|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Required Reading for
Italian-Americans...
Sicilian Culture: News & Views
Nominations: What the Oscar Voters Missed:
My Voyage to Italy
Letters to the Editor, By Dave Schmerler, Los Angeles Times
In Letters to the Editor, of the Los Angeles Times, regarding: "Nominations: What the Oscar Voters Missed", after mercilessly "panning" the Academy voters for nominating "Moulin Rouge" the following comment reflected my viewpoint.
* * * * * * * * *
Once again, the academy's documentary branch displays its usual dubious expertise and denies even a nomination to what was clearly the year's best documentary. For many, "Martin Scorsese's 'My Voyage to Italy'" was not only the year's best documentary but the year's best film. Period.
This beautiful four-hour cinematic history lesson brought tears to my eyes, as it reminded me again and again of the potential power and beauty of the cinema, from the days when some people still treated movies as an art form.
As usual, the documentary branch didn't do its homework.
DAVE SCHMERLER
Westminster
It's a moving and enthralling exercise, touched with genius – and, at four hours, six minutes, the best value you'll ever get from a trip to the cinema....Clyde Jeavons
My Voyage to Italy is a love letter (to the movies, to Italy, to his parents, and especially to Rossellini, Visconti and Fellini) just as passionate, reckless and beautiful.....Gary Mairs
"Firmly establishes the brilliant filmmaker as invaluable an educator as he is a director." -- Frank Scheck, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
"Will forever change and deepen the way you look at cinema." -- Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Voyage to Italy [Il mio viaggio in Italia]
If Martin Scorsese never made another movie (which heaven forbid), he could unquestionably sustain a career as one of the greatest-ever teachers of film. This is an epic master-class in how to watch films, how to interpret a director's intentions, how to enjoy cinema (there is one marvelous digression in which Scorsese freezes the action to reveal the fleeting subtlety of an actor's comic timing). But this is more than a brilliantly entertaining tutorial. A follow-up to the director's Personal Journey Through American Movies (1995), My Voyage to Italy takes Scorsese – and us – back to Italy, to his Sicilian roots ('My grand parents were Sicilian emigrants who were barely literate in Italian. So it was through Italian films that I actually began to discover my family'), where we are treated to an impassioned, analytical tour of modern Italian cinema, from the Neorealist revolution wrought by Visconti and Rossellini, via De Sica and Antonioni, up to Fellini's 8 1/2 (yes, there's more, much more to come). Made in 35mm, with generous film extracts, it's a moving and enthralling exercise, touched with genius – and, at four hours, six minutes, the best value you'll ever get from a trip to the cinema.....Clyde Jeavons
Director Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter Kent Jones, Martin Scorsese, Raffaele Donato, Suso Cecchi D'Amico
Country USA-Italy,Year 2001,Running time 246 minutes
Sponsored by:Turner Classic MoviesRLFF Homepage
www.rlff.com/db_world/cinema.cgi/films/view_203.htm----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Voyage to Italy (Il Mio Viaggio in Italia ) (1999)
Martin Scorsese
Internet Movie DatabaseAs his own filmmaking curdles into empty virtuosity - Bringing Out the Dead, The Age of Innocence and Casino are all as dazzling as they are completely unnecessary - Martin Scorsese has positioned himself as the cinema's official goodwill ambassador. He's been instrumental in the restoration and re-release of such classic films as The Golden Coach and Purple Noon. Long out-of-print critical works by James Agee and Vachel Lindsay have been republished under his imprimatur. And if you tune into any documentary about cinema, you'll see him interviewed: garrulous, intense, crisply professorial in his sleek Armani suits, preaching the gospel of the movies.
Scorsese's new documentary, My Voyage to Italy, is a passionately idiosyncratic history of the Italian cinema, framed by stories about his immigrant family. Four hours long and comprised mainly of film clips and voice-over narration, it may seem like something only the most hardcore of movie geeks could love. Yet it's among the best films of Scorsese's career, a welcome return to form that gives unexpected hope for his upcoming fiction film, Gangs of New York.
This is not an encyclopedic tour of a national cinema. Rather than include a minute or two from a hundred films, Scorsese instead talks through substantial portions of about a dozen major works. These sequences are edited for time but never feel truncated. (Editor Thelma Schoonmaker uses wipes to distinguish between the cuts made for the documentary and those in the original material.) The unique rhythms of the original sequences are respected, so that even when La Dolce Vita is cut to its highlights, it still maintains the turgid pacing of Fellini's original.
The film follows the careers of the great neo-realist directors from the eruption of the movement at the end of World War II through their growth away from grim naturalism into opulent period drama and surrealist fantasy. Key later figures - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci and the Taviani brothers most prominently - are missing from the film, and a number of the Italian cinema's greatest achievements (Nights of Cabiria, The Leopard, The Conformist) are mentioned only in passing or neglected altogether.
This narrow focus comes not just because the neo-realists comprise Italy's most important contribution to the cinema, but also because Scorsese saw these films on television when growing up in a Sicilian neighborhood in Queens, New York. These works announced themselves as completely different from the Westerns and musicals this movie-mad six year old was used to. In one of the film's most illuminating sequences, he butts a Roy Rogers western up against Roberto Rossellini's Paisan. The contrast is startling, and gives us a sense of what these films must have looked like in the late '40's. The Rogers is all primary colors, stirring music and the sort of broadly heroic storytelling young boys devour. The Rossellini is something else entirely: stark black and white, no music at all, languid rhythms, non-professional actors and a brutal story that edges forward incrementally rather than leaping from event to event.
At its best, My Voyage to Italy manages enormous complexity within a very simple structure. As Scorsese works through passages from Rome: Open City or Umberto D, he ties the films to his family's history and makes clear how being touched by these films spurred him to make his own. He shares his awakening to the possibilities of the medium. His utter absorption in these films - he clearly knows this work intimately, and is as erudite as he is passionate about it - points inescapably to his own films. Sometimes the connections are obvious: Mean Streets, for instance, is a reworking of Fellini's I Vitelloni. The most exciting passages, however, point far beyond such easy correspondences. Scorsese's examination of Rossellini demonstrates that the ambivalent spirituality and drive for transcendence in his own movies has roots not just in his life but in the art he prizes; once it is understood what Scorsese sees in these films, the formal strategies he borrows from them gain weight beyond simple homage.
The early neo-realist work is most often shown in spliced, scratchy 16mm dupes, the blacks and whites washed out with time to a murky gray. (The videos are worse: the same terrible prints transferred too brightly to read the subtitles.) Here, the prints are lovingly restored, and it's finally possible to see just how beautifully photographed these films were. In their austerity and the clarity of their vision, they evoke the work of great documentary photographers like Walker Evans and Robert Frank. They create a rich, offhand sense of life unfolding before the camera, as though the events are being captured rather than being staged for our benefit.
In the final sequence, Scorsese describes Fellini's 8 1/2 as the "purest expression of love for the cinema that I know of." This is modesty: My Voyage to Italy is a love letter (to the movies, to Italy, to his parents, and especially to Rossellini, Visconti and Fellini) just as passionate, reckless and beautiful....- Gary Mairs
My Voyage to Italy
www.culturevulture.net/Movies3/MyVoyagetoItaly.htm-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Il Mio Viaggio in Italia
Oct. 18, 2001
By Frank ScheckNEW YORK -- Martin Scorsese's fascinating account of the history of Italian cinema from the end of World War II to about 1961, a companion piece of sorts to his seminal documentary "A Personal Journey Through American Movies," firmly establishes the brilliant filmmaker as invaluable an educator as he is a director. Equally personal and informative, insightful and passionate, this four-hour work establishes its goal of illuminating the joys of Italian cinema to neophytes and experts alike.
Although its natural home eventually will be on video and television, "Il Mio Viaggio in Italia" has been picked up by Miramax for theatrical distribution; despite its demanding length, it well deserves to be seen on the big screen thanks to the superb restoration of its numerous film clips. Screened recently at the New York Film Festival, it is due to be exhibited theatrically in Los Angeles soon.
As its title suggests, "Viaggio" makes no claims to be an exhaustive history of Italian cinema. Rather, it is a personal essay in which Scorsese delivers not so much an overview but rather a guide to the films and filmmakers who have had the biggest influence on him. Staring directly into the camera in a series of monologues, he describes his early years growing up in Little Italy, watching Italian films broadcast on a black-and-white 16-inch TV set. Although there is a brief segment dealing with Italian silent epics, "Viaggio's" first part deals principally with Italian postwar cinema, most notably the neorealist films made by such directors as Rossellini and De Sica.
Part Two deals with the stylistic advances made by such filmmakers as Visconti, Antonioni and Fellini, with the latter's works, most notably "I Vitelloni," "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2," having a particularly important impact on Scorsese's work. For instance, "I Vitelloni," he informs us, was a strong influence on Scorsese's "Mean Streets."
Admittedly, considering its four-hour-plus running time, "Viaggio" might be digested more easily in installments than in its current format. And one might argue that the film clips, while expertly chosen and edited (by Scorsese's longtime collaborator, the brilliant Thelma Schoonmaker), might be a bit too voluminous; many of the excerpts go on for 15 minutes or more. But there is no denying the passion or intelligence of this work, which is meant to be an encouragement to explore the films for ourselves rather than a dry history lesson. On that level, "Viaggio" fully succeeds.
IL MIO VIAGGIO IN ITALIA
Miramax Films
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenwriters: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Raffaele Donato, Kent Jones, Martin Scorsese
Producers: Barbara De Fina, Giuliana Del Punta, Bruno Restuccia
Executive producers: Giorgio Armani, Riccardo Tozzi, Marco Chimenz
Co-executive producer: Raffaele Donato
Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker
Color and black and white/stereo
Running time -- 246 minutes
No MPAA ratingHollywood Reporter
www.rottentomatoes.com/source-213/?letter=mGuardian Unlimited Film | Features | Hollywood reporter: Marty's Roman holiday | OK you, that's a rap
www.pixunlimited.co.uk/global/adpopup3.htm?IFRHEIGHT="200"?IFRWIDTH="200"?IFRAMEBGCOL="000000"?SPACEDESC=popupbig50MovieWeb : Agent Orange - My Voyage to Italy
movieweb.com/columns/orange/rev_italy.htmlUpcomingmovies.com: My Voyage to Italy
www.upcomingmovies.com/myvoyagetoitaly.htmlSlant Magazine: Il Mio Viaggio in Italia
www.slantmagazine.com/film/archive/ilmioviaggioinitalia.htmlBoxoffice Magazine [MY VOYAGE TO ITALY (IL MIO VIAGGIO IN ITALIA) Film Review]
www.boxoff.com/scripts/fiw.dll?GetReview?&where=ID&terms=5571
© Copyright 1999-2002
(MCMXCIX) Cristaldi Communications
Web Design, Hosting & Promotion -
- February 19,
2002