La Strada

Federico Fellini's "La Strada" (1954) tells a fable that is simple by his later standards, but contains many of the obsessive visual trademarks that he would return to again and again: the circus, and parades, and a figure suspended between earth and sky, and one woman who is a waif and another who is a carnal monster, and of course the seashore. Like a painter with a few favorite themes, Fellini would rework these images until the end of his life.

The movie is the bridge between the postwar Italian neorealism which shaped Fellini, and the fanciful  extravaganzas which followed. It is fashionable to call it his best work - to see the rest of his career as a long slide into over-elaboration.  However, the film won Best Foreign Language Academy Award in 1957.

In almost all of Fellini's films, you will find the figure of a man caught between earth and sky. You will find journeys, processions, parades, clowns, freaks, and the shabby melancholy of an empty field at dawn, after the circus has left. (Fellini's very last film seen in this country, 1987's "Intervista," ends with such an image.)

And you will hear it all tied together with the music of Nino Rota, who, starting with "I Vitelloni" in 1953, faithfully composed for Fellini some of the most distinctive film scores ever written, merging circus music and pop songs with the sadly lyrical sounds of accordions and saxophones and lonely trumpets.

The cast is exemplary from Anthony Quinn's loveable brute to Giuletta Masina's innocent ingenue and shot with some beautiful cinematography which transfers beautifully on this 2K restoration and is a perfect stepping stone to see where Fellini was years before his masterpiece La Dolce Vita just three years later.

The DVD from StudioCanal is released for £17.99 and £22.99 on Blu-ray and would be a welcome addition to any World Cinema catalogue.

My Voyage to Italy - DVD review

Martin Scorsese narrates and presents a personal voyage through the history of Italian cinema, which had a huge influence on his life from an early age when watching it on his small television in New York when growing up, to the huge impact it has had on his esteemable career.

Featuring excerpts from many filmmakers he had enjoyed immensely; the neo-realism of De Sica and Rossellini, the surrealism of Fellini and the groundbreaking Antonioni.

The documentary is an epic in its own right, running to a mammoth 246 minutes (4 hours) of footage.  The only downside is the inserted images of Scorsese himself; he looks like a gangster standing atop a building in Little Italy, but the black and white camerawork, itself a nod to the monochrome beauty of the Italian cinema.  Yet there is a strange melancholy about the scenes of Scorsese, as if he is an omnipresent movie savant - in some quarters he is but unfortunately the scenes can be deemed a bit eerie.

What cannot be mistaken though, is the passion and enthusiasm of Scorsese's thirst to share his joy of these films with the masses.  You can put on retrospectives and write it in books, but sometimes putting yourself on camera makes for a more convincing argument, his empassioned narration further does justice to the debt Scorsese and many of his contemporaries (Coppola especially) owe these Italian masters.

The DVD 'Voyage to Italy' is out on September 26th, and has a recommended RRP of £14.99 from the good people at Mr. Bongo Films