THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US Review of a Vittorio De Sica Film

This film is an allegory for post-war Italians families with the message : get back on track with what’s important about family life; don’t make immoral decisions; be aware of the impact of your behavior on your children.  If you’re not able to stand up to the responsibility of parenting, then the church will take over for you.  It’s a classic Italian neorealist film put together by the famous director and screen writer Vittorio De Sica (who also made The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D, and the Garden of the Finzi-Contini).

Of course I thoroughly enjoy any film set in Rome, just because it is Rome.  Here we stroll through the Pincio, watch a puppet show, visit a dressmaker, sit back while the housekeeper serves us up a big bowl of soup, and even go to a condominium meeting. What surprised me was that the film was released in 1944

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e uccellini: his father myth

Pasolini. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Why is he fascinating? Like other Italian intellectuals–or politicians–who you might put behind a podium or in front of a camera he is able to talk up a storm. (BTW: Italian politicians are known to go on for half days rather than hours). Theories. Politics. Right and wrong. Peasant values. Life. Religion. Police…He embodies what we are missing in the 2000s–a respected thinker. Instead we have celebrities who say little about the fabric of life but who are oft quoted on their food intake and love life. Much has changed in 40 years.

Along with being a prolific writer and a public intellectual, Pasolini was a mystic marxist catholic and atheist. The juxtaposition of all these elements, along with a keen intelligence and need to expose alternative sexuality and institutional hypocrisy, saturate his work.

Perhaps being a mystic was most important to him. In interviews he repeatedly spoke up for the need to deliver a mythological element to film. Back to Greek logos and mythos: logos gets too much air time.

Uccelacci and Uccellini embraces the complexity of Pasolini; completely pasoliniesque it is, in fact, a film that he has gone on record saying was his favorite. It is a comedy. It is a satire. It is a modern story that looks back on medieval times to gather momentum. It is an urban/rural clash story. It is a road-of-life story; a circular story. In the interview that accompanied the DVD, Pasolini said “I like to leave stories open…I choose everything.” Mostly Uccelacci and Uccellini is a father-son

Art Is the Opposite of Disintegration: Woman of Rome, A Life of Elsa Morante

After reading ARACOELI (truly brilliant novel), I became curious to know more about Elsa Morante. I did know a few tidbits: her friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini; her affair with the filmmaker Bertolucci; and her marriage to Alberto Moravia. Not much more. Many years ago I had waded through the first third of her difficult novel History . Since I couldn’t go to the end, Morante fell outside my interest and my corral of favorite Italian writers.

Just so happens this last month Lily Tuck came out with a biography of Morante–the first in the English language and a noteworthy recognition. Morante is underrated in the States. The angle of the biography is rather interesting. Tuck places herself in the biography.  She starts as a child in Rome, sitting in cafes with her father, a filmmaker. Possibly Tuck sat across the table from Morante at a cafe in the Piazza del Popolo, but she does not remember for sure. The book plays off many possible past encounters with its subject Morante throughout its pages. Tuck also intersperses a narrative about  her own experiences in Rome as she wrote the biography.  Tuck, for instance, suffered a harangue from Morante’s ex-landlady when she ring the landlady’s doorbell during lunch time.

What sticks to me after reading the biography–besides recognition of her great  talent– is Morante’s wild, stubborn, almost mean independence, her vanity, and her proud triumph over an economically thin and unusual background to become a writer on top of her world. A writer who, with the help of her ambitious nudgy mother, her body,

Elsa Morante’s ARACOELI: a disturbing story of memory, rejection and love

I never met a woman named Aracoeli. As I read Elsa Morante’s impressive and  disturbing 1982 novel, of the same name, I wondered how to correctly pronounce “Aracoeli” and if it might be a common name for girls in Italy. My Italian friends Francesca and Renato both wagged their heads and fingers when I asked. “No,” they said. “It is a latin word. Imperative tense, a command, in fact that orders you ‘to look up to the sky’.”

And then, after finishing the book, I remembered having visited a church in Rome, located at the top of a hundred steps and to the side of the ‘wedding cake’ on Capoltine Hill: Santa Maria in Ara Coeli. It’s a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin for having given birth to the first son of God. At Christmas, pilgrims come from all over the city to adore the infant, play music for him,and leave him gifts.

The latin verbal command, along with the Blessed Virgin and child Jesus signifiers, are gateways into the novel, which like much of Morante’s work combs through childhood: how children look up to mothers who (at least in the beginning) love them unconditionally; and from that pinnacle of perfect the painful descent into adulthood. Life chips away illusions, fantasy, dreams, and family love.

The narrator of Aracoeli, a boy named Emanuel, laments that he is torn from the uterus but, as a reward for that pain, is glued to the wonderful teat of his beautiful mother,

HOW TO LIVE TO 100

Our oldest living Nobel laureate and the first ever to reach the 100th birthday

If you want to live to a 100, you might consider following Rita Levi-Montalcini’s routine: get up at five in the morning, eat just once a day, at lunchtime, keep your brain active, and go to bed at 11pm.

“I might allow myself a bowl of soup or an orange in the evening, but that’s about it,” she says. “I’m not really interested in food, or sleep.”

A  diminutive, bird-like figure with an alert manner and engaging smile, Montalcini  has the insight stamina and sharp intellect that someone half her age would envy.

This astonishing woman – who studied medicine, survived Fascism and prejudice, and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1986,  still takes an active part in politics

in the Italian Senate. I recently read her autobiography “In Praise of Imperfection:My Life and Work.”  What touched

IN THE GARDEN OF PAPA SANTUZZU

Since we’re going to Italy, I am taking the occasion to write about one of my favorite “Italian Immigration Novels”.  This one– IN THE GARDEN OF PAPA SANTUZZU — is more specifically a Sicily to American novel. My daughter will be enjoying Sicily during her spring break. I’ll be drinking wine in Roma and Bari.

“Cu nesci arrinesci” (He who leaves succeeds)

Tony Ardizzone’s novel, In the Garcden of Papa Santuzzu, is an abundant collection of magical stories and magnificent language woven together to create a extraordinary loving novel about not only Sicilian Americans but also the heartbreak and hope of common people who leave a home to begin again somewhere else.  In Ardizzone’s case the people are poor Sicilian farm laborers who endure backbreaking work in the rocky fields of oppressive baruni.  The place they migrate to is La Merica.  The story begins as the character’s father, Papa Santuzzu and his wife Adriana, push their sons and daughters, one by one, to the land of opportunity and promise.

Rosa Dolci, Gaetanu, Luigi, Assunta, Salvatore, Rosaria and Livicedda Girgenti, Teresa Pantaluna, Ciccina Agneddina, and Carla and Gerlando Cavadduzzo all bribe their way out of the poverty of their island–one disguises herself as a man; another gains the help of enchanted eels

My Greenwich Village and the Italian American Community

The boho-beatnik, boutique, food and folk music scenes of Greenwich Village have made indelible marks in the imagination of people everywhere.  Less reknowned are the Italian-American immigrants who lived in the area around Washington Square and the stories about their lives, love, and rabbletrousing.

Carol Bonomo Albright, granddaughter of Italian immigrants, had an inside view on all of the going ons.  She grew up in an apartment building on West Broadway  between Prince and Spring. The building housed not only her family and grandmother but also 28 other families, all Italian except for a few

Interviewing Dario Fo: 1997 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature

I first interviewed Dario Fo, in New York City, in November 1984.  I brought an entourage along with me that included a photographer and assistant, an interpreter, and NY filmmaker Emile D. Antonio.  We were going to do Fo.  Fo of course, had his own entourage, and we all crowded into the dainty yellow and green parlor of his suite at the Plaza. 

The Village Voice said they’d take a look at my story.  No one, it seemed, at the time, knew about Fo. (I ended up selling an abbreviated version of the interview to Reuters, and a longer version, a year later, to Saturday Evening Post.)

Prior to his 1984 visit to New York, Fo, an Italian playwright and satirist, had twice been denied a visa.  During our interview Fo said his previous efforts to enter the U.S. had been turned down on the grounds of “ideological exclusion.” 

  He added his entry had finally been made possible by President Reagan.  “Mr. Reagan is an actor and understands it is bad luck to treat theater people badly,” he said.

Fo had come to New York to see preview productions of his play “Accidental Death of an Anarchist.”  The play opened later that month at the Belasco Theater and starred Patti LuPone and Jeremy Irons.

For years I had been smitten by the work of Dario Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, having been introduced to a several one acts performed here in Boston, at a small, now non-existent theater in the North End, called the Nucleo Eclettico.  The plays and skits written by both Fo and his wife are interactive, political and gutsy; they honor the audience and honor

My Brother is an Only Child:AMERICANS DON’T MAKE FILMS LIKE THIS

Viewers would probably benefit by having a sense of Italy’s history– and the history of Italian cinema–to get a good grasp on the film. Otherwise, it may seem uneven and spotty. If you haven’t already,  I recommend watching Best of Youth, Fist in the Pocket, Bicycle Thief, Rocco and His Brothers, I’m Not Afraid and even Lina Wertmeuller’s Swept Away to put this film in context.

handsome fellows, aren't they?

Italian cinema has a tradition of basing their films on literature, classical drama, and political and intellectual concerns. As a cultural group, they are first to speak up about injustices of the status quo.  Such is the case with Mio Fratello e’Unico Figlio ( My Brother is an Only Child).

It is a story of a family living on the outskirts of Rome. In the 60s and 70s things were pretty rural in the town of Latino; excitement resided elsewhere–Rome, for example. Within the family, there is the Communist brother Manrico; a fascist younger brother Accio; and a Christian Democrat father.  The mother is work-worn and weary of living in government housing with walls that crack

MODIGLIANI SAID SAVE YOUR MONEY (from 10/8/08)

Franco Modigliani

FRANCO MODIGLIANI WON THE NOBEL PRIZE IN 1985 for “his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets”.

When the Italians come to Cambridge and stay with me, they used to visit with Franco Modigliani–when he was alive–& his wife  Serena who lived in an apartment building overlooking the Charles River. Francesca and Renato described Modigliani as brilliant and also ‘cute.’   By then he was in his 80s and liked to drive a little car. His wife didn’t think he ought to because his eyesight and reflexes weren’t the best. During conversation, he repeatedly went back to the car topic, she would roll her eyes, and he would smile.

FRANCO & AMADEO
Before Francesca and Renato came into my life, I didn’t know about Modigliani the Economist. I knew the long-faced, stretched-out painting of Amadeo Modigliani. Were the two men related?  No. They were both born into Jewish-Italian families. Amadeo in Livorno to a bohemian family; Franco in Rome, to a professional family.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI FILM: Teorema (from 10/7/08)

Pasolini

PASOLINI? A controversial , leftist journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure.

In his film TEOREMA(Theorem, 1968) , in a final scene, we see the maid, Emilia, suspended in the sky above the casina– a row of farmhouses. The image smacks of Fellini’s imagine of the Virgin Mary at the beginning of the film LA DOLCE VIDA (1968): the Virgin statue hangs in the sky above Roman rooftops as a helicopter transports it over the crowded suburbs. Peasant vs. bourgeoise. Country vs. city. The sound of church bells vs. the noise of a helicopter engine. In both cases elevation of a woman, in both cases funny, in both cases not an intellectual question but rather a visual joke asking for the audience’s gut reaction. Like, “what’s going on?” The image breaks the narrative. In Fellini’s case setting up what is to follow; in Pasolini’s case, closing off what has already occurred.