Gustavus Library Movie Guide: Italian, Greek, and Balkan Cinema

"In this comprehensive guide, some of the world's leading scholars consider the issues, films, and filmmakers that have given Italian cinema its enduring appeal. Readers will explore the work of such directors as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto Rossellini as well as a host of subjects including the Italian silent screen, the political influence of Fascism on the movies, lesser known genres such as the giallo (horror film) and Spaghetti Western, and the role of women in the Italian film industry. Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image explores recent developments in cinema studies such as digital performance, the role of media and the Internet, neuroscience in film criticism, and the increased role that immigrants are playing in the nation's cinema." - from the publisher

"While Italian cinema has long been popular with international audiences, a surprising unfamiliarity remains regarding the rich traditions from which its most fascinating moments arose. Directory of World Cinema: Italy aims to offer a wide film and cultural context for Italian cinema’s key aspects, from political radicalism to opera, from the art house to popular cinema. Essays by leading academics about prominent genres, directors, and themes provide insight into the cinema of Italy and are bolstered by reviews of significant titles. From the silent spectacle to the giallo, the spaghetti western to the neorealist masterworks of Rossellini, this book offers a comprehensive historical sweep of Italian cinema that will appeal to film scholars and cinephiles alike." - from the publisher

"The Cinema of Italy, a new addition to the 24 Frames series, looks at the historical and aesthetic connections of some of Italy's most important films with both Italian and Western film culture. Spanning almost a century of film productions and organised chronologically, the volume examines recurring thematic and stylistic features. Together with the crucial lessons of such neorealist masterpieces as Rossellini's Paisan and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, The Cinema of Italy looks at how Italian cinema has dealt - before and since neorealism - with the nation's past and present history (1860, Senso, The Conformist, Lamerica), with the so-called Southern question (Assunta Spina, Salvatore Giuliano, Padre Padrone), as well as with modern configurations of work-life and gender relationships through the films of Olmi, Pasolini, Antonioni, Cavani and Wertmuller. The Cinema of Italy also considers the very personal, but never politically apathetic works of Fellini, Ferreri and Moretti and reserves a special attention to those film-makers (Argento and Leone) whose cinema directly addresses such international film genres as horror and western." - from the publisher

"Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema explores the ferments of Italian cinema from the mid-50s to the end of the 60s, situating its wealth in the context of other national cinemas emerging at the same time. Olmi, Pasolini, Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, the Taviani Brothers, Cavani, Rosi, Ferreri and many others all made their debut or directed their most representative works during the period. The book brings to the surface the lines of experimentation and artistic renewal appearing after the exhaustion of Neorealism, mapping complex areas of interest such as the emergence of ethical concerns, the relationship between ideology and representation, and the role of Italian counter-culture." - from the publisher

"Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude, and brutal honesty." - from Criterion.com

"This neorealist masterpiece by Vittorio De Sica follows an elderly pensioner as he strives to make ends meet during Italy’s postwar economic recovery. Alone except for his dog, Flike, Umberto struggles to maintain his dignity in a city where human kindness seems to have been swallowed up by the forces of modernization. His simple quest to satisfy his basic needs—food, shelter, companionship—makes for one of the most heartbreaking stories ever filmed, and an essential classic of world cinema." - from Criterion.com

"Seeking escape from city bombing, an Italian mother and daughter travel war-torn Italy during World War II trying to survive near-starvation, rape by wandering soldiers and other horrors of war."

"Inspired by Boccaccio's novellas, each episode focuses on sex, love and seduction in Italy in the 1960s, an era of economic growth and major cultural changes." - from IMDb.com

"This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the films that would follow it to form The War Trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member—Rome Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake." - from Criterion.com

"Roberto Rossellini’s follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan, which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, and taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po valley. With its documentary-like visuals and intermingled cast of actors and nonprofessionals, Italians and their American liberators, this look at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances is equal parts charming sentiment and vivid reality. A long-missing treasure of Italian cinema, Paisan is available here in its full original release version." - from Criterion.com

"The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black-market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher. Germany Year Zero is a daring, gut-wrenching look at the consequences of fascism, for society and the individual." - from Criterion.com

"Filmmaking legend Roberto Rossellini brings his passion for realism and unerring eye for the everyday to this portrait of the early years of the reign of France’s “Sun King,” and in the process reinvents the costume drama. The death of chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, the construction of the palace at Versailles, the extravagant meals of the royal court: all are recounted with the same meticulous quotidian detail that Rossellini brought to his contemporary portraits of postwar Italy. The Taking of Power by Louis XIV dares to place a larger-than-life figure at the level of mere mortal." - from Criterion.com

"In this evocative, atmospheric biography, Roberto Rossellini brings to life philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who, amid religious persecution and ignorance, believed in a harmony between God and science." - from Criterion.com

"Roberto Rossellini’s three-part The Age of the Medici is like a Renaissance painting come to life: a portrait of fifteenth-century Florence, ruled by the Medici political dynasty. With a lovely score from composer Manuel de Sica (son of Vittorio), this grand yet intimate work is a storybook conjuring of a way of life and thought." - from Criterion.com

"As profoundly simple as its hero's famous statement "I think, therefore I am," Roberto Rossellini's Cartesius is an intimate, psychological study of obsession and existential crisis." - from Criterion.com

"Inspired by Boccaccio's novellas, each episode focuses on sex, love and seduction in Italy in the 1960s, an era of economic growth and major cultural changes." - from IMDb.com

"Making its long-awaited U.S. home video debut, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is an epic on the grandest possible scale. The film recreates, with nostalgia, drama, and opulence, the tumultuous years of Italy's Risorgimento—when the aristocracy lost its grip and the middle classes rose and formed a unified, democratic Italy. Burt Lancaster stars as the aging prince watching his culture and fortune wane in the face of a new generation, represented by his upstart nephew (Alain Delon) and his beautiful fiancée (Claudia Cardinale). Awarded the Palme d’Or at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, The Leopard translates Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel, and the history it recounts, into a truly cinematic masterpiece." - from Criterion.com

"Based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann, this late-career masterpiece from Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death. A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde, in an exquisitely nuanced performance) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy named Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), his infatuation developing into an obsession even as rumors of a plague spread through the city. Setting Mann’s story of queer desire and bodily decay against the sublime music of Gustav Mahler, Death in Venice is one of cinema’s most exalted literary adaptations, as sensually rich as it is allegorically resonant." - from Criterion.com

"Widely acclaimed as the consummate filmmaker's filmmaker, few post-war figures in world cinema have been as influential as Michelangelo Antonioni on directors and screenwriters coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s. His 1995 Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement marks the long-overdue, official recognition of a fifty-year career of rare talent and innovation. Here, for the first time in English, Antonioni's writings and interviews on cinema are available in a collection which is an homage to its author and a major contribution to the appreciation of his work. The Architecture of Vision is an indispensable tool for understanding the work of a cinematic giant whose investigation of the "crisis" of individuals and groundbreaking use of "visual minimalism" remains unique in contemporary culture."

"In Antonioni: The Poet of Images, Arrowsmith's friend and colleague Ted Perry has brought together and edited eight remarkable essays, all but two never before published, in which the late critic confronts the Antonioni oeuvre through a film-by-film examination of his best known work, from 1956's Il grido, to L'avventura, La notte, Eclipse, Red Desert, Blow-Up, and Zabriskie Point, concluding with 1975's The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. Originally presented as lectures, these seminal essays brilliantly illuminate what these films mean to us, and why. A renowned literary critic and classicist, Arrowsmith traces with matchless clarity the intellectual roots of Antonioni's uncompromising vision. But Arrowsmith also illuminates the more technical and cinematic aspects of Antonioni's work, how the movement of the camera or the use of space enhanced the director's ability to find and create memorable images.In his analysis of a scene in La notte, for instance, Arrowsmith proposes how the composition of shots expresses the meaning. Noting how the actress portraying a nymphomaniac is framed next to expanses of wall, Arrowsmith writes, "What the nymphomaniac wants to shut out is any knowledge of the blank immensity ... that we see exteriorized as she stands against the absolutely clinical white blankness of the wall, her own emptiness projected as the emptiness around her, threatening her.". "When an artist like Antonioni is examined by a critic like Arrowsmith," Ted Perry writes in his memorable introduction, "we see again how art is connected to life, life to death, and both art and life to meaning." Enhanced by an appendix providing a brief synopsis of each of the eight films, and frequent translations of key bits of dialogue crucial to film-goers' understanding, Antonioni: The Poet of Images captures the insight, sensitivity, and intelligence of one of our most distinguished critics, and celebrates the work of one of the world's most innovative film makers. It is essential reading for lovers of cinema and all admirers of Arrowsmith."

"Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the great visual artists of the cinema. The central and distinguishing strength of Antonioni's mature films, Seymour Chatman argues, is narration by a kind of visual minimalism, by an intense concentration on the sheer appearance of things and a rejection of explanatory dialogue. Though traditional audiences have balked at the "opacity" of Antonioni's films, it is precisely their rendered surface that is so eloquent once one learns to read it. Not despite, but through, their silences the films show a deep concern with the motives, perceptions and vicissitudes of the emotional life. This study covers films not dealt with in any other book on the great director, including Il mistero di Obertwald (1980) and Identificazione di una donna (1982), which have not yet been seen in the U.S. Its coverage of the early documentaries and features, when Antonioni was forging his new and original stylistic "language," is especially full. In a free-ranging analysis of the evolution of Antonioni's style that quotes liberally from Antonioni's own highly articulate writings and interviews, Chatman shows how difficult it was for the filmmaker to liberate his art from the conventional means of rendering narrative, especially dialogue, conventional sound effects, and commentative music. From his first efforts to his triumphant achievements in the tetralogy of L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Il deserto rosso, Antonioni's acute sensibility struggled to achieve the mastery that has won him a secure place in film history. Chatman's study is the only complete account of Antonioni's work available in English. Its novel visual approach to the films while attract not only film scholars but also readers interested in painting and architecture--both important elements of Antonioni's work."

"Antonioni is one of the most influential filmmakers of all times, indeed critics revere him as the creator of Modern Cinema. His STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR, aka Cronaca di un Amore, is his first feature film, a Noir thriller with sensual themes of yearning and jealousy. It is considered a masterpiece by Scorsese, among others. Paola (Lucia Bosè) is a strikingly beautiful young woman married to a rich older industrialist who decides to have her past investigated. The detective's enquiry reaches Paola s former lover, Guido, prompting him to seek her after seven years, and they reignite their passion. Antonioni, who defined cool modernism on screen, chronicles the love affair, observing without judgement." - from Amazon.com

"Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative on its own terms, L’avventura concerns the enigmatic disappearance of a young woman during a yachting trip off the coast of Sicily, and the search taken up by her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti, in her breakout role). Antonioni’s controversial international sensation is a gorgeously shot tale of modern ennui and spiritual isolation." - from Criterion.com

"This psychologically acute, visually striking modernist work was director Michelangelo Antonioni’s follow-up to the epochal L’avventura. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau star as a novelist and his frustrated wife, who, over the course of one night, confront their alienation from each other and the achingly empty bourgeois Milan circles in which they travel. Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti smolders as an industrialist’s tempting daughter. Moodily sensual cinematography and subtly expressive performances make La notte an indelible illustration of romantic and social deterioration." - from Criterion.com

"The concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy on contemporary malaise (following L’avventura and La notte), L’eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and drifts into a relationship with another (Alain Delon). Using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for the doomed affair, Antonioni achieves the apotheosis of his style in this return to the theme that preoccupied him the most: the difficulty of connection in an alienating modern world." - from Criterion.com

"Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and Red Desert, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age—about a disaffected woman, brilliantly portrayed by Antonioni muse Monica Vitti, wandering through a bleak industrial landscape beset by power plants and environmental toxins, and tentatively flirting with her husband’s coworker, played by Richard Harris—continues to keep viewers spellbound. With one startling, painterly composition after another—of abandoned fishing cottages, electrical towers, looming docked ships—Red Desert creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age." - from Criterion.com

"In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni transplanted his existentialist ennui to the streets of swinging London for this international sensation, the Italian filmmaker’s first English-language feature. A countercultural masterpiece about the act of seeing and the art of image making, Blow-Up takes the form of a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park. Antonioni’s meticulous aesthetic control and intoxicating color palette breathe life into every frame, and the jazzy sounds of Herbie Hancock, a beautifully evasive performance by Vanessa Redgrave, and a cameo by the Yardbirds make the film a transporting time capsule from a bygone era. Blow-Up is a seductive immersion into creative passion, and a brilliant film by one of cinema’s greatest artists." - from Criterion.com

"Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness. After his wife leaves him, a film director finds himself drawn into affairs with two enigmatic women: at the same time, he searches for the right subject and actress for his next film. This spellbinding antiromance was a late-career coup for the legendary Italian filmmaker, and is renowned for its sexual explicitness and an extended scene on a fog-enshrouded highway that stands with the director’s greatest set pieces." - from Criterion.com

"Before he left his mark on cinema forever with the revolutionary The Battle of Algiers, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo directed this audacious World War II drama about a young Jewish woman (Susan Strasberg) in a Nazi concentration camp, who saves herself from death by assuming another’s identity and becoming a ruthless warden. The Oscar-nominated Kapò was one of the first films to depict the horror of the Holocaust, and it does so with brutality and daring emotional complexity." - from Criterion.com

"One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today." - from Criterion.com

"Forged from the many conversations Charlotte Chandler conducted with director Federico Fellini over the course of fourteen years, and featuring a forward by Billy Wilder, I, Fellini is a portrait of one of Italy's greatest filmmakers in his own words. In the book, Fellini recounts the stories behind his classic films La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, La Strada, and others, describing the inspirations from which they arose and the struggles to get them filmed. He also speaks at length on actors Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, and Anna Magnani, and on directors Roberto Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Antonioni." - from the publisher

"This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of Carl Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering Fellini's entire career, the book links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman, and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neorealist scriptwriter. Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian themes to reveal the director's growth not only as an artistic master of the visual image but also as an astute interpreter of culture and politics. Throughout the book Bondanella draws on a new archive of several dozen manuscripts, obtained from Fellini and his scriptwriters. These previously unexamined documents allow a comprehensive treatment of Fellini's important part in the rise of Italian neorealism and the even more decisive role that he played in the evolution of Italian cinema beyond neorealism in the 1950s. By probing Fellini's recurring themes, Bondanella reinterprets the visual qualities of the director's body of work - and also discloses in the films a critical and intellectual vitality often hidden by Fellini's reputation as a storyteller and entertainer. After the first two chapters dealing with Fellini's precinematic career, the book covers all the films to date in analytical chapters arranged by topic: Fellini and his growth beyond his neorealist apprenticeship, dreams and metacinema, literature and cinema, Fellini and politics, Fellini and the image of women, and La voce della luna and the cinema of poetry."

" A groundbreaking academic treatment of Fellini, provides new, expansive, and diverse perspectives on his films and influence The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini presents new methodologies and fresh insights for encountering, appreciating, and contextualizing the director’s films in the 21st century. A milestone in Fellini scholarship, this volume provides contributions by leading scholars, intellectuals, and filmmakers, as well as insights from collaborators and associates of the Italian director. Scholarly yet readable essays explore the fundamental aspects of Fellini’s works while addressing their contemporary relevance in contexts ranging from politics and the environment to gender, race, and sexual orientation. As the centennial of Federico Fellini’s birth in approaches in 2020, this timely work provides new readings of Fellini’s films and illustrates Fellini’s importance as a filmmaker, artist,and major cultural figure. The text explores topics such as Fellini’s early cinematic experience, recurring themes and patterns in his films, his collaborations and influences, and his unique forms of cinematic expression. In a series of “Short Takes” sections, contributors look at specific films that have particular significance or personal relevance. Destined to become the standard research tool for Fellini studies, this volume: Offers new theoretical frameworks, encounters, critiques, and interpretations of Fellini’s work Discusses Fellini’s creativity outside of filmmaking, such as his graphic art and his Book of Dreams published after his death. Examines Fellini’s influence on artists not only in the English-speaking world but in places such as Turkey, Japan, South Asia, Russia, Cuba, North Africa. Demonstrates the interrelationship between Fellini’s work and visual art, literature, fashion, marketing, and many other dimensions of both popular and high culture. Features personal testimonies from family, friends and associates of Fellini such as Francesca Fabbri Fellini, Gianfranco Angelucci, Valeria Ciangottini, and Lina Wertmüller Includes an extensive appendix of freely accessible archival resources on Fellini’s work The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini is an indispensable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Fellini, Italian cinema, cinema and art history, and all areas of film and media studies."

"With this breakthrough film, Federico Fellini launched both himself and his wife and collaborator Giulietta Masina to international stardom, breaking with the neorealism of his early career in favor of a personal, poetic vision of life as a bittersweet carnival. The infinitely expressive Masina registers both childlike wonder and heartbreaking despair as Gelsomina, loyal companion to the traveling strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn, in a toweringly physical performance), whose callousness and brutality gradually wear down her gentle spirit. Winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, La strada possesses the purity and timeless resonance of a fable and remains one of cinema’s most exquisitely moving visions of humanity struggling to survive in the face of life’s cruelties." - from Criterion.com

"In the fifth of their immortal collaborations, Federico Fellini and the exquisitely expressive Giulietta Masina completed the creation of one of the most indelible characters in all of cinema: Cabiria, an irrepressible, fiercely independent sex worker who, as she moves through the sea of Rome’s humanity, through adversity and heartbreak, must rely on herself—and her own indomitable spirit—to stay standing. Winner of the best actress prize at Cannes for Masina and the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Nights of Cabiria brought the early, neorealist-influenced phase of Fellini’s career to a transcendent close with its sublimely heartbreaking yet hopeful final image, which embodies, perhaps more than any other in the director’s body of work, the blend of the bitter and the sweet that define his vision of the world." - from Criterion.com

"The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight. This mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become."

"Inspired by Boccaccio's novellas, each episode focuses on sex, love and seduction in Italy in the 1960s, an era of economic growth and major cultural changes." - from IMDb.com

"One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ marks the moment when the director’s always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly among flashbacks, dream sequences, and carnivalesque reality, and turning one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life, as he struggles against creative block and helplessly juggles the women in his life—including Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale. An early working title for 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion, and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act." - from Criterion.com

"Federico Fellini’s career achieved new levels of eccentricity and brilliance with this remarkable, controversial, extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, written during the reign of Nero. An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie, Fellini Satyricon follows the exploits of two pansexual young men—the handsome scholar Encolpius and his vulgar, insatiably lusty friend Ascyltus—as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. Creating apparent chaos with exquisite control, Fellini constructs a weird old world that feels like science fiction." - Criterion.com

"Federico Fellini returned to the provincial landscape of his childhood with this carnivalesque reminiscence, recreating his hometown of Rimini in Cinecittà’s studios and rendering its daily life as a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political subterfuge. Sketching a gallery of warmly observed comic caricatures, Fellini affectionately evokes a vanished world haloed with the glow of memory, even as he sends up authority figures representing church and state, satirizing a country stultified by Fascism. Winner of Fellini’s fourth Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Amarcord remains one of the director’s best-loved creations, beautifully weaving together Giuseppe Rottuno’s colorful cinematography, Danilo Donati’s extravagant costumes and sets, and Nino Rota’s nostalgia-tinged score." - from Criterion.com

"The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most controversial European intellectuals of the postwar era, at the center of political and cultural debates still vital to our time. Greene presents Pasolini's films to the English-speaking world in full detail and in a rich critical context, using them to trace the evolution of his ideas and the details of his troubled personal life from 1950, when he settled in Rome, to 1975, the year of his brutal murder, apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute. "In her concise and sympathetic book, Greene intelligently explicates the political and social context within which Pasolini became both a leading figure and a significant heretic. He was an atheist who directed one of the few genuinely profound biblical films in the cinema, a communist who severely criticized many of the radical movements of modern Italy. Though he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, he privately referred to it as his 'sickness.' As the book well documents, Pasolini was not a rebel but rather an authentic heretic who worked in contradiction to both his medium and milieu." - from Choice

"In a prolonged series of interviews Mr. Stack has drawn from Pasolini a wealth of illuminating comments on his career to date." - from the publisher

"Colorized version of Pasolini's film about the life of Jesus Christ using the text of the gospel of Matthew as the basis for the script. The story begins with His birth and illustrates how his teachings attracted not only his disciples, but crowds of believers. When the Pharisees, chief priests and elders learn of Jesus, they conspire to have Him arrested, beaten, tried and crucified on the cross." "A biblical epic that only the Marxist dissident Pier Paolo Pasolini could make, this intensely faithful adaptation of Saint Matthew’s Gospel depicts the life and teachings of Jesus Christ (Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish economics student and Communist activist), whose unwavering compassion for the poor and defiant condemnation of moral hypocrisy make him a perhaps unexpected embodiment of the director’s own worldview. Stunningly shot amid the timeless landscapes of southern Italy and set to a soundtrack that encompasses everything from Bach to Black spirituals, The Gospel According to Matthew cuts past dogma and straight to the core of Jesus’s radical humanism." - from Criterion.com

"ier Paolo Pasolini’s powerfully iconoclastic take on Sophocles’s tragedy blends eras and cultures to create a searing exploration of fate, free will, and the things we fear most in ourselves. Shot amid the stark, elemental landscapes of the Moroccan desert, and set in an indefinable ancient past, this bold reimagining casts the filmmaker’s frequent collaborator Franco Citti as the eponymous foundling, whose willful blindness to his own nature unleashes a cataclysmic reckoning. With a prologue and epilogue set in twentieth-century Italy, Pasolini connects the story to his own upbringing, daring to bare his soul on-screen." - from Criterion.com

"In this hypnotic adaptation of Euripides’s immortal tragedy, Pier Paolo Pasolini casts opera diva Maria Callas (utterly arresting in her only film role) as the sorceress of Greek legend, whose separation from her homeland of Colchis and betrayal by her lover, Jason, lead her down a path of shocking vengeance. Melding Western myth with aesthetic and musical influences from numerous world cultures, Pasolini fashions a mesmerizing cinematic pageant that gathers in force until it explodes in rage and a stunningly nihilistic condemnation of injustice." - from Criterion.com

"The notorious final film from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . It’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy in 1944 remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in." - from Criterion.com

"The Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood) enters the Mexican village of San Miguel in the midst of a power struggle among the three Rojo brothers (Antonio Prieto, Benny Reeves, Sieghardt Rupp) and sheriff John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy). When a regiment of Mexican soldiers bearing gold intended to pay for new weapons is waylaid by the Rojo brothers, the stranger inserts himself into the middle of the long-simmering battle, selling false information to both sides for his own benefit."

"In the Wild West, a murderous outlaw known as El Indio (Gian Maria Volonte) and his gang are terrorizing and robbing the citizens of the region. With a bounty on El Indio's head, two bounty hunters, Monco (Clint Eastwood) and Col. Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), come to collect the prize. Upon their first meeting, the two men view each other as rivals, but they eventually agree to become partners in their mutual pursuit of the vicious criminal."

"In the Southwest during the Civil War, a mysterious stranger, Joe (Clint Eastwood), and a Mexican outlaw, Tuco (Eli Wallach), form an uneasy partnership -- Joe turns in the bandit for the reward money, then rescues him just as he is being hanged. When Joe's shot at the noose goes awry during one escapade, a furious Tuco tries to have him murdered. The men re-team abruptly, however, to beat out a sadistic criminal and the Union army and find $20,000 that a soldier has buried in the desert."

"When young Domenico (Sandro Panseri) ventures from the small village of Meda to Milan in search of employment, he finds himself on the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder in a huge, faceless company. The prospects are daunting, but Domenico finds reason for hope in the fetching Antonietta (Loredana Detto). A tender coming-of-age story and a sharp observation of dehumanizing corporate enterprise, Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto is a touching and hilarious tale of one young man’s stumbling entrance into the perils of modern adulthood." - from Criterion.com

"A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated estate in the province of Bergamo. Filming on an abandoned farm for four months, Olmi adapted neorealist techniques to tell his story, enlisting local people to live as their own ancestors had, speaking in their native dialect on locations with which they were intimately familiar. Through the cycle of seasons, of backbreaking labor, love and marriage, birth and death, faith and superstition, Olmi naturalistically evokes an existence very close to nature, celebrating its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledging the feudal cruelty that governs it. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is intimate in scale but epic in scope—a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking." - from Criterion.com

"The story of a son's development under an oppressive father. Gavino lives in solitude as an illiterate Sardinian shepherd. Finally he revolts against his father and his own illiteracy, studies and earns a degree and finds his identity through his newly-found ability to communicate."

"Depicts the final days of World War II in Italy, seen mostly through the eyes of a six-year-old girl. It is a mythic recollection by the protagonist of life on the run when a group of Italian villagers flee from brutal Nazi occupiers in the summer of 1944."

"The wealthy Recchi family has undergone sweeping changes. Eduardo Sr. has named a successor to the reins of his company, and surprised everyone by splitting power between his son Tancredi and grandson Edo. But Edo had always dreamed of opening a restaurant with his friend Antonio. To make matters worse, the very foundation of the entire family may be totally shattered after Tancredi's wife Emma falls deeply in love with Antonio and begins a passionate love affair."

"It's the summer of 1983 in Italy, and Elio, a precocious 17-year-old, spends his days in his family's villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading and flirting with his friend Marzia. One day, Oliver, a charming American scholar arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio's father, an eminent professor. Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will alter their lives forever."

" Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions, in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio. With its coolly assured style, shocking perversity, and savage gallows humor, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca) was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality, a truly unique work that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema." - from Criterion.com

"Scathing satire of middle-class provincial Italian attitudes toward love and hypocrisy in the 1960s." "Three stories from the man who defined Italian morals in the 1960’s - Pietro Germi (‘Divorce, Italian Style’). Here he takes on the church, the courts, the police and family life, sparing no sacred cow. Ably assisted by screenwriters ‘Age & Scarpelli’ (‘Divorce, Italian Style’, ‘Seduced and Abandoned’) who are often considered the inventors of ‘Commedia Italiana’. Their combined efforts earned them a Grand Prix at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. In the first story, a laughing doctor diagnoses a man with temporary impotence. But it’s his wife who steps in to provide the appropriate treatment. The next, and longest tale, features Virna Lisi as the object of desire. But her married suitor refuses to accept Italian convention and take her as his mistress. Instead, he leaves his wife and children (scandal!) to be with her. Society is outraged! But the picture is at its boldest and most scathing in the final section, when the pillars of local society seduce a girl who turns out to be underage. What will these fine upstanding gentlemen do? Bribe her father to drop the charges, of course!" - from Amazon.com

"Captures the world of the "Casa di Riposa" in Milan, the world's first nursing home for retired opera singers, founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. Featuring Giuseppe Manacchini, Leonida Bellon, Salvatore Locapo, Giovanni Erminio Puligheddu, and Sara Scuderi, its inhabitants are singers many of whom had significant careers on the opera stage, re-living and re-enacting their triumphant roles of the glorious past."

"Little Salvatore, known to all as Toto, is fascinated by the movies and befriended by projectionist Alfredo. Toto becomes Alfredo's apprentice, which nurtures his love for cinema. The Cinema Paradiso is the center of village life, despite the depredations of Father Adelfio, who censors all of the films, indicating where to cut--at every kissing scene--by ringing a small bell. After a fire blinds Alfredo, Toto becomes the projectionist. As Toto grows older, his gaze switches from the flickering images on the screen to pretty classmate, but they are separated when Toto is drafted into the military. Thirty years later Salvatore, now a successful filmmaker in Rome, learns that Alfredo has died. His return to the small Sicilian village of his childhood unleashes a flood of memory, of a love as fleeting as those forbidden, excised kisses."

"In 1930s Italy a bumbling Jewish waiter who's gifted with a colorful imagination and an irresistible sense of humor has won the heart of the woman he loves and has created a beautiful life for his young family. But that life is threatened by World War II."

"A family struggles to go on after a devastating loss. Giovanni (Moretti) is a psychiatrist with a successful practice. He has a warm relationship with his wife, Paola (Morante), and they have a daughter, Irene (Trinca) and a son, Andrea (Sanfelice). The family's calm is shattered when Andrea is unexpectedly killed in an accident. Giovanni finds it impossible to continue with his work, and blames himself for the death, since he was planning to go jogging with Andrea that morning before he was called away for a patient. His wife and daughter tried to keep their emotions in check, but both sink further into anger and grief. And then the appearance of an unexpected visitor forces the family to confront their feelings about Andrea. Arianna (Vigliar) is a girl who had a summer romance with Andrea the year before, and has come to town to pay him a surprise visit, unaware of his recent death."

"The body of a young girl is found on the shores of a northern Italian lake. Sanzio, a middle-aged police officer with family troubles of his own, is put in charge of investigation. He discovers much beneath tranquil appearances in the nearby village."

"Sixteen year old Rocco's two aims in life are to get laid and to see his favorite pop star in concert with his two best friends. When a bullying incident at school forces Rocco to come out to his divorced middle-class parents their liberal leanings are severely tested. Luckily his two friends stand by him and join him in running away from home (in his parents stolen car) to see their favorite singer in concert, followed hot on their heels by his neurotic mother and eccentric gran."

"During a carefree summer, two 12-year old boys face the transition from childhood to adolescence, as they look for new adventures and life experiences when their previous games become boring."

"Samuele is twelve years old and lives on an island in the middle of the sea. He goes to school, and loves shooting his slingshot and going hunting. He likes land games, even though everything around him speaks of the sea and the men, women, and children who try to cross it to get to his island. But his is not an island like the others, its name is Lampedusa and it is the most symbolic border of Europe, crossed by thousands of migrants in the last twenty years in search of freedom."

"Adapted from the first book in Elena Ferrante's acclaimed 'Neapolitan Novels,' Season 1 of this drama series follows Elena Greco, a now-elderly woman who discovers the most important friend in her life, Raffaella 'Lila' Cerullo, has disappeared. An author immersed in a house full of books, Elena starts writing the story of her and Lila's tempestuous friendship." - from HBO.com

"Romulus and Remus are two shepherds and loyal brothers who are destined to found the greatest empire the world has ever seen--but only one can rule. The journey to greatness is paved with blood and the fate of the chosen one lies in the hands of their brother."

"Zorba the Greek (Greek: Αλέξης Ζορμπάς, Alexis Zorbas) is a 1964 comedy-drama film written, produced, edited, and directed by Greek Cypriot filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis. It stars Anthony Quinn as Zorba, an earthy and boisterous Cretan peasant, and Alan Bates as the buttoned-up young intellectual he befriends. The cast also includes Lila Kedrova, Irene Papas, and Sotiris Moustakas. The musical score was composed by Mikis Theodorakis. The film is based on the 1946 novel The Life And Times Of Alexis Zorba by Nikos Kazantzakis." - from Wikipedia

"Set in Russia at the turn of the century, "The Cherry Orchard" chronicles a noblewoman's return to her family estate after a five-year absence to escape troubling memories her son's death. Lyubov Ranevskaya (Charlotte Rampling) arrives home to find the cherry orchard in full bloom, but the finances of the estate on the verge of ruin. Lyubov and her brother, Gaev (Alan Bates), find themselves scrambling to retain a vision of gentility amidst a climate of huge social and economic transition." Adapted from the Chekhov play.

"In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obligated to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into animals and sent off into The Woods."

"Steven, a charismatic surgeon, is forced to make an unthinkable sacrifice after his life starts to fall apart, when the behavior of a teenage boy he has taken under his wing turns sinister."

"Early eighteenth-century England is at war with the French. A frail Queen Anne occupies the throne, and her friend Lady Sarah tends to her ill health. When a new servant Abigail arrives, Sarah takes her under her wing, and Abigail sees a chance at a return to her aristocratic roots. As the politics of war become time-consuming for Sarah, Abigail steps in to fill in as the Queen's companion. Their growing friendship gives her a chance to fulfill her ambitions, and no one will stand in her way."

"Lysistrata is an Athenian woman disgusted by the way men have ruined the country with their endless wars. Rallying the other women, she proposes they impose an embargo on sexual relations with their men as long as the war lasts. This "sex strike," reluctantly agreed to and not always enthusiastically observed, finally brings the men to their knees."

"A dying writer (Bruno Ganz), trying to finish the works of a 19th-century poet, rescues a kidnapped child about to be sold."

"Set during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, 11-year-old Misha is travelling from Russia to live with his mother in Athens in the home of an elderly Greek man she works for. When he learns this man is actually his new father, Misha runs away but doesn’t have the stomach for life on the streets. Returning to his new home, he clings to the stories he grew up with, melding them with reality to create a dark urban fairytale."

"Tito’s break-up with Stalin in 1948 marked the beginning of dangerous years for many hard-core Yugoslav communists. A remark about a newspaper cartoon puts Mesha in prison and his family is forced to cope with the situation and await his release from prison." - from MUBI.com

"Time of the Gypsies (Serbo-Croatian: Дом за вешање, Dom za vešanje, lit. 'Home for Hanging') is a 1988 Yugoslav coming-of-age fantasy crime drama directed by Emir Kusturica. Filmed in Romani and Serbo-Croatian, Time of the Gypsies tells the story of a young Romani man with magical powers who is tricked into engaging in petty crime. It is widely considered to be one of Kusturica's best films. The film was recorded in Sarajevo, Skopje and Milan, by the Forum Sarajevo. The film was selected as the Yugoslav entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 62nd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. The film revolves around Perhan, a Romani teenager with telekinetic powers and his passage from childhood to adulthood which starts in a little village in Yugoslavia and ends in the criminal underworld of Milan." - from Wikipedia

"Black marketeers Marko (Miki Manojlovic) and Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) manufacture and sell weapons to the Communist resistance in WWII Belgrade, living the good life along the way. Marko's surreal duplicity propels him up the ranks of the Communist Party, and he eventually abandons Blacky and steals his girlfriend. After a lengthy stay in a below-ground shelter, the couple reemerges during the Yugoslavian Civil War of the 1990s as Marko realizes that the situation is ripe for exploitation."

"Tomislav is a former Partizan who continues his struggle after the war as a dedicated member of Tito's secret police. He meets and falls in love with a ballet dancer from a bourgeois family. His love affair with the class enemy and his slow adaptation to the post-war realities could seal his doom." - from IMDb.com

"Battle of Kosovo (Serbo-Croatian: Бој на Косову, Boj na Kosovu) is a 1989 Yugoslav historical drama/war film filmed in Serbia. The film was based on the drama written by poet Ljubomir Simović. It depicts the historical Battle of Kosovo between Medieval Serbia and the Ottoman Empire which took place on 15 June 1389 (according to the Julian calendar, 28 June 1389 by the Gregorian calendar) in a field about 5 kilometers northwest of Pristina. Serbian Duke Lazar in 1389 refuses to obey the Turk Sultan Murat who intends on invading Serbia with an army in order to conquer Europe. Although aware that he is weaker, without enough men, Duke Lazar decides to fight him anyway. The Serbian Lords are not united. Most of them want to fight, even at the cost of defeat, but some of them do not. Everyone fit for battle is sent to Kosovo. The battle of Kosovo in 1389 ended with no winners - with both armies defeated and both Lazar and Murat dead. The Turks would proceed to invade Serbia but were hindered from taking over the rest of Europe."

"Ten-year-old Zoran (Dimitrije Vojnov) leads a cramped life in 1950s Yugoslavia with his mother, Majka (Anica Dobra), his father, Otac (Predrag Manojlovic), and several other guests huddled in a small living space. To escape, Zoran eats prodigiously and worships Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (Voja Brajovic), so much so that he wants to know all about the man. Zoran gets to go on a guided historical tour of Yugoslavia, and he then learns that his hero might not be the great man he imagined."

"Told in three parts, a mysterious incident in the Macedonian mountains blows out of proportion, eventually threatening a full-blown civil war. A silent young monk offers protection to an ethnic Albanian girl who is suspected of murder. A London photojournalist who is pregnant, needs to deal with her estranged husband and desires a permanence with her lover. Her lover is a prize-winning Macedonian photographer, just back from Bosnia, finds himself changed by the violence. Linked by events and explores the uncompromising nature of war." "Milcho Manchevski's acclaimed Before the Rain is considered 'one of the greatest debut feature films in the history of cinema (Annette Insdorf) and 'one of the most important films of the decade' (Ann Kibbey). The New York Times included it in its Guide to the Best 1,000 Films Ever Made list." - from Wikipedia

"Milan (Dragan Bjelogric), a Serb, and Halil (Nikola Pejakovic), a Muslim, grew up as best friends in an idyllic rural village, where they often passed an unused tunnel that they thought contained a monster. But when, years later, war comes, they find themselves on opposing sides of a horrific, inhumane conflict. Milan's troop ends up trapped in a newly built tunnel, surrounded by enemy soldiers. One by one they recount their experiences, and one by one they're wounded or killed."

"On a harsh winter night in Belgrade, Serbia, an ex-con working as a taxi driver (Nebojsa Glogovac) has a series of bizarre encounters with tragic passengers from all walks of life, each a part of a patchwork of stories. Elsewhere, Ana (Mirjana Jokovic) survives a bus hijacking, only to find herself caught between a drug dealer and an angry boyfriend. And on the other side of town, passionate showman Boris (Nikola Ristanovski) struggles to entertain a tough crowd in a smoky cabaret."

"Soft boys by day, kings by night. The film follows a group of young Bulgarian Roma who come to Vienna looking for freedom and a quick buck. They sell their bodies as if that’s all they had. What comforts them, so far from home, is the feeling of being together. But the nights are long and unpredictable." - AustrianFilms.com