Vittorio De Sica – Neo-Realism, Melodrama, Fantasy
June 5 – June 14 at the Harvard Film Archive
The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center for the Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
617-495-4700
http://hcl.harvard.edu
Tickets are $9 General Admission, $7 Seniors and Students
The Films
Shoeshine (Sciuscia)
Saturday June 5 at 7pm
Sunday June 6 at 9pm
De Sica’s heart-wrenching portrait of two impoverished shoeshine boys uses the ever-present Allied soldiers and bombed ruins as a constant reminder of the still reverberating devastation of war. De Sica and Zavattini’s interest in symbols and, increasingly, fantasy, is legible in the figure of the horse that becomes the boys’ sole source of happiness and, almost simultaneously, despair. Rarely screened today, Shoeshine stands with Bunuel’s Los Olviadados as one the great films about children.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Rinaldo Smordoni, Franco Interlenghi, Anniello Mele
Italy 1946, 35mm, b/w, 93 min. Italian with English subtitles
The Gold of Naples (L’oro di Napoli)
Saturday June 5 at 9pm
In this delightful episodic comedy about Naples, De Sica pays tribute to the city where he spent his childhood. Loosely structured around four short vignettes and featuring some of Italian cinema’s biggest stars – including De Sica as an upper-class gambler - this anthology showcases the lyric beauty of Naples and De Sica’s evident love for its people and places while subtly plumbing the depths of the human heart.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Totò, Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano
Italy 1954, 35mm, b/w, 107 min. Italian with English subtitles
The Children Are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano)
Sunday June 6 at 7pm
A searing portrayal of familial disintegration vividly told from the perspective of a five-year-old abandoned by his mother, De Sica’s proto-neorealist masterpiece foregrounds a thematic concern that recurs throughout his oeuvre – the troubled distance between children and adults as an echo of a dysfunctional society destabilized by fascism and war. As a vital witness to the callousness and ingratitude pervasive throughout society, the young boy’s struggle to ascribe moral values to the world offers both an indictment and an ambiguous vision of hope.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Luciano De Ambrosis, Isa Pola, Emilio Cigoli
Italy 1943, 35mm, b/w, 85 min. Italian with English subtitles
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Monday June 7 at 7pm
The story of a wealthy Jewish family willfully shut off from the rest of the world and in reckless denial of fascism’s hold on the Italian people, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is narrated by Giorgio, a frequent guest of the family and the only one who foresees the impending and unstoppable forces that will shatter their cloistered world. Combining luminous flashbacks with the present, the film’s structure resembles De Sica’s own comeback: the once great director who was written off in the 1960’s re-emerges out of the past with this late, luxuriant masterpiece.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Dominique Sanda, Lino Capolicchio, Helmut Berger
Italy 1970, 35mm, color, 93 min. Italian with English subtitles
Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano)
Friday June 11 at 7pm
Sunday June 13 at 9pm
An off-beat and entrancing entry in De Sica’s neorealist canon, Miracle in Milan is an extraordinary fable that bends towards magic realism to imagine a place where society’s most downtrodden can find purchase and possible escape from misery. Set within a fantastically theatrical shantytown, Miracle in Milan constructs an alternate world from De Sica and Zavattini’s fascination with marginalized perspectives. One of De Sica’s unsung masterpieces, Miracle in Milan’s unusual use of deliberate artifice and spectacle rekindles the Meliesian, magical aura of early cinema.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Emma Gramatica, Francesco Golisano, Paolo Stoppa
Italy 1951, 35mm, 96 min. Italian with English subtitles
Terminal Station (Stazione termini)
Friday June 11 at 9pm
Following a fraught collaboration, producer David O. Selznick – without De Sica’s knowledge or consent – re-edited their film and released his bowdlerized version as Indiscretion of an American Wife. De Sica’s version – his last true neorealist work – stars Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones, as a married American whose attempt to end an affair with an Italian academic occurs in real time in the eponymous station. Delicately portraying the vulnerability of the lovers, Terminal Station sensitively explores the powerful pull of desire and the conflict between personal happiness and familial duty.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift, Gino Cervi
US/Italy 1953, 35mm, b/w, 90 min.
Umberto D.
Saturday June 12 at 7pm
A powerful diary of loneliness and old age written by the palsied hand of slow suffering, Umberto D tells the story of an elderly man struggling for dignity and survival in a society indifferent to the needs of its frailest members. Cruelly marginalized and eventually forced onto the streets, with only his dog for companionship, Umberto is victim to an impersonal, uncaring state and a petty, hardhearted society. With minimal dialogue and a small cast of nonprofessionals, De Sica uses Carlo Battisti’s devastating performance as Umberto, the atmospheric streets of Rome and G.R. Aldo’s brilliantly crepuscular cinematography to etch an emotionally resonant portrait of societal breakdown as a quiet yet terrifyingly absolute disintegration.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari
Italy 1952, 35mm, b/w, 89 min. Italian with English subtitles
After the Fox (Caccia alla volpe)
Saturday June 12 at 9pm
De Sica’s late comedy shines with a witty screenplay co-written by Neil Simon and a playful film-within-a-film structure with a hilarious Peter Sellers at its center. Although seemingly an unlikely project for De Sica, After the Fox returned to his roots in sophisticated comedy, where he is able to cleverly manipulate milieu and story – a band of thieves smuggling gold from Cairo – into a biting satire of a fluttering, superficial world of disguises and postures. With a wickedly funny turn by Victor Mature as an aging, egotistical actor and its affectionate skewering of narcissistic directors – including De Sica himself in a cameo – After the Fox is a biting repart to the decadence of the 1960s Italian film industry.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Victor Mature
Italy 1966, 35mm, color, 103 min.
The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette)
Sunday June 13 at 7pm
De Sica’s best known film and a foundational work of the neorealist movement, The Bicycle Thieves uses nonprofessional actors and incredible location shooting on the streets of a war-ravaged Rome to tell the gripping story of a downtrodden man whose quest to reclaim a stolen bicycle sends him on a spellbinding tour through the city’s working class neighborhoods with his young yet wise son. A heartbreaking work of redemption and hope in the face of overwhelming despair, The Bicycle Thieves is a richly insightful examination of the human condition.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
Italy 1948, 35mm, b/w, 87 min. Italian with English subtitles
Two Women (La Ciociara)
Monday June 14 at 7pm
A heartbreaking story of survival during WWII, a preternaturally beautiful Sophia Loren stars as a young widow returning to her native village, fleeing Rome and the Allied bombings with her teenage daughter. An operatic and devastatingly intense story of family ties and societal hypocrisy, Two Women is one of the greatest film melodramas of all time. When the small town proves no safer than the city, both mother and daughter must reach far deeper into the well of human suffering than seemingly imaginable.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleonora Brown
Italy 1960, 35mm, b/w, 105 min. Italian with English subtitles
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