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NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2001 (PART II) Send This Review to a Friend
Of all the films that I saw at the 39th New York Film Festival, the one that gave me the most pleasure was Martin Scorsese's "IL MIO VIGAGGIO IN ITALIA, the renowned director's passionate exploration of the Italian films that helped shape his outlook and his art. With Scorsese assembling a trove of wonderful clips and commenting along the way, seeing the four-hour film is like taking a university course in cinema. Although I come from a totally different background than Scorsese, who grew up in New York's Little Italy, many of the films that he highlights also shaped my appreciation for cinema when I first became aware of foreign films as opposed to the Hollywood films of my childhood.
Scorsese invites us into his life by describing his home, his neighborhood and his early association with Italian movies on the small television set in his home. He remembers a steady diet of Italian films at certain hours in the early age of TV when the urgent need for product led to the showing of more foreign language movies than are televised today.
At a press conference after the media screening, Scorsese said: "I wanted to focus on each film and what it meant to me and why."
And so he does. We see pieces of Roberto Rosselini's "Paisan" and "Open City;" Vittorio De Sica's "Shoeshine," "The Bicycle Thief," "Umberto D," and "The Gold of Naples;" Federico Fellini's "I Vitelloni," "La Dolce Vita" and "81/2," and Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Aventura" and "Eclipse." We see the great stars, DeSica when he was a matinee idol as an actor, Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani (in one of the great scenes of "Open City") and Claudia Cardinale. There is a particularly interesting segment from Rossellini's underrated "Voyage to Italy," starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders.
Scorsese's passion for cinema pulsates througout his informative narration, which packs the film with both emotion and insight. The selections do the rest, as we journey through the various films, the clips beautifully restored, and long to see each film in its entirety. Scorsese's long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker remarked at the press conference that working on this film was a "fantastic experience," and added "I'm grateful to Marty because I got to live with these films for years." "Il Mio Viaggo in Italia" is to be distributed commercially by Miramax.
In its commitment to respect for past works, the Festival also revived THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, which was directed by Charles Laughton, who showed great promise as a filmmaker but only directed this one. Originally released in 1955, it stars Robert Mitchum in a villainous role, as well as Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. Mitchum is both menacing and strangely amusing as a traveling preacher with warped ideas and the capacity to kill. The work was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and on the occasion of its showing at the Festival Martin Scorsese received the Award for Preservation from the International Federation of Film Archives.
The Festival also featured various sidebars, including an HBO Films Public Forum with the subject of "Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate."
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