La Terra Trema (Visconti, 1948): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8pm
This presentation, also screening on May 26th, is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.
Time Out review:
Luchino Visconti's second feature (five years after Ossessione in 1942)
was an improvised drama produced by the Communist Party, filmed with and
among Sicilian fishermen in the village of Aci-Trezza. An
overwhelmingly stark chronicle of a family which strives but fails to
break out of the poverty trap - they try to cut out the middlemen by
embarking in what one might call 'free enterprise', with disastrous
results - La Terra Trema‚ stands as a masterpiece of neo-realism,
a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and means. Yet, despite
this, it's no less 'operatic' than the director's later decadent
melodramas: it surges with great tides of emotion. The film is
distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'.
(Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, it may be noted, served as
assistant directors.) Visconti only finished the film by selling some of
his mother's jewellery and an apartment in Rome. Yet, true to his
breeding, he brought home one of the boys from the film and installed
him as his butler.
Tom Charity
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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