Italian neorealism, conceived in Italy during the 1940s and concretised in the immediate postwar, when the nation was still in ruins, by three unique artists, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, is a cinema that holds an implacable but poetic mirror to the human condition under the most extreme circumstances. Working with ludicrous budgets by Hollywood standards, often employing non-professional actors, these men let their subjects do the talking and the effect was powerful and memorable. The canvas included all the curses that humanity has harvested from its fall into class-divided society: slavery, feudalism, and now capitalism, the latter ensuring war, pervasive unemployment, poverty, and untold misery for millions. But the neorealist movement also gave us visions of faith and love, and the need for moral political action, and therefore hope in a future that seems to be increasingly in doubt by the younger generation.
ARTS & FILM
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P GREANVILLE—We found this quality print of The Wages of Fear and wanted to share it with our audience. Two French films of the immediate postwar qualify as all-time thriller classics, with noir overtones. One was the deserveddly acclaimed Du rififi chez les hommes (also known as Rififi, or Big brawl among the men), a crime thriller created by Jules Dassin, who, despite a French surname and look, was actually a terrifically gifted Jewish American expat living in Paris, a refugee from the anticommunist insanity gripping the US in the early ’50s. Rififi came out in 1955. The other is this film, Le Salaire de la Peur, authored by Henri-Georges Clouzot in the 1952-3 stretch. Salaire also boasted a story that has whimsical fate at its core, and a great deal of unexpected male bonding between characters pushed into extreme circumstances. Both films were and remain highly original in plot and construction, having generated an inevitable cottage industry of mediocre imitators.
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DAVID YEARSLEY—In the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby of 1968, an old apartment manager named Mr. Niklas shows a young couple through the building which is, unbeknownst to them, home to a coven of witches. As they walk through the foyer, Mr. Niklas discovers that the husband is an actor and asks, “Have I seen you in anything?” It’s a sly bit piece of casting that this line should be uttered by one of the great character actors of moving pictures—Elisha Cook, Jr. As in the unsettling amalgam of manic intensity and slightly askew trustworthiness he delivered in Rosemary’s Baby, Cook gave his characters a ruffled quirkiness that made many of them immortal.
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Enthusiasm for Beethoven is particularly strong in Japan. Every year in December, 10,000 choir singers gather in a concert hall in Osaka to sing “Ode to Joy,” the final chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. At the podium for the 20th time is conductor Yutaka Sado, a pupil of Leonard Bernstein. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is performed more often in Japan than in other country in the world. The Japanese simply refer to Beethoven’s Ninth as “Daiku” — the “Great.” Participation in the concert is highly sought-after: The singers have to pay the equivalent of 700 euros to sing “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” in German. And there are far more than 10,000 applicants. The enthusiasm for Beethoven’s most famous symphony goes back to the first performance of the work by German soldiers in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp Bando in 1918.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—This is a highly unusual film, a quiet, at times lyrical, other times creepy documentary on the small mansions —actually impressive mausoleums—where Mexico’s most notorious drug lords (and other victims of the drug war) lie at rest. Hauntingly, most of the residents in this city of the dead are extremely young. A meditation on culture and class, the images say a lot about the almost infinite ability of the poor to scrape a living under almost any circumstances, and about the people of Mexico’s unique attitude toward death and their apparent stubborn belief in an afterlife.