Three Brothers opens to an oddly sterile medium shot of a building wall (made even colder and more impersonal by the black and white photography) as the amplified sound of a heartbeat discordantly accompanies an elegiac melody, before a jarring chromatic shift focuses the camera in extreme close-up at the center of a littered, derelict […]
In 1935, a distinguished artist and intellectual turned escorted political prisoner from Turin named Carlo Levi (Gian Maria Volonté) arrives at the railroad terminal station at Eboli for further transportation – first by a series of public buses, then by a waiting automobile dispatched by the regional mayor Don Luigi (Paolo Bonacelli) – into the […]
Perhaps Francesco Rosi’s most pointed and incisive social examination of the widespread instability, scandal, injustice, and corruption of (then) contemporary postwar politics, Exquisite Corpses opens to the image of a somber, elderly judge named Varga (Charles Vanel) as he walks pensively through the catacombs of a church, observing in painstaking detail the recesses and contours […]
Voyage in Italy opens to a shot of a reserved British couple, Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) traveling in silence down a long, empty, narrow road on the Italian countryside. They are awaiting the sale of an inherited villa in Naples, and have decided to seize the occasion and spend undivided time […]
In an upscale district of Rome, a cosmopolitan American socialite named Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman) hurries home with her pet in tow and is greeted by the concierge with the inconvenient news that the elevator is again out of service. It is a perfunctory irritation for the carefree and sophisticated expatriate whose pressing engagement is […]
In the midst of a torrential rain, Brother Francis of Assisi (Brother Nazario Gerardi) in the province of Umbria and his disciples arrive at their outpost in the rural village of Rivo Torto to seek shelter from the inclement weather, only to be driven away by a trespassing peasant who, along with his donkey, have […]