, myths and fantasies that propose an unattainable morality or sanctity or perfection, all of it brainwashed into us during our defensive childhood.'
Other Italian movies:
Sunflowers (1969)
This is a fine work performed by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
He has to go to the war and he loves her. Their love was great and then he leaved her. Many years are passes and she desides to go to Russia where she heard the last news about him. She searches in Moscow and out of city. That field where he was wounded now is full of sunflowers..
I adore this movie. I watched it many years ago and now I hope to find it somewhere to put in my collection.
Of course this is not the end of the list of my favourite italian movies.
Moving to french films, I stay under french charm for a long time. You don't know what is Love if you never watched Un Homme Et Une Femme, ...Et Dieu Cre`a La Femme, La Femme D'a Cote` or the finest Amelie.
