Nostalgia: De Sica & Zavattini
You learn a few things when you set out to hold onto what you think of as the best of the past. For starters, you find out that whatever intrinsic merits a work of art may have had, the value it has for you was pretty strongly affected by the amount of effort you put into getting to see it. In the days before people were able to order up whatever movie they wanted and watch it at home on television, the University of Illinois at Chicago was located at Navy Pier, and their film society – I’d found out at the time – was going to give a showing of a Vittorio De Sica film I’d never had a chance to see. Okay, I said to myself, how do you get to Navy Pier from where you are now?
As it turned out, you had to take three buses and an el train and if you were lucky you’d make it in an hour and a half; and then you could set about finding your way to the little screening room the film society’d been assigned at the far end of the pier by asking eight different people, seven of whom had no idea what you were talking about; and, having managed to reach the place just in time, you took a seat on a folding chair alongside a dozen other folks, three of whom had never heard of the film till they poked their noses into the room to see what was going on. But once you’d got through all that and the lights were switched off and the reels started turning, you were able to sit there in the dark and watch Shoeshine for the first time in your life.
————————————————————
Another thing you learn in trying to hold onto the past is not to dig any deeper into it than you have to. I happen to have a recollection of four movies Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini made together, that are as good as the memories I have of any movies I’ve ever seen. But it takes some effort in preserving my ignorance to keep it that way. I’m sure both film-makers led lives full of all sorts of political and personal involvements, some of which I’d find admirable and some reprehensible. The fact of the matter is, I don’t know anything about those aspects of either man’s life, and I’ve tried to avoid finding out any more than I do. I have necessarily become aware of the fact that separately and together the same pair were involved in making lots of other films, some of which were pretty good, some mediocre, some downright awful. Those films and the mental confusions they seem to exhibit, I put out of my mind or try to. For me, Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini exist as the director and writer of The Children Are Watching Us, Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, and Umberto D. (A generation later they could lay claim to another outstanding collaboration in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; but the virtues of that film are of a different sort.) The reason those movies appeal to me as much as they do, I’m pretty sure, is because they’re populated with people of a sort I actually knew. Not that friends of mine were caught up in circumstances quite as desperate as the ones that take place in those movies, but the residents of my neighborhood would have reacted in pretty much the same way if they had found themselves in those situations. It’s having captured life on a level as close as that to the way it is, that puts those films into the category of the few most worthy of being remembered.
Those early De Sica films were better than Rossellini’s and equaled only by Forbidden Games in the style of an era that was coming to an end. The worst thing that could have happened to movie-making in Italy, did, a while later, when La Dolce Vita turned out to be such a hit. Who the devil are those people, I wondered as I watched Marcello making his blank-faced way through passels of mindless fellow-sophisticates. Nobody I saw on the screen was anywhere close to anybody I’d ever met. Who could have any interest in watching people like that or care in the least about what they chose to do with their time? Obviously lots of folks did, me not among them; and so the world wound up being treated to a series of looks into the lives of self-indulgent individuals of the sort Fellini found himself surrounded by at that time, for most of whom he had little respect; along with lots of other films about equally aimless meanderings through the worlds of Antonioni and Visconti and imitators too numerous to (want to) remember.
1943 to 1952 isn’t a long time, really, even in terms of one person’s life. Small budgets is what Italian film-makers had to get by with then, black and white film, on-location sets, and actors nobody ever heard of. What else did they have? Well, how about Vittorio de Sica and Cesare Zavattini – at that time and that place. It’s worth the effort to take a look at what those two were able to do with what they had. Nobody else is ever going to do it like that again.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
That's what I'd like to know 