Scorsese's Italian Trip

I'm terrible with long movies, escpecially if they're on DVD and I have the option to watch whenever I please. I can watch a long movie in a theatre, no problem; well, maybe "no problem" is pushing it, as I spent the last half-hour of Yi-Yi trying to mentally communicate the message to please, please, please stop. But in a theater I can at least prepare myself for the long haul. If I have a DVD of say Tarkovsky's 204-minute Andrei Rublev, i'll do anything not to watch it.

Documentaries by Martin Scorsese are a different matter, especially if they focus on his love for Italian cinema. About ten years ago, he made this four-hour-plus documentary called My Voyage to Italy, and damn if I didn't sit there transfixed through the whole thing.

To his credit, Scorsese doesn't try to give an entire history of the industry. Rather, he makes it personal in the very best sense of the word, recalling how he first saw these films on a black and white television as a boy growing up in New York, where Italian cinema revealed his heritage to him and his family. (The family footage he uses here, reminiscent of the opening credits of Mean Streets, is extraordinary, as are the director's own boyhood drawings of posters of the movies he dreamed of making.)

He focuses mainly on five key directors -- Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Fellini and Antonioni -- and what their work has meant to him. It's overlong at points, as Scorsese uses film clips to tell the entire plot and then some of every Italian movie he has ever loved, but he also blends in a lot of sharp analysis about style, camera movement and meaning. Like any good critic, he has an infectious enthusiasm: he makes you want to see these movies, again or for the first time.

Of particular interest: Visconti's Senso and Rosselini's Voyage to Italy, both of which look perfectly stunning.

Scorsese also hit some very important points, I thought, such as the way film enthusiasts are divided between Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's L'Avventura, two films about the same thing -- the soullessness of the early 1960s Eurotrash class -- that couldn't be more different in style or execution. (Both, I might add, are two long films I've managed to get through many times.)

Fellini's great film hits this world from every angle, telling something like (if I remember correctly, because I once counted) seven main stories, with six connective ones between them. It's a film about fakery, about masks -- they appear all the way through it -- and how, with the main character, Marcello, the mask ultimately absorbs the personality.

Where Fellini's film was loud, noisy, intensely visual, Antonioni's was comparatively cool and restrained, and tackled the very idea of narrative form itself. Like Psycho, which came out around the same time, it has one of the most distinct story arcs in history, taking a ninety degree turn early on.

It begins with a group of wealthy young pals on a voyage; when they stop at an island, one girl goes missing. They can't find her. She could be dead, she could have disappeared, she could have fled the scene altogether, no one knows. Over the rest of the film, her boyfriend and best friend look for her, and then fall in love themselves. The story of the search fades completely -- the adventure of the title is their advernture together, and our adventure in watching it, in trying to figure out where this unpredictable journey will lead. It's a movie with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that wanders completely off course. We never find out about the missing girl; she vanished. What matters isn't that she vanished, but what her vanishing causes, what it creates, the chain of events it sets into motion, reflecting along the way on a society where people live somewhat by comfort and impulse.

I think you could almost make the point that both movies are latter-day extensions of Renoir's Rules of the Game, the original Eurotrash masterpiece.

I remember both Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann extolled Antonioni's over Fellini's, and ever since then it's been seen as the hipper, more with-it, more intellectual of the two choices; Fellini's great film is seen as flashy by contrast.

Anyway, this was just one aspect of Scorsese's documentary, which I watched more or less is one ass-fatiguing sitting, with only occasional breaks to smoke or piss.

It was like being at an Italian meal with the director where I never wanted to leave, and I very often found myself talking back to the screen, saying "Oh yes, the Bicycle Thief is great," and and "Wow, how come I've never seen that? Tell me more..."