hobbit | good news bad news

the good news
was that Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth, was lined up to direct The Hobbit.

the bad news
came out May 30, when del Toro announced he would not be directing The Hobbit, "expressing concern about MGM's financial situation. He left days later. Since the expectation is that somehow the film would get financed despite MGM's woes, speculation was that perhaps del Toro didn't see himself and his family living in New Zealand for the next several years required to make the films."

the good news
"Peter Jackson has decided to direct two installments of The Hobbit, after Jackson extricates himself from other project obligations. Jackson said he expected to get the films into theaters for December 2012 and December, 2013. Jackson has been a creative partner with del Toro from the beginning. The films will use the soundstages and visual effects facilities that Jackson built with proceeds from the LOTR proceeds. Pending a deal, the next step will be to discuss whether or not to shoot the films in 3D."

the qualm
hoping for more Fellowship and Return, not so much Towers. Dwarf-tossing and skate-boarding warriors we don't need.

Source: Deadline New York
Thanks, Peter

Watching for... THE GREAT DIVORCE

For Pacific Theatre's next season, I hoped to stage The Silver Chair, but because a film version is in the works, the rights weren't available. But we did secure permission to produce The Great Divorce. Maybe we were just in time...

painting by Neil Dassler, from his "Great Divorce" series

Producers wed for 'Divorce' fantasy
Mpower, Beloved to adapt C.S. Lewis novel
By DAVE MCNARY
Variety, June 22 2010

Mpower Pictures ("The Stoning of Soraya M.") and Beloved Pictures are teaming to co-produce C.S. Lewis' fantasy novel "The Great Divorce." Veteran producer and Mpower CEO Steve McEveety will lead the production team. Childrens' book author N.D. Wilson ("Leepike Ridge," "100 Cupboards") is attached to write.

Lewis, who wrote the "Chronicles of Narnia" books and often wove Christian themes into his works, published "The Great Divorce" in 1945. Story centers on a man who learns that the sprawling, dim metropolis where he's been living is actually Hell; he hops on a bus headed for the outskirts of Elsewhere, only to discover that the one place worse than Hell, for a self-absorbed ad executive, just might be Heaven.

Mpower was created by McEveety in 2007 after he'd been a longtime exec at Mel Gibson's Icon Prods. He produced "The Passion of the Christ" and "We Were Soldiers" and exec produced "Braveheart" and "What Women Want." . . . Mpower recently completed the live action family film "Snowmen," which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and stars Ray Liotta and Christopher Lloyd. Other projects include romantic comedy "Hello, I Love You" by director Sunu Gonera ("Pride"); a film based on Adam Ciralsky's article "Scandal Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy"; Joe Eszterhas' "Guadalupe"; and "Left to Tell" by Immaculee Ilibagiza.

Thanks, Mr Chattaway

Peter Chattaway on the Toy Stories

Toy Story movies in dog years

Pixar and its toys come full circle

Toy Story 3 and its place in Pixar's legacy

Watching for... HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS

Peter Chattaway, filmchat: "Eagle Eye co-writer Travis Adam Wright has been hired to write the script for Warner Brothers' adaptation of Here, There Be Dragons, a novel that casts real-life authors C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams as heroes in a fantasy adventure of their own. When I first mentioned this project nearly four years ago, it was going to be produced by Harry Potter producer David Heyman and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer, but the only producer named in the current news story is Rick Porras, a co-producer and second-unit director on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptation (2001-2003)."

Mike Dacko, "Lightheaded"

A Peter Chattaway recommendation from the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival

Brody on Rossellini

Malcolm Brody has a notable film blog at The New Yorker. In this recent post, he considers GERMANY YEAR ZERO from Rossellini's war trilogy...

“Germany Year Zero” is part of Criterion’s boxed set featuring Rossellini’s “War Trilogy,” which I recently reviewed in the magazine; I also reviewed two other Rossellini sets last year. But there’s one, a natural to compile, that doesn’t exist, and its absence from home video is perhaps the single most grievous cinematic blind spot in the marketplace: the five features and one short film that he made with Ingrid Bergman (whom he married in the course of their collaborations), between 1949 and 1955.

Exactly. No sooner had I ordered my copy of the War Trilogy than I began wishing Criterion would come out with Stromboli, Europa '51 and Voyage To Italy - the Rossellini films (apart from Rome, Open City and Paisan) that I've always been most eager to see. Someday...

There've been a couple other previous Soul Food posts on Rossellini, one concerning the War Trilogy that includes some nice links, James Quandt's notes on the Cinematheque Ontario's retrospective, and a transcription of Martin Scorsese's comments in his tribute to Italian film My Voyage To Italy - which is available, along with the War Trilogy and Flowers Of St Francis, at Videomatica

Happy Birthday, Kurosawa-san

Over at Filmwell, Andrew Spitznas posted a nice tribute for Kurosawa's 100th birthday.

The formative event in his own childhood occurred when, in the immediate aftermath of the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, his older brother dragged him around Tokyo and forced him to gaze upon massive scenes of death and conflagration. As young Akira attempted to turn away from the carnage, his brother sternly told him, “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.” These words became a lifelong motto for Kurosawa, as he pushed himself and his audiences to stare directly at human wrongs and tragedies, whether war, poverty, child abuse, or class discrimination.

Nonetheless, Kurosawa succeeded (most of the time, anyway) in representing moral dilemmas to his audience, rather than preaching about them. In viewing his films, I feel moved to become a better person. . . .

Now Playing! PLEASE GIVE

A few years back, much fuss - mostly deserved - was made over THE LIVES OF OTHERS, and everybody saw it. (Perhaps because of the irresistable Austrian-ness of the tyro director's handle -- Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Yes, I think that's why.) The only pity was that the mob response to that pretty darn fine foreign film completely overshadowed an even finer foreign film playing at precisely the same time, AFTER THE WEDDING. I never understood how one made it into everybody's datebook, while the other slipped past uncelebrated.

If you haven't seen WEDDING, you ought to. Screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen seems to be Denmark's most prolific: he's got Dogme credits, and his outrageous ADAM'S APPLES is an all-time favourite. A frequent collaborator with director Susanne Bier and actor Mads Mikkelsen, both of whose work on the picture in question is marvellous.

All of which is a long way of getting to the point of this post. The essential concern of AFTER THE WEDDING was philanthropy. (How many charity flicks can you name? It's something I think about a great deal, but it doesn't make it into a lot of fiction. Odd. I guess people find car chases more relevant to their personal lives.) PLEASE GIVE takes up similar themes, if on a smaller scale. And sounds like a film not to miss. Here are excerpts from David Denby's May 3 New Yorker write-up.

From scene to scene, PLEASE GIVE, a radiant comedy of middle-class mores, depends on observations so acute that the movie, even as it borders on satire, is intensely sympathetic. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Lovely & Amazing, Friends With Money) is a virtuoso of awkward domestic scenes in which conversation goes absurdly awry. Bu she's ambitious too, and among the deftly launched jokes, PLEASE GIVE explores such large and grave matters as the nature of benevolence and the exhausting but inescapable necessity of family loyalty. . . . A finely wrought short story, all but perfect. l l l
A New Yorker by birth, she spent time as a teenager on Woody Allen's sets. (Her stepfather, the late Charles Joffe, was Allen's longtime producer.) In PLEASE GIVE, she inhabits a slightly downscale version of Allen's worried and self-conscious Manhattan. . . .

Kate and Rebecca, a set of paired characters, act as if they were always living under scrutiny. Holofcener's touch with these two glum urban saints is gently comic: Rebecca Hall just slightly parodies this wallflower's need to always be good. Her Rebecca is not quite as forlornly conscience-stricken, however, as Kate, who can't walk down the street without slipping five bucks to a homeless person. Kate's philanthropy is underoing a frenzied crisis. Oblivious to everything but her own guilt, she begins helping people who don't need help. . . .

Not much happens: a couple of love affairs, one trivial, one perhaps serious; some moments of pleasure. . . The trouble with life-goes-on movies is that they don't electrify the senses. This one doesn't, either, but it does stimulate moral imagination. . .

. . . funny, irresistibly convincing and appealing.

PLEASE GIVE is at Tinseltown - a nifty double bill with this year's Exotic Lingo Oscar nabber, THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES, which is also at the Fifth Avenue

Jan Kiesser

A couple years ago, Pacific Theatre did a themed season, "PT Goes To The Movies." It featured a special "Stage & Screen" evening for each of the shows, and my special guest for some of those was cinematographer Jan Kiesser. He just put up a website where you can view clips his work on some of the 83 films he's shot. Check it out here.

Amazing to think the same guy lensed Fido, Beowulf & Grendel, and the action sequences in The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift (which are all shown on the site) - not to mention work on 80 other films including Heaven's Gate, Hair, Some Kind Of Wonderful, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Clean and Sober, the notable Door To Door, Martin Scorsese's Kundun, and Jason Goode's Pop Switch. His latest is Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

Easter Double Feature: Last Temptation / Passion

The Conversations (at Slant.com) is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects. This month, an extended, detailed and really substantial consideration of two Jesus movies...

Jason Bellamy: I never followed the amateur filmmaking documentary series Project Greenlight, which was perhaps best known for having celebrity producers (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) and for failing to discover any major breakthrough talents, but I'll never forget one of the episodes I happened to see. It was early in its third and final season, by which point Project Greenlight had expanded its diamond-in-the-rough search to be a contest not just for amateur screenwriters, but also amateur directors. In the episode in question I took delight in the method chosen to evaluate their pool of director nominees: All contestants were given identical screenplays offering nothing more than dialogue. No descriptions of settings. No descriptions of characters. No descriptions of action. Just words to be spoken. From that skeleton it was on the directors to dream up the rest, fill in the blanks and shoot a film. All these years later, I can't remember anything about the dialogue, but I do remember that the interpretations were wildly diverse—one had a mob theme while another was set in a dentist's office, as I recall. Same source material. Same words. Different films.

That brings us to this month's edition of The Conversations, in which we will discuss Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a pair of films that are remarkably and unmistakably different despite the numerous things they have in common. . . . When it comes to the life of Jesus, so much of the Bible is like those Project Greenlight scripts: dialogue on a page. No descriptions of settings. No descriptions of characters. No descriptions of action. Just words to be spoken.

. . .

It's only fitting that a devout worshiper of cinema such as Scorsese would use film not just as a way to reveal his own feelings about Christianity but as a way to explore them. And, as such, Last Temptation feels like two quests—that of Jesus Christ and that of Martin Scorsese.

And yet the more I continue along these lines of thinking, the less dismissive I become about the substantiality of THE PASSION. Is the film as complex? No. Is it as provocative? No. Is it as conflicted? Heavens, no. But is it personal? Well, I think so, yes. And is it "engaged with matters of spirituality?" Why, certainly. . . .

The conversation continues here

Fifty Best Living Directors | Paste Magazine

Paste Magazine
The Fifty Best Living Directors

1. Martin Scorsese | Raging Bull
2. Jean-Luc Godard | Breathless
3. Steven Spielberg | Schindler's List
4. Joel & Ethan Coen | Fargo (probably right, but I'd pick Blood Simple)
5. Steven Soderbergh | Traffic


6. Paul Thomas Anderson | Magnolia
7. Woody Allen | Annie Hall (bizarrely, I'd pick Take The Money and Run)
8. Quentin Tarantino | Pulp Fiction
9. David Lynch | Mulholland Dr.
10. Wong Kar-Wai | In The Mood For Love
11. Wes Anderson | Rushmore (Fantastic Mr. Fox)
12. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne | L'Enfant (The Son)
13. Werner Herzog | Grizzly Man (Aguirre, The Wrath Of God)
14. Francis Ford Coppola | The Godfather


15. Lars von Trier | Breaking The Waves (Dogville)
16. Hou Hsiao-Hsien | Hao nan hao nu [Good Men, Good Women]
17. David Fincher | Fight Club
18. Abbas Kiarostami | Taste Of Cherry (Close-Up)
19. Clint Eastwood | Mystic River (Unforgiven)
20. Hayao Miyazaki | Princess Mononoke
21. Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Syndromes and a Century
22. Agnes Varda | Vagabond
23. David Cronenberg | A History of Violence
24. Tim Burton | Edward Scissorhands
25. Wim Wenders | Wings Of Desire


26. Jim Jarmusch | Ghost Dog (good call!!)
27. Terry Gilliam | Brazil
28. Claire Denis | Chocolat
29. Christopher Nolan | The Dark Knight (Memento)
30. Danny Boyle | Slumdog Millionaire (Trainspotting)
31. Chris Marker | Sans Soleil
32. Michael Haneke | Cache (White Ribbon)
33. Alain Resnais | Hiroshima Mon Amour
34. Gus Van Sant | Good Will Hunting


35. Ridley Scott | Blade Runner (probably, but my peculiar fave: Matchstick Men)
36. Richard Linklater | Before Sunset (near miss: Before Sunrise)
37. Pedro Almodovar | Talk To Her
38. Spike Lee | Do The Right Thing
39. Jacques Rivette | La belle Noiseuse
40. Guillermo Del Toro | Pan's Labyrinth
41. James Cameron | Avatar
42. Jane Campion | The Piano


43. Terrence Malick | Days Of Heaven
44. Cameron Crowe | Almost Famous (Say Anything)
45. Sofia Coppola | Lost In Translation
46. John Sayles | Lone Star (near miss: should be Men With Guns)
47. Jim Sheridan | My Left Foot
48. Errol Morris | The Fog Of War (Thin Blue Line)
49. Charles Burnett | Killer Of Sheep
50. Mel Brooks | Blazing Saddles


And these are the most significant imissions pointed out by readers, along with my pick of their Crowning Achievement . . .
Todd Haynes | Far From Heaven
Roman Polanski | Chinatown
Peter Jackson | The Lord Of The Rings
Alexander Payne | About Schmidt

And I'd add . . .
John Lassetter | Up

(boldface = my top picks, brackets = my preferred films)

steven soderbergh | oscar acceptance speech, 2001

“I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think the world would be unlivable without art.”

New Yorker cover | best picture nominees

Videomaticademy Awards!

Foxes are Fantastic and Prawns are Prime

at Videomatica.ca's 11th Alternative Oscars

While Hollywood was busy showcasing lengthy acceptance speeches and well-dressed actors at its annual Oscars, the Videomaticademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was equally occupied chasing foxes and celebrating prawns at the conclusion of its Canada-wide Alternative Oscars Contest.

Hosted by Videomatica.ca, the Canadian destination for independent and alternative films, the 11th edition of the Alternative OscarsÒ Contest boasted an 11-category ballot of 2009's most overlooked and underappreciated films and performers, and invited Canadian movie fans to choose for their favourites.

• In the battle for Best Picture, the stop-motion animation of Fantastic Mr. Fox trumped science fiction, political satire, musical documentaries, and real-life romance. Fantastic filmmaker Wes Anderson didn't win the award for Best Director, which went to Neill lomkamp, who won for being the architect of the space alien "prawns" in District 9.

• One of the aforementioned prawns, Christopher the "Prawn" from District 9, won the coveted Best Non-Human Actor Award. In a field that also included creatures ranging from tigers and iguanas to robots and animated dobermans, Christopher made short work of them all and struck a chord with the voting members of the Videomatica.ca Alternative OscarsÒ who crave emotional depth and honest character development from their non-human performers. Where human actors were concerned, Matt Damon (The Informant) and Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) topped the votes in the Best Actor Maleand Best Actor Female categories, respectively.

• Like Melanie Laurent, this year's most resounding winner was also a "basterd". Christoph Waltz waltzed away with the Best Villain award for his chilling turn as Col. Hans Landra Best Villain, collecting a hefty 45% of the vote on his way to victory. One of Waltz's fellow nominees was Lorna Raver, the crazed gypsy in Drag Me to Hell, a film nominated in this year's newest Alternative OscarsÒ category, Scariest Picture. In the end, the unseen forces ofParanormal Activity proved to be scary enough for voters to emerge victorious.

• So what was the closest race in the Alternative Oscars this year? The infamous Worst Picture showdown, which saw Steve Martin's bumbling remake sequel, Pink Panther 2 overtake the poorly-conceived shenanigans of Robin Williams and John Travolta in Old Dogs by a single vote. One vote wouldn't have made a difference in the Best Canadian Picture category, where the Joshua Jackson-led drama, One Week, tugged at the necessary heartstrings to shine through as a true winner.

For a complete wrap-up of the contest, please visit www.videomatica.ca/alternativeoscars

A complete list of winners and nominees follows...

THE COMPLETE LIST OF WINNERS AND NOMINEES

BEST PICTURE
Bright Star
Fantastic Mr. Fox (winner)
In the Loop
Michael Jackson's This Is It
Moon

BEST DIRECTOR
Wes Anderson – Fantastic Mr. Fox
Neill Blomkamp - District 9 (winner)
Tom Ford - A Single Man
Terry Gilliam - The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Duncan Jones - Moon

BEST ACTOR (MALE)
Nicolas Cage – Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Matt Damon - The Informant (winner)
Paul Giamatti - Cold Souls
Christian McKay - Me and Orson Welles
Sam Rockwell - Moon

BEST ACTOR (FEMALE)
Abbie Cornish - Bright Star
Sasha Grey - The Girlfriend Experience
Melanie Laurent - Inglourious Basterds (winner)
Tilda Swinton - Julia
Robin Wright Penn - The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (MALE)
Robert Duvall - The Road (winner)
Ken Jeong - The Hangover
Bill Murray - Zombieland
Liev Schreiber - Taking Woodstock
Kevin Spacey - The Men Who Stare At Goats

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (FEMALE)
Mariah Carey - Precious
Claire Danes - Me and Orson Welles
Maggie Gyllenhaal - Away We Go
Helen Mirren - State of Play
Julianne Moore - A Single Man (winner)

BEST NON-HUMAN ACTOR
Alpha the Doberman – Up
Christopher the Prawn – District 9 (winner)
GERTY the Robot - Moon
The Iguanas - Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Mike Tyson's Tiger - The Hangover

BEST VILLAIN
Michael Gambon as Franklin Bean – Fantastic Mr. Fox
Mo'Nique as Mary – Precious
Lorna Raver as Sylvia Ganush – Drag Me to Hell
Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landra – Inglourious Basterds (winner)
Greedy Corporations – Capitalism: A Love Story

BEST CANADIAN PICTURE
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Coopers' Camera
Facing Ali
The Necessities of Life
One Week (winner)

SCARIEST PICTURE
Dead Snow
Drag Me to Hell
The Haunting in Connecticut
Paranormal Activity (winner)
Thirst

WORST PICTURE
Angels & Demons
Couples Retreat
Old Dogs
The Pink Panther 2 (winner)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

GENTLEMEN BRONCOS "a work of visionary inspiration with religious overtones"?!

New Yorker's Richard Brody is rare among film critics in finding things to praise about GENTLEMEN BRONCOS, the third film from Mormon film maker Jared Hess (NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, NACHO LIBRE).

One of the most audacious American movies of 2009, Jared Hess’s “Gentlemen Broncos” (on DVD from Fox) — a loopy comedy that blends frumpy down-market vulgarity with excremental humor and cartoonish, yet astonishingly simple and clever, action sequences — is hardly the type to attract Oscar consideration. Yet it’s a work of visionary inspiration that, like many outrageous Hollywood comedies of the classic era (such as those of Frank Tashlin), tackles remarkably serious matters.

The story of the home-schooled teen-ager Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), the only child of a poor widow (Jennifer Coolidge) in a pious Christian community in Saltair, Utah, is rife with religious overtones. An aspiring science-fiction writer, Benjamin goes to a teen-writers’ conference, where he meets his idol, the fantasy novelist Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), to whom he shows a manuscript, which Chevalier soon appropriates, transforms, and passes off as his own. Meanwhile, two other kids in the program, Lonnie (Héctor Jiménez) and Tabitha (Halley Feiffer), buy the story from Benjamin under false pretenses and turn it into a smarmy home video; the young writer—with the help of his so-called guardian angel, Dusty (Mike White)—fights to reclaim and restore his novel.

Hess, a Brigham Young graduate who has worked in the Mormon film industry, daringly sets Benjamin’s naïve yet heroic visions in three sets of images—the gaudy, lubricious ones that Chevalier imagines; Lonnie’s travesty; and, most astonishingly, the fierce yet devout ones that Benjamin sees in his mind’s eye. Set in a future outer-space post-apocalyptic desert, his tale, “Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years,” blends whiz-bang weaponry with Rocky Mountain fauna and an adolescent obsession with reproductive organs and bodily fluids. Its hero resembles Benjamin’s late father, as well as the poster-size portrait of the long-haired, bearded Jesus that hangs in the family’s living room. The struggle against a diabolical intergalactic warlord involves physical degradation, projectile vomiting, and other grotesque bodily functions. In his jejune yet highly moral inspiration, Benjamin is the prophet of a pop-infused Gospel, an updated Book of Mormon, that speaks to a new generation of young people whose coarsened sensibility is paradoxically attuned to Biblical explicitness and ferocity. Hess’s vision is both childish and childlike, yet from the mouths of babes oft comes wisdom—as well as things that need to be wiped up.

Brody noted the spiritual concerns of BRONCOS last fall, at The New Yorker's film blog The Front Row

"Point by point, Manohla Dargis’s review of Jared Hess’s Gentlemen Broncos (2009) misses what’s going on. She and I were among the few writers who praised Hess’s previous film, Nacho Libre (2006). . . . She saw the film almost exclusively in terms of gender politics, praising its 'liberating vision of identity as a performance space, an existential wrestling ring, if you will, in which each of us, if only given the opportunity, can cavort freely in the mask and colored tights of our choosing.' Fine, but not a word about religion. . . ."

Where Dargas sees only "a gross-out comedy," Brody calls Gentlemen Broncos "a strange and personal religious vision," its central character "the author of a new gospel," and director Hess’s filming of his visions "wondrously ingenuous, . . . both as sublime and as crudely carnal as scripture itself."

He goes on to connect the writer-director of Napoleon Dynamite (2004) with another auteur whose work finds the sacred in the profane. "The grotesque bodily functions, human, animal, and alien, that the movie depicts unflinchingly—as well as the “unpleasant, unattractive characters” Dargis says the film is filled with—are the point. It’s easy to present the beautiful people and the scrubbed world as divine creations; Hess’s vision sacralizes what other filmmakers don’t. The director he’s closest to in this regard is Pier Paolo Pasolini (and Pasolini, too, had an extraordinary sense of the naïve, the repellent, and the ridiculous)."

It strikes me that a less lofty point of comparison might be Kevin Smith (CLERKS, whose sensibility similarly pairs an eternally adolescent preoccupation with crudity and a not-so-crude preoccupation with eternity - Smith a Catholic, Hess a Latter Day Saint.

In case Brody sets Soul Food expectations too high, here's the prevailing critical opinion, represented by EW's Lisa Schwartzbaum: "As they did in Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, the Hesses claim to celebrate the amusing qualities of misshapen people and their misshapen dreams, insisting that amateurism and bad taste (both in filmmaking and in life) are intentional artistic choices. The audience may have bought the act in Napoleon Dynamite. But this time, the act bombs.The one saving grace of such a relentlessly unappealing movie may be that the emperor's-new-clothes moment has arrived: Bad taste is sometimes just a vice, and amateurism in filmmaking is no virtue."

All three Hess films available at Videomatica

Richard Brody on LORNA'S SILENCE

In LORNA'S SILENCE (Sony), the Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, shooting on location in Liège, use symbolic and theatrical elements to transcend practical naturalism. Arta Dobroshi stars as an Albanian immigrant for whom gangsters have arranged a paid marriage with Claudy (Jérémie Renier), a drug addict, in order to make her a Belgian citizen. They plan to kill him off so that she can, in turn, marry a Russian immigrant—and her silence costs Claudy his life. With recurring shots of locks and keys, the Dardennes suggest the fear and exclusion that suffuse the prosperous West and Lorna herself, and the story builds to a terrifying episode of Shakespearean madness that, with its implications of the supernatural, dramatizes, against the coldhearted demands of reason, the resistance of moral conscience.

The New Yorker, February 15 & 22, 2010

Available at Videomatica

A&F 100: 2010 Edition!

In 2004, 2005 and 2006 the Arts & Faith conversation board created a list of 100 "spiritually significant" films. Last year the site joined forces with IMAGE Journal, which is to my mind the finest publication available on, well, arts and faith. Jointly, A&F and IMAGE today published the fourth iteration of the list, and it's well worth exploring.


This year the "spiritually significant" descriptor was removed from the list, and as a result there's been an increase in films which might not at first glance seem to be of particular "soul food" interest - a drift toward just-plain-great movies, the "Sight & Sound" effect. But for every PLAYTIME or KILLER OF SHEEP added to the list, you'll find any number of exciting new additions that still fit with the list's original intent - A SERIOUS MAN, INTO GREAT SILENCE, L'ENFANT and LORNA'S SILENCE, THE ISLAND (OSTROV), SILENT LIGHT, THE NEW WORLD, USHPIZIN and (an extreme personal favourite) SON OF MAN.


More to follow, whenever your faithful correspondent can spring some time to dig a little deeper, but for the meantime check out the list itself at A&F, Jeffrey Overstreets initial thoughts posted at the IMAGE Journal blog, "Good Letters," and ongoing commentary at Filmwell. And here's a rundown of all the films previously included on the list, from 2004 to 2006.

Mar 12-14 | City of Angels Film Festival | Los Angeles

Nice line-up at this year's City Of Angels Fest in L.A. Not mentioned in the note below: Lourdes (Jessica Hausner), Seraphine (Martin Provost), and 1040 (Evan Jackson Leong)

WELCOME TO THE 16TH ANNUAL CITY OF THE ANGELS FILM FESTIVAL

We are highlighting nine cinematic gems. Plenty of fresh, original and sparkling films are being produced. But with film distribution in turmoil, it is even tougher to find them. The City of the Angels is thrilled to present the most original and inspiring independent films of 2009. These 'buried treasures' will surprise and delight cinephiles.

That Evening Sun invites us to slow down, to sit on the porch, to observe life as it unfolds.

Still Walking takes us inside a Japanese home, where the rhythms of life are interrupted.

Summer Hours explores a family reunion in France, wrestling with legacies and inheritances. What are people, places, and things worth?

Goodbye Solo invites us to reexamine our values. Why should we live? A Senegalese cab driver provides a vibrant answer.

Burma VJ takes us to the streets of Rangoon, where a democratic uprising challenges an oppressive government. It demonstrates the power of citizen journalists to tell the real story.

After the Storm takes us inside St. Mark's community center, eager to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. This backstage musical provides hope and healing for teens in transition.

What a privilege to champion such inspiring stories. These cinematic treasures will ignite your passion for art, justice, and reconciliation.

Join us at the Directors Guild for a vital conversation, March 12-14, 2010.

Craig Detweiler & Eugene Suen

Watching for... THE END TIME (UK, Norman Stone)

Norman Stone is a well-thought-of director with a ton of BBC Film credits, whose work includes the first screen version of SHADOWLANDS (preferred by many C.S. Lewis fans over the Anthony Hopkins big screen version, but I'm not so sure: it's definitely closer to the facts, and apparently to the spirit of the man, but I also found it a touch bland and dreary) and MAN DANCIN' (1995), a real Soul Food candidate about a man released from prison who is cast in a church Passion play in an inner-city parish.

Exclusive: Jeremy Irons to star in new film about St Columba
Mike Merritt, Sunday Mail

Oscar winner Jeremy Irons is to star in a major new movie about the saint who brought Christianity to Scotland. The film on the life of St Columba by SHADOWLANDS director Norman Stone will be shot either in Northern Ireland or the west of Scotland. . . .
Stone: ""I see Columba as a man of incredible faith, integrity and strength - but at times flawed. He struggled with hunger for power. He was cunning, brave and an independent spirit which sometimes he found difficult to fit into his holy orders. But he was a gifted man who changed the religious and social map of Scotland and Britain. He was not a saintly saint and this film will be more of a character study and a political thriller than a Christian epic. Columba will not wear a halo."
The movie will be shot either in the spring or autumn of 2010, with screening six months later.

Scorsese on Rossellini

(Originally posted November 27 2006, reposted with swell vintage poster images to celebrate the release of the new Criterion release of Rossellini's WAR TRILOGY - already available at Videomatica, as are THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS and Scorsese's documentary). And don't miss Mike Hertenstein's write-up at Filmwell.)

Martin Scorsese's MY VOYAGE TO ITALY is a journey through the Italian films which have shaped the director's work. Here's a transcription of what Scorsese had to say about Rossellini and his work.


PAISAN is made up of six episodes that follow the Allied army, the Americans and the British, as they pushed their way up the boot of Italy from south to north, driving the Germans out. The episodes that had the biggest impact on us as we watched the picture were the ones that were about sacrifice. These sacrifices were for something that I guess I really didn't understand at the time, at such a young age. They were for freedom.

In the Naples episode of PAISAN, I saw something that really shocked me. I realized that if my family had never left Italy, I could have been one of those kids up there on the screen, reduced to stealing shoes, selling them on the black market, even sort of casually buying and selling the right to rob American soldiers. These kids were already so toughened up by war and what came after it that they learned every trick in the book. Like this one, right here: to create a panic to get their soldier, their victim, away from the competition. …

PAISAN was no fantasy. Especially this Naples episode. Like this scene, where the kid takes the drunken soldier (his name is Joe) into a puppet show to get him out of sight, to hide him from the other kids. Joe's having a good time, but once he realizes that the crowd is cheering on the story of a white knight beating a Moorish knight, a black knight, it triggers something in him. It's just a little too close to the prejudice he has to live with every day back home. …

The places looked real. They didn't look like sets. … These films were part of an explosion called Neo-Realism which was shaking up film-goers all over the world. The climax of the Naples episode was the most disturbing thing about it. A few days later, after Joe has sobered up, he spots the kid in the street and he wants his shoes back. … ("Take me to your home!") They drive all the way to the outskirts of Naples. The kid gives Joe any old pair of boots. His own boots, of course, are long gone. The boy take shim to the place he now calls home. … where the victims of Allied bombing raids wound up after their homes were destroyed. Now Joe's seen a lot, but he's never seen anything like this. Neither had I. ("Where's your mother and father?" "My mom and dad aren't here anymore. They are dead. The bombs. Boom!") …

In this version – the American release version, the only version I've ever seen – they used a map to introduce each episode. The Sicilian episode is the first one in the movie, and for my family, it was obviously the most important. … (the story is described) … When the Americans come back, they find Joe's body and they assume that he was murdered by Carmella. They don't know that she's dead too, shot by the Germans and dumped off the side of a cliff. They'll never understand that she sacrificed her life to save theirs. But we do.

Every movie is the product of its own time, but the neo-realist movies were much much more than that. After neo-realism, nothing would ever be the same again. …

If you ever have any doubt about the power of movies to effect change in the world, to interact with life and fortify the soul, then study the example of neo-realism. … They needed to dissolve the barrier between documentary and fiction, and in the process, they permanently changed the rules of movie making. Altogether, these movies amounted to a prayer: that the rest of the world look closely at the Italian people and see their essential humanity. That's why they had to be truthful. There was no choice. … For the first time, illusion took a back seat to reality. (The Bicycle Thief) … Beyond everything else, neo-realism came to exist out of a moral and a spiritual necessity.


In a way, you could say that neo-realism began with Roberto Rossellini. He was born in Rome in 1906. His father built and owned the first modern movie theatre in Rome. And when he was young he started going to the movies there every day. Of the many films he saw, two films by the American director King Vidor – THE CROWD and HALLELUJAH – seemed to be especially meaningful for him. It's not surprising: they're both great movies, landmarks in fact, and they've been meaningful for many filmmakers, including myself.

Rossellini's father died when he as 26, so he was forced to do something he'd never done before – get a job. That's when he turned to film. He started off doing sound effects, editing and dubbing, and he was drawn to the documentary form right from the beginning.…

During the occupation, Rossellini was already starting to envision a whole new kind of movie.…


"It's a story of a priest. the one who was executed by the fascists." The picture Rossellini was talking about, when it was finally finished, was called ROMA CITTA APERTA. Here in America, it was called OPEN CITY. ("Look, priest. Look! Are you satisfied? This represents your Christian chrity, your love for the fellow man. You can't save your accomplices. You'll end up a traitor. We'll destroy you all. All! Right to the last one!" / "You haven't spoken.") If it can be said that neo-realism began with one film, it would have to be OPEN CITY. …

With OPEN CITY and PAISAN, he had as great an influence on the cinema as Griffith or Eisenstein. Everybody seems to agree about that. But apart from those early milestones, his work isn't widely known. And a lot of the people who do know the later films don't appreciate them.

Take VOYAGE TO ITALY, made in 1953, which is one of my favorites. Now, I first saw it when I was a film student, and I was kind of prepared for it. So my first reaction was immediate and emotional. But over the years I've found that other people didn't always share my feelings about the picture. Like many of Rossellini's films, it's not instantly accessible. But if you give yourself to the film, if you spend time with it, you find it can be a rich, moving experience. I think the reality is that Rossellini was one of the few filmmakers who actually became more adventurous as he got older, and that's rare. His work from the fifties, sixties and seventies is as impassioned as his neo-realist films. It's just different…

Like Orson Welles with CITIZEN KANE, Rossellini came to resent OPEN CITY. Which isn't very surprising when you think about it. You're in the middle of your career, and everytime you make a new film it's compared and measured against something you did way back at the beginning. And your new work comes up short. This can be very very frustrating, even infuriating. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that OPEN CITY is a one of a kind film, where history and cinema met to create something uniquely powerful. OPEN CITY became a worldwide success, a phenomenon really…. At the time, Life magazine wrote that "the film helped Italy to regain that nobility it had lost under Mussolini." That's not the kind of thing you usually read about a movie. In a way, OPEN CITY became the new Italy's ambassador to the world.

It's a film about ordinary people – a priest, a pregnant woman, a group of Communist resistance fighters, a few kids – who all become heroes under extraordinary circumstances. It's also a film about occupation and its price, whereas PAISAN is a film about liberation and its price.


Some critics and historians consider PAISAN's final episode set in the Po Valley to be the purest form of neo-realism. Stripped of all dramatic artifice, things simply happen, and we're drawn further and further into the hopeless situation of some truly courageous people. Fellini, who was one of the assistants on PAISAN, said that Rossellini didn't want to be tied to a script. He was in search of something that he could only get by leaving himself open to every possibility. Some partisans and American and English soldiers are completely cut off in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Germans. They find out that they won't be getting any support from the Allies. They get so hungry that they are forced out into the open. … The American soldier finds a way of repaying the family for their kindness. The family prepares a meal for the men, polenta and eels. It seems pretty simple: fishing for the eels, picking them out, and then killing them, right in full view of the camera. Just an act of everyday brutality. And it's also a way of preparing us for what's about to happen. The family has been compromised by their own hospitatlity, and the Germans slaughter them.

Fellini said that Rossellini seemed to know exactly what he wanted during the shooting of this episode. He was driven to find a new way of telling a story on film, where nothing is artistically embellished or enhanced. Everything seems to be simply unfolding, as in life. For me, this clarity of vision has an almost religious impact. As the French film critic Andre Bazin said, Rossellini was simply directing the facts. … (End of PAISAN)


(Cut to: "This movie, filmed in Berlin in the summer of 1947, aims to be the true and objective witness of a great city now mostly destroyed, where three and a half million people tried to survive a miserable existence.") In 1947, Rossellini went to Berlin to make a film called GERMANY YEAR ZERO, the last third of what became his postwar trilogy. It's about a young boy named Edmund who's trying to grow up in a world that's been completely decimated by war. Edmund has nothing, and nothing to look forward to. In this world of corruption and never-ending horror, the only rule is survival. All the conflicting forces around him drive Edmund to do something unthinkable: kill his own ailing father, who has lost the will to go on. In his mind, it's an act of mercy, but once he's done it, there's nothing left for him but despair. Compared to the early films, GERMANY YEAR ZERO feels a little detached. But I think that Rossellini needed to stay detached because he is presenting us with a truly terrible reality here. Try to imagine what it was like in Germany after the war, after their entire culture had self-destructed. What would it be like to be an innocent in a guilty world? For me, GERMANY YEAR ZERO is a film of real compassion. Edmund's death is a lonely sacrifice, just like Carmella's. in fact, sacrifice is what links the three films in the trilogy. I think that Rossellini was pleading with the nations of post-war Europe to find some sympathy and tolerance for their former enemy so that they could all go on together. I don't think anyone else had the courage to make a movie like this in 1947.

Rossellini followed GERMANY YEAR ZERO with something different, a sort of tale called THE MIRACLE. Federico Fellini wrote the story, and this is Fellini himself right here, playing a drifter. THE MIRACLE is a vehicle for Anna Magnani – in fact, it's unthinkable without her. She plays a shepherdess, a woman of limited intelligence but infinite faith. ("Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Why are you leaving? Please don't go. May I talk to you? How beautiful. Beautiful saint of mine. I am so happy. What a joy. You make me want to die, and that's that. Then you can take me to heaven with you. To the contemplation of God.") THE MIRACLE is about the question of faith, and it's a running theme in Rossellini's work at this time. I think he was trying to ask the question, "How can faith survive world war two and the horrors of the Holocaust?"

("…Know what they always tell me? Crazy people can't go to heaven. …") She has convinced herself that he's Saint Joseph. But he's no saint, and he makes the most of the situation. ("This is heaven. It's heaven on earth. The crazy woman received grace. I feel sick.") She's slow to realize what's actually happened to her. Once she does, she believes that she's going to give birth to the baby Jesus. ("It's the grace of God." "Yeah, grace. You wish!") The homeless people she stays with throw her out. The people in town have absolutely no sympathy for her whatsoever. To them she's just a fool. Everybody has a good laugh over the "miracle" that's about to happen. But then there really is a miracle. A child is born. The miracle is life.

THE MIRACLE seems like such a simple film, but it's very special because without calling attention to it, Rossellini's communicating something very elemental about the nature of sin. It's part of who we are, and it can never be eliminated. For him, Christianity is meaningless if it can't accept sin and allow for redemption. He tried to show us that this woman's sin, like her madness, is nothing in comparison to her humanity.

It's odd to remember that this film was the cause of one of the greatest scandals in American movie history. When THE MIRACLE opened at the Paris Theatre in Manhattan, Cardinal Spellman who was the cardinal of New York at the time, and the Legion of Decency – that was the Catholic watchdog organization – called the movie "a blasphemous parody" and they mounted a campaign to have it pulled from the theatres. Josephy Burstyn, the film's US distributor, took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. And on May 26, 1952, the court decided in his favor. They held that movies were entitled to the same freedom of speech as the press, and they completely struck down the idea of blasphemy as grounds for censorship. Now, I've run into plenty of my own problems with censorship, so I know from personal experience what a landmark decision this was.


THE MIRACLE caused a scandal, but it was nothing compared to what happened a year later with STROMBOLI. STROMBOLI was the first Italian film I ever saw on a big screen in a theatre. Even at the age of seven you could feel the scdandalous air around the movie. You could almost taste it right there in the theatre. Of course, I'd overheard my parents talking privately about the details. Rossellini and his star Ingrid Bergman had had an affair, and then a child out of wedlock. Today it doesn't seem like a very big thing, but it was back then. They were condemned throughout America, and not just by the church this time – they were actually condemned on the floor of the American senate.

Just like THE MIRACLE, STROMBOLI was centred around one woman and her story. This was a problem for critics who felt that Rossellini had drifted too far from pure neo-realism.

The fact that the woman was played by Ingrid Bergman, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, only made matters worse. Rossellini had betrayed the movement that he'd helped to invent. Actually he was growing and changing as an artist, but people got very angry with him. And so he really got it from both sides of the Atlantic with STROMBOLI. Of course now, fifty years later, the controversy and the criticism are gone, and we can look at the movie on its own terms.

In the film Ingrid Bergman is a Lithuanian war refugee named Karin. She's stuck in an Italian displaced persons camp, and she can't go back to her own country because she's been romantically involved with a German soldier. Her visa applications for Argentina is denied, Italy won't take her, so she has no place to go. One of the Italian POWs, who’s a Sicilian fishermen, gives her a way out. [He marries her] But then she sees where they'll be living: Stromboli, an isolated island off the coast of Sicily. And she realizes she's just walked into a whole different kind of prison. Rossellini once described Karin like this: “This woman has undergone the trials of war. She comes out of it bruised and hardened, no longer knowing what human feeling is.”

Every morning her husband goes out to sea with the other fishermen. [They cross themselves]. One day she wonders down to the shore and a man comes by, and he shows her how they look for fish. Even though things start innocently, this happens in full view of the Islanders and for them of course it's unthinkable, it's unpardonable. She has no idea that she's disgraced her husband – remember, this is a very small, closed society. They are locked on this island. In this world, when you lose your respect as a man, it's a real tragedy.

She becomes so desperate that she'll do absolutely anything to get off this island, so she pays a visit to the local priest who offers to help her and her husband emigrate. But she wants to make sure he's going to help. Watching this scene, as young as I was, I could tell just by the body language that something truly forbidden was being played out. [“You are the one man who can give me comfort.” /” I am no more than the parish priest of a community of fishermen…. I am a priest and I can only assist you during confession or in prayer. … what I feel for you is a deep feeling of pity. May the Lord guide you. Compose yourself. Meditate, think.”].

The tuna catching scene is the center of the whole movie. The heart of it. You're slowly drawn into what really is the core of existence for these people: the praying, the waiting. It’s as if the camera had been there thousands of years ago to record an ancient ritual of food gathering long before history was ever written, when it was still something that was passed down from one generation to the next. It's about the sanctity of eating as a communal act and gathering food with the people you know. The food is sacred, a gift from God. The scene is actually quite long. It builds slowly, like a piece of music. [Huge fish are loaded into the boats, and the fishermen pray “Jesus and Mary, thank you. Please protect us.” Husband: “Did you like the fishing?” “No, it was horrible. I don’t feel well. … I believe I’m pregnant.”]

When the volcano threatens to erupt, the Islanders go out in their boats and wait it out. For them, this is normal. But for Karen, she's reached her limit and she can't take it anymore. The only way left to get off the island is to actually walk over the volcano to get to a boat on the other side. Because of Ingrid Bergman's presence in the film, STROMBOLI was produced by RKO, which was owned at that time by Howard Hughes, who really didn't know what to do with the picture. So he cut 25 minutes and inserted a voiceover at the end tying up all the loose ends and reassuring us that Karen returns to her husband. But in Rossellini's version, it's open ended.

What happens to Karen at the volcano? Rossellini once said the important thing was to find out if this woman could still cry. But it's more than that. [Stars. Karen wakes.] Here's a woman who’s undergone a series of horrible trials, and who now has a baby growing inside of her. At the edge of the volcano she wakes up to a new spiritual reality. [“Oh god.”] It doesn't matter whether she goes back to her husband: this is a film about her journey, a journey that many of us may have gone through at different times in our lives… [“What mystery.”] Suffering, acceptance, transcendence.[“What beauty.”] And finally, peace.

GERMANY YEAR ZERO is about the loss, or the absence, of faith. STROMBOLI is about one woman's discovery of faith. And then Rossellini made a film about having faith, the embracing of faith. With Pasolini he adapted “The Flowers Of Saiint Francis,” a book that was written in the 14th century. In the aftermath of world tragedy, Saint Francis is example of unconditional love for every living thing.

I've never seen the life of a saint treated on film with so little solemnity. And so much warmth. FLOWERS OF SAINT FRANCIS was shot in early 1950 in the mountains around Rome. Rossellini used real monks to play all the principal roles. The film consists of a series of episodes in the lives of Saint Francis and his fellow brothers. These episodes play like little parables. But this Saint Francis is just the opposite of the somber saints with halos that were used to seeing in other movies. Rossellini made a film about a human being, but a human being, who is struggling to be good. Francis is alive to the beauty of all living things, including fire.

The faith shared between Francis and his brothers is so great that there's room for all kinds of eccentric behavior. In this scene, the brothers are saying goodbye to Francis and going off for the day to preach. Brother a juniper is very upset: he's disappointed that he's the one that's gotten stuck with the job of staying behind to make the meals while everybody else goes up to preach. So he comes up with what he thinks is a terrific scheme. He takes all the food that is meant to last for two weeks, throws it into an enormous pot, and put and cooks it up all at once, thinking this is going to free them up to code and start preaching. The old man, who is the newest and most enthusiastic, and I must say least intelligent of the brothers, is no help – especially when he starts throwing the firewood into the pot, not into the fire where it should go. It's a calamity.

This saint: he lives and breathes, he suffers cold and hunger, and from time to time he feels overwhelmed by the suffering of other people. For me the most beautiful scene in the picture is the one in which Francis meets a leper. I'm not sure I've ever seen another film that portrays the reality of compassion with such eloquence: the terror of compassion, of contact that direct.

In the end, the monks realize that they'll have to split up: it's the only way to spread their beliefs, each one venturing out on his own and performing simple acts of compassion. I've always loved the way they decided which direction to take.

Francis: we have arrived, my brothers. It is time to separate. From now on, each
of us will go alone to preach to the world.
Father, which way should we go?
We'll follow God's will.
How do we know what's his will?
Spin on the
spot where your feet are planted, like kids do while playing. Don't stop until
you are dizzy. [The monks spin and fall down.] Brother, which direction were you
facing when you fell down?
Facing sienna, just like me.
And you,
Bernardo?
Facing Florence.
And you, Ginepro?
Facing Arezzo.
And
you, Elia?
Facing Pisa.
And you, Ruffino?
Facing Spoleto.
And
you, Egidio?
Facing Foligno.
And you, Giovanni? Facing where?
Facing
over at that bird on the tree.
Then follow that bird, because that's the way
God wills you to go. Now go brothers. Travel all around the world, and preach
for peace.

What would happen if Saint Francis were alive in postwar Europe, where everyone was desperate to forget the war and return to normal. Would he be recognized as a saint or would people just think he was crazy?


Rossellini asked himself these questions with his next picture, in which he took a different approach to the idea of sainthood. He made a film that takes you through the process of someone actually becoming a saint in a world that didn't believe in them anymore. He called his film EUROPA ‘51. Ingrid Bergman plays an English woman named Irene Girard. She is living a comfortable life in Rome with her husband George and her son Michel. But something's wrong. Irene and Michel have lived through the air raids of London together, so the bond between them is very intense. But now everything back to normal, Michel feels neglected. He wants Irene’s attention , and he'll do anything to get it. [They argue. Later, he throws himself down the stairs.] This boy who's grown up in wartime just doesn't know how to live in a world of peace. [She promises to stay with him always, but he dies.]

Michel's death basically strips Irene of herself. She loses her reason for being. The first person who tries to bring Irene out of her depression is her cousin, Andrea. Andrea, who is a committed Marxist, tries to educate Irene and open her eyes to the misery in the world. This is the beginning of a change in Irene and without knowing or intending to, she is becoming a very different kind of person. She meets the family of the sick child. But at home, her own family is very concerned.

Irene: Let me explain to you mother. I'm not hurting anyone. I'm only trying to
find a way, don't you understand?

When she goes back to see the family she's helped, they are celebrating because their son Bruno has finally come home. She enjoys the warmth of people who simply like to be in each other's company. It's a small community of people living together in cramped quarters, and there's a prostitute living next door much to the disapproval of her neighbors. Maybe most of all, Irene simply wants to spend time with this boy who reminds her of her son. After helping one family, the floodgates opened. She wasn't there for her son when he needed her, so now Irene wants to be there for everyone.

Rossellini doesn't call attention to her evolution: the picture feels purely objective, almost as if it had no style. It's as if we're just walking by Irene's side, just following her emotional progress. Irene spends more time around the neighborhood and she becomes very attached to a few of the kids. She visits the home of a woman who's taken in many of these abandoned the children, and who happens to have three children of her own. Her name is Passerotto. And she's played by the great Giulietta Masina, who was married to Fellini.. It's easy to take advantage of Irene, because her need to help others is insatiable. So she agrees to take Passerotto’s place at the factory for the day, but once inside the factory Irene comes face-to-face with a side of life she's never known before: the tedium and pressure that most people have to go through every day, just to make a living.

When Irene gets home that night, it's as if she's walking into another world. What's actually happened to Irene is so impossible to imagine for her husband that he is convinced she has a lover.

George: it's perfectly clear to me what's going on. It shows in the way you act, in the way you dress, and everything you do is to please him.

And so she crosses over. She leaves her husband and goes to live in the slum, cutting off all ties with her life of comfort. Now all she can see his human need: there's nothing else. I read actually cares for the prostitute who is alone and who is dying of tuberculosis. It's only a matter of time before she crosses the line and gets into real trouble with the police. The police are very suspicious of her. They want to know how a respectable woman like her could possibly be living in the slum with a common prostitute. For her husband, there's just no alternative. [He commits her to an asylum] It takes her a little time to figure out exactly where she is.

Now, she understands. But it really doesn't matter where she is, there will always be people in need. Everywhere. [“You are not alone. Don't worry. I'm with you. I'll stay with you.”] The doctors in the asylum keep pressing her about her plans, her goals, her ideas.

Now, do you want to join a religious order.
No.
Are you a member of any political party?
No.
Then what are your ideals?
My ideals are the ideals of those who need me, day by day.

They keep pressing her: does she want to return home to her husband?
No, if I went home, I would save neither myself nor the others. I would only return to being what it was before. Don't think it wouldn’t be easier. … I want to share the sorrow of those who suffer. The pain of those who are distressed. I want to live with the others and save myself with them. I'd rather be lost with them than saved alone. I only feel that I can belong to them when I'm free of everything else. When you are down to nothing, you are bound to everybody. I have nothing more to say. Take me back to my room.

Rossellini doesn't condemn anyone in EUROPA 51. Not Irene's family, not her husband, not even the doctors who lock her away. He makes the case that society has rules, and that those rules are what define madness and sanity. That's the disturbing truth of this picture.

"People today only know how to live in society, not in community. The soul of society is the law. The soul of the community is love." That's Rossellini in 1963 describing this film that he made about Europe in 1951. But really it could be anywhere, and it could be now.

If you ever have an opportunity to see the picture, it's important to get past the imperfections in EUROPA ‘51. The dialogue dubbing of the minor characters is pretty poor, and that's also a problem in some of the other films Rossellini made around this time. It was a difficult time in his career: he was finding it harder and harder to make movies and the conditions were getting very tight, almost impossible. But he made the picture he wanted to make. EUROPA ‘51 is such a forceful film that it transcends its limitations.