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July 27 - August 3,2003 |
Another Summer of Movie Classics
Essentials programme features legendary films by Fellini, Antonioni, Leone and Visconti
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2003-06-15
Every summer Cinemath-eque Ontario showcases some of the best movie classics in history in a programme appropriately titled A Summer of Essentials.
This year's selection is dedicated, in particular, to European cinema, with many entries on the British Institute's Sight & Sound Ten Greatest Films of All Time list (for which this writer was a voting critic). And when it comes to European classics, Italians are always front and centre.
Not surprisingly, Federico Fellini's groundbreaking 1959 classic La Dolce Vita (August 16) is on the list, this time screened in marvelous scope. The film follows a series of events in the life of a journalist named Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) which explore his dissatisfaction in his work and his loves, ultimately a reflection on where one finds - or fails to find - meaning in life.
The setting is Rome in the 1950s where Marcello covers the more decadent side of life. Although Marcello is living with Emma, a woman who loves him and wants a traditional marriage, he has encounters with other women - Anouk Aimée as a stunningly beautiful, wealthy, and jaded friend/lover; Anita Ekberg as an American movie star, also beautiful and alluringly sexy in a simple, mindless way. The life of intellect is tackled at a party given by Marcello's friend Steiner, whose final tragic act thrusts the journalist over the edge, turning him into the milieu he once criticized.
Another great Italian film screening in the series is Michelangelo Antonioni's exceptional 1960 L'avventura, an eerie and enigmatic character study which marked the director's unique aesthetic and camera technique. Much like La Dolce Vita, L'avventura's characters are in a fruitless search for sensual pleasure. But for Antonioni's idle and decadent rich people, pleasure is anything that momentarily distracts them from the lethal ennui of their existence.
A group of wealthy friends are cruising the sea near Sicily on a yacht. They anchor near an island, swim ashore and begin to explore. Anna (Lea Massari) has quarreled with her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and has been overheard saying she wanted to be left alone. They both go ashore, along with her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and others. After a time Anna cannot be found and is never seen again. But the film isn't about the search for Anna as it's about the sense in which all of the characters are on the brink of disappearance.
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