Film Education in Western Europe 2003 Keynote Presentation
2003; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoI AM MOST HONORED to be here tonight, and I thank Suzanne Regan and Karla Berry for having invited me to open the 57th UFVA Conference. Me, a foreigner. A European. Actually, I am Italian, and I am very proud of Italian cinema. will forgive me if I take this opportunity to pay a brief homage to it. I know well, and I love, the films that Italian filmmakers have given us, since the invention of the medium: from Pastrone the pioneer, to Alessandro Blasetti, who set the rules, to Roberto Rossellini, who broke them; and then Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni. Don't be scared, I am not going to name them all. I'd just like to remember the masters of comedy, Mario Monicelli and Dino Risi; and also Francesco Rosi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Gianni Amelio; younger filmmakers such as Giuseppe Tornatore, Gabriele Salvatores, Paolo Virzi, and MarcoTullio Giordana; and most recently, Gabriele Muccino, who won the Public Award at the Sundance Film Festival not long ago. I love Italian cinema, nearly as much as Martin Scorsese does. But-again like Martin Scorsese-I also passionately love American cinema. As I am getting old, my hair is gray and all of a sudden I need reading glasses. I am in that nostalgic mood that makes me think back with great emotion on all the films that have marked my youth. The films that made me dream. Like most Italians of my generation, I have grown up fed by American movies: great marvelous tales that tell us that everything is possible and that each human being holds the future in his/her own hands. I have seen and loved comedies, dramas, musicals, and, most of all, westerns. From them I have learned not only a system of values based on freedom, responsibility, and loyalty, but also a constellation of places, events, and characters that belong to American mythology and history. My firsthand knowledge of America is very little indeed. I have been in New York a few times; many years ago I had the opportunity to work in Charleston, for the Festival of Two Worlds; I have briefly touched, for various personal reasons, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. As for Columbia, South Carolina, I have just arrived. Too little for a country so vast. And yet each state of the United States of America means something to me: from Alaska to Louisiana, from Oregon to Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, and so on. Although I am not sure where they are on the map, these places are more familiar to me than a lot of European countries. An example? I know nothing about Slovakia, but I know Montana because Gary Cooper was born there. Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp belong to my cultural patrimony as much as the heroes of the French Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento, which is weird, if you think of it; but it gives evidence that your beautiful films have been an extraordinary vehicle of emotion and culture. In Italy, I should say in Europe, we have not been as effective. Maybe because the stories we chose to tell were less appealing; maybe because we told them in a less appealing way. The fact is that our heroes, little or great, are not known and loved as widely and as much as yours are. I wonder for how many amongyou the names of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Henri Dunant evoke memories or emotions. And yet they are major characters who led adventurous, spectacular lives and influenced the destiny of entire populations. In 1989, at the top of his career, Sergio Leone held a masterclass for the students of Centra Sperimentale di Cinematografia, now the Italian National Film School. He analyzed his film Once upon a Time in America. At the end of the class, a young student stood up and asked Mr. Leone: You are a wonderful filmmaker, a great master, with a talent for the epic that is rare in our cinema. Why do you tell stories that do not belong to our culture? Our history, too, is full of adventurous stories, which are tremendously moving. Just think of our Risorgimento, think of Garibaldi, who conquered half of Italy with an army of one thousand volunteers. …
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