Press Information February 2018 Mario Monicelli the Human Comedy
Press Information February 2018
Mario Monicelli The Human Comedy
Mario Monicelli was an exceptional figure of Italian cinema: a progressive thinker and contemporary whose work provided a critical commentary on Italian politics and history for more than half a century. Acting from a Marxist humanist perspective, Monicelli’s creations mostly took on the form of popular comedies featuring film stars of the time.
Totò cerca casa (1949), realized in collaboration with Steno (i.e. Stefano Vanzina), is a source of many revelations about the problems Italy faced in the post-war period, addressing more than the desolate housing situation. Made six years later, Un eroe dei nostri tempi (1955) displays the neuroses bred in the souls of an utterly overwhelmed middle class in the wake of a rampant economic miracle. Another eight years later, I compagni (1963) saw Monicelli explore the issues of organized resistance against capital. Albeit in period dress, his reflections can easily be applied to the conditions of the early 1960s. The rarely shown pop grotesque Toh, è morta la nonna! (1969) takes us directly to the spirit world of ’68, where big industry finally collapses in on itself. Vogliamo i colonnelli (1973) tackles a delicate issue: the coups attempted by right-wing extremist elements in the government and military that provided many headlines in the 1970s. What Un eroe dei nostri tempi did for the boom, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (1977), an unsettling hybrid of comedy and vigilante justice thriller, did for “anni di piombo,” the “Years of Lead” in which assassinations and terrorist attacks by both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups turned the country into a battlefield.
After Monicelli’s most pessimist, darkest phase, at a time when film was becoming less and less relevant for political thinking, he retreated into a cinema of sceptical cheerfulness. In the realm once dominated by the Commedia all'italiana, a sagacious melancholy now spread, giving rise to late masterpieces such as the family breakdown story Speriamo che sia femmina (1986) or the Giuseppe Berto adaptation that could be considered the key to his oeuvre, ll male oscuro (1990). As in numerous other films from the 1980s and ‘90s, narratives revolve around emotional failures, sheer desperation, as well as regrets over what might be a wasted life. Perhaps wife and children were more important than the political cause after all? Several of these films end on a gloomy note reminiscent of Pirandello – in the end, not even more than one life can protect you from suffering defeat at the hands of life itself. Human beings are neither good nor bad. Ultimately, their only aspiration is to make it through the day not much worse off than they were at the outset.
This philosophy was well understood around the world. Following La grande guerra (1959), Monicelli became one of Italy’s most popular, most award-winning and most economically successful filmmakers. To be more precise, the principles of his work were understood, but the specifics remained accessible only to local audiences, above all the humor of language in many of his films. For example, the anti-war sentiments in La grande guerra, as well as the buddy movie dynamics between the unfortunate soldiers Oreste and Giovanni are easy to pick up on, while the effect of countless regionally specific jokes in the dialogues and the play with Roman and Milanese idioms are impossible to translate.
Monicelli’s aesthetics were just as vital to his success. Regardless of how genre-steeped the approach got, his films were always built on a classical realist foundation. Epic narratives like La grande guerra, I compagni or L'armata Brancaleone (1966) and their sequel (arguably an allegory of the Vietnam War) Brancaleone alle crociate (1970) continue to fascinate with their attention to detail and the sheer proportions of their imagery to this day. Mountain landscapes covered in corpses and military equipment, giant machine halls shaking with terrible noise, outworks reeking of filth and feces – a setting for raging, pointless lives. However, at times, Monicelli opts for a detour by means of genre excess, such as in the melodramatic dime novel farce Romanzo popolare (1974), where he exaggerates stereotypes with such force that real desires as well as underlying fears are forced to reveal themselves.
Mario Monicelli lived to be almost a hundred, he saw political systems come and go between 1915 and 2010, survived a world war and dozens of national as well as private crises, all the while remaining true to his own political principles. Late in life, he quit Craxi’s PSI and became an active member of the Marxist- Leninist Rifondazione Comunista. His only fear in life was boredom – the whisperings behind his back regarding his relationship with a woman 40 years his junior disturbed him just as much as the label of diehard leftist – that is to say, not at all. In one of his last interviews, given about six months before he took his life by jumping out of a window in a conscious decision to avoid the suffering that would follow from his cancer diagnosis, Monicelli said: “Never harbor any hope. Hope is a trap, a vile thing invented by those in power.”
The retrospective will take place in close collaboration with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia National Film Archive and Istituto Luce Cinecittà, who kindly provided the majority of the 35mm prints for the program. February 9 to March 1, 2018
2
After the Great War Two Films by Fritz Freisler and James Whale
On the topic of cinema after 1918, Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald write: “World War I divided the era into two epochs. Relationships, perception and thought have been shaken at the core and must be assembled anew.” On the occasion of the anniversary year 1918/1938, the Film Museum will show two films that speak on the lasting effects of war on both minds and bodies.
Der Mandarin, a large-scale film produced by Austrian Sascha Film and rediscovered in 2004, was made in the last year of the war and tells the tragic story of a libertine who worms himself into ladies’ favor using a talisman. A pre-Caligari Viennese psychodrama with special effects ending in madness: Steinhof, the end of 1918 – the world war is over, but it continues in a grim kind of cinema.
Director James Whale (Frankenstein) and his “regular” production company Universal Studios eventually parted ways over the studio’s brutal intervention into The Road Back, a sequel to the controversial world war drama All Quiet on the Western Front. Whale’s original cut has now been restored and the film can be rediscovered in the full extent of its slow tempo, telling the story of the impossible return of German soldiers to their home village carried by the visual and tonal artificiality of the studio settings. All solidarity has been obliterated and the hungry are shot at with merciless determination. The melancholy bottom line is: Whoever was taught how to kill in the service of the Reich will continue to do so. The war may be over, but a new war is already on the horizon.
February 23 and 26, 2018
Film Online: “Création de la serpentine”
When you think that there are no great discoveries left to make, a surprise phone call can give you a start. May 2014: a caller inquires whether he can send in an “old film.” A few days later, a tin can arrived, with the word “Serpentine” written in old-fashioned Fraktur script. The can contained two small rolls of heavily deteriorated 35mm nitrate cellulose film. Like all organic materials, nitrate film decomposes over time. Large parts of the rolls were stuck together and the acid released in the chemical breakdown of the celluloid had literally eaten away at the silver atoms in the emulsion. Furthermore, the gelatine contained in the film strip had softened. This made the emulsion stretch in places, distorting the geometry of the image content. The result: an eerie “eraser” effect where objects and actors in the film appear as if they had been dissolved leaving only a vague imprint on the strip.
After unblocking the roll frame by frame, the content was finally revealed. We held in our hands a stencil- colored positive print of Création de la serpentine (1908), a short féerie film by Spanish-French director and special effects pioneer Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929).
The outcome of the restoration as well as a report on the restoration process can be found on our website.
3
Mario Monicelli List of selected films
Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an Apartment) 1949
Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers) 1951
Totò e Carolina (Totò and Carolina) 1953/55
Un eroe dei nostri tempi (A Hero of Our Time) 1955
Padri e figli (Fathers and Sons) 1957
I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) 1958
Risate di gioia (The Passionate Thief) 1960
I compagni (The Organiser) 1963
Gente moderna (Modern People) 1964
L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold) 1966
Toh, è morta la nonna! (Oh, Grandmother's Dead) 1969
Il frigorifero (The Refrigerator) 1970
Vogliamo i colonnelli (We Want the Colonels) 1973
Romanzo popolare (Come Home and Meet My Wife) 1974
Caro Michele (Dear Michele) 1976
Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man) 1977
I nuovi mostri (First Aid) 1977
Speriamo che sia femmina (Let's Hope It's a Girl) 1986 ll male oscuro (Dark Illness) 1990
For more information and photos, please visit www.filmmuseum.at or contact: Patrick Holzapfel, [email protected], T +43 | 1 | 533 70 54 Ext 22
4