 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| La Strada | |||
"Widely considered to be Fellini’s first masterpiece, La strada features a masterful performance by Anthony Quinn as an itinerant strongman who purchases a tragic, affection-starved waif (the sublime Giuletta Masina) as his assistant for the price of a plate of pasta. He exploits her at every turn as they travel to grey and desolate towns that Fellini captures in strikingly poetic and symbolic imagery. Winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, La strada also features a haunting score by composer and lifelong Fellini associate Nino Rota." – Harvard Film Archive "Moving away from the neorealist tradition that had originally inspired him, Fellini turns La strada into a magical story of life among the peasant circus performances and gypsies of postwar Italy. It’s a marvellous film, charged with an emotional forthrightness that never squanders the two fantastic central performances. Quinn is stunning as the savage strongman — a drunken, whoring, violent thug — and manages to keep him from becoming a one-dimensional symbol of oppression by imbuing him with a twisted humanity all his own. But it’s Masina’s film. Her Chaplinesque clowning, wide-eyed wonder and desperate attempts to please are full of tragi-comic pathos. Touching, funny, and completely enchanting, La strada is a deceptively simple film — a haunting, lyrical masterpiece that will remain with you long after the credits have disappeared." – Jamie Russell, BBC Films "A deceptively simple and poetic parable, Federico Fellini’s La Strada was the focus of a critical debate when it premiered in 1954 simply because it marked Fellini’s break with neorealism — the hard-knocks school that had dominated Italy’s postwar cinema. “[Neorealism should embrace] not just social reality, but spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, all that there is within man,” said Fellini to his detractors, mostly Marxists who labeled him a traitor to the genre and therefore to their cause. While the neorealists defined their characters according to social circumstances, the characters of La strada… exist outside these confines in an ambiguous time and place. The neorealists saw the wasted land, the ragged people, but Fellini looked up and saw that there were stars…. “Everything in this world is good for something. Take… this stone, for example,” says Il Matto in hopes of convincing Gelsomina of her life’s worth. “What’s it good for?” she asks. “I don’t know… but it certainly has its use. If it were useless, then everything would be useless — even the stars.”" – Rita Kempley, Washington Post |
|
||
| Italy 1954 | |||
Director: Federico Fellini With: Anthony Quinn (Zampano), Giulietta Masina (Gelsomina), Richard Baseheart (Il Matto, “The Fool”), Aldo Silvani (Signor Giraffa), Marcella Rovere (La Vedova), Livia Venturini (La Suorina) 108 mins, 35mm (1,37:1), black and white In Italian, with English subtitles M adult themes Greytown Film Society |
|||
