SCREENING LOG - 7/08-7/14, 2002

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I watched STROMBOLI, ARABIAN NIGHTS, and UMBERTO D. In order of preference:

Stromboli (1949, Roberto Rossellini)

A masterpiece of realism and spiritual liberation, infused with an obvious passion for both film and for life, Rossellini's first film with Ingrid Bergman during their notorious real-life affair is on many levels a revelatory experience. This is easily the best Bergman performance I've seen. As a Lithuanian refugee, she marries an Italian fisherman to escape a refugee camp and settles into an unhappily restrictive life in his hometown on a remote volcanic island. By opening venting her frustration and impolitely defying the traditions and standards imposed upon her by her host community, Bergman's performance pulls the rug from her troubled, angelic saint persona which Hollywood helped conceive; rarely have both actress and her role been so entwined in their respective journeys of self-discovery. Rossellini achieves a new level of objectivity and patience in his craft in showing the well-meaning but ill-informed attempts by Bergman's husband to acculturate her, as well as the daily routines of the villagers, esp. in one lengthy fishing sequence that with brilliant nonchalance conveys both the sense of Bergman's horror and the villagers' necessity. The sense of self-discovery through alienation in a stark rustic setting presages such future achievements as Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA and Kiarostami's THE WIND WILL CARRY US, though the force of Rosselini's conclusion is clearly the most visceral and immediate -- a woman has been taken to the brink, and discovers what matters.

Umberto D (1953, Vittorio de Sica)

Much-heralded as a masterpiece, de Sica's hearbreaking account of an impoverished retired civil servant forced out of his home certainly delivers the goods in terms of pathos and astute social observation tinted with righteous outrage, though its narrative seems almost too efficient in leading the viewer by the leash through the hoops of one misfortune after another. Whether one sees this clockwork pacing as a strength or a weakness, it can be credited to Cesare Zavattini's screenplay, which perhaps is so perfect in its construction and attention to detail that it leads one to wonder if great screenplays can actually hamper great cinema from blossoming in its own right. The only moment in the film that truly held me in awe was the five-minute pantomime of a servant girl's morning ritual, absent of dialogue. The ending also possesses immense power in its wordless mystery (and not in its sentimental dog tricks). Such moments aspire to the best of Chaplin; Carlo Battisti's performance in the title role certainly merits that description.

Arabian Nights (1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Certainly my favorite of Pasolini's trilogy of classic bawdy literature (including THE CANTERBURY TALES and THE DECAMERON), because, paradoxically, it feels like the most sprawling and the most cohesive of the three. Pasolini threads his successive stories through boundaries of memory, fiction and geography (he shot in Ethiopia, Iran, Yemen and Nepal). His ragged, disjunctive style is certainly an acquired taste, though the ideology of liberation in matters of sex , class, race, or any sort of convetion, is something to be reckoned with. Even so, I couldn't be sure of how much matter was being made of all the scheming and sex -- is it really any deeper than, say, a weekend party hosted at Hugh Hefner's mansion? The thick-headed and endlessly horny men matched with lithe and giggling young women leads me to think not. What I appreciated most, as in GOSPEL OF ST. MATTHEW, is Pasolini's talent for capturing the complex beauty of human faces (among other body parts), in such a way that it elevates the narrative, though the mugging by some of the younger actors becomes ponderous, and the oodles of flesh displayed seems to lose its sense of purpose.

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