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Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria was not treated particularly kindly by the UK critics -- The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw was particularly harsh, seeing it as something like a two-and-a-half-hour Stella Artois ad – and perhaps for this reason it has not entered the public consciousness here in the way achieved by Tornatore's most famous film, Cinema Paradiso.
But I'm not quite sure what the critics want. Sure, Baaria is sentimental. And it's beautifully shot, and it has a Morricone score. The same kind of accusations could be levelled against Once Upon A Time In America, with which it shares some structure.
Baaria is the local name for Bagheria, where Tornatore was born, and this is an adult's sentimental memory of his childhood, heading through the more cynical period of adulthood. I suspect that critics would still prefer all Italian films to be in the mould of Bicycle Thieves – gritty and in black and white – or Gomorrah a far more modernistic take on the Italian south. Tornatore is, in other words, too much of a sentimentalist for them.
The narrative covers the entire life of one man – Peppino, who as a child in the early 1920s was sent away to work for his shepherd uncle because the family simply did not have enough to eat. He becomes a Communist, and much of the film covers his adult life working through the Italian political system.
There are scores of minor characters (most of them related either to Peppino or his wife), and back stories cover both Peppino and his wife's parents, and their five children. Other characters reappear throughout the story as kind of extensions of Bagheria. I particularly like the man who stands in the same spot, throughout the film, shouting (for the first half) "I buy dollars" and for the second half "three pens for 60 lira". He never ages. Why not? Because he is not a human being. He is as much a part of Baaria as the pavement. He is part of the lead character's memory. And we all remember people like that -- who seemed old when we were young and who seem exactly the same age now.
I think the UK critics got it wrong on this one and that Baaria will, in time, be seen as one of Tornatore's best – his Once Upon A Time In The America compared with The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.
Carl Dreyer's Mikael (Michael) is a great discovery. Long thought lost, it was recompiled in the 1990s and a DVD released in Germany 2004. There are still a couple of continuity errors and three or four points where I think they have got the order wrong.
However, as Brownlow has observed with Napoleon what happens is that you are never reconstructing a single film. You can never be sure which bits of film that you have got were actually the final versions used in the original film. In effect you might be putting stuff back in that the original director had left out. In a couple of places it looks to me that they had a bit of footage that looked suspciously like a bit of footage earlier on -- probably a bit of film that Dreyer did not use. For that reason the running time is put at "84-93 min".
Michael is a film about a famous painter's love for his model Michael. It's a "Chamber film". It's mostly shot indoors, and, for a silent movie, very "talky". It seems plain to us today that the painter, Claude Zoret (played brilliantly by the then famous Danish director Benjamin Christensen) is homosexual, while Michael (Walter Slezak) is less absolute in his sexuality.
A gold-digging Russian Countess, whose accustomed style of living was no longer matched by the size of her funds, looks to get some of Zoret's money, but "the master" as he is called, is less responsive than the Countess would wish. Michael, however, falls for her, and promtly starts spending money on her that he does not have. The Master bails Michael out time and time again because of his devotion to his muse. But, as we know, once love is lost, no amount of kindness or expenditure can win it back.
It's a deeply touching film and not for nothing known as one of the finest early examples of "gay cinema". That's a rather stupid piece of genre classification (you might as well call it "intergenerational love cinema". It's a film about love and about the unequal balance in all relationships, about the frequent occasions when it's given in one direction but is not given in the other. Or, as that great philosopher the cook Mrs Patmore said at one point in Downton Abbey "You're all in love with the wrong people!"
Of course, not many movies made in 1924 are going to be of much interest to the modern film-viewer from an objective viewpoint. But from a historical angle this is a fascinating film. Dreyer was only 34 when he made it, and there has been speculation that there's a certain degree of autobiography about Dreyer's own sexual preferences. The directorial technique is in places very forward-looking (his use of close-ups are very different from the mode at the time, although they are so standard today that we do not notice this) while in others it seems very old fashioned (the "iris" technique to make us focus on a particular person). Dreyer was extremely influential, not least on Hitchcock, who borrowed many of Dreyer's innovations for his own silent efforts.
But what makes it most interesting is that here we have a film that isn't horror, or comedy, or "blockbuster". It's a quiet serious film about human relationships. The "commentary" version is both good and bad -- the Danish academic makes some interesting points, but does so in such a fashion as to make them boring unless you are determined to sit it out. Academia does not have to be boring and you do not need to read a commentary as if it is a written thesis (which I suspect this commentary is). But, better there than absent!
_____________________
But I'm not quite sure what the critics want. Sure, Baaria is sentimental. And it's beautifully shot, and it has a Morricone score. The same kind of accusations could be levelled against Once Upon A Time In America, with which it shares some structure.
Baaria is the local name for Bagheria, where Tornatore was born, and this is an adult's sentimental memory of his childhood, heading through the more cynical period of adulthood. I suspect that critics would still prefer all Italian films to be in the mould of Bicycle Thieves – gritty and in black and white – or Gomorrah a far more modernistic take on the Italian south. Tornatore is, in other words, too much of a sentimentalist for them.
The narrative covers the entire life of one man – Peppino, who as a child in the early 1920s was sent away to work for his shepherd uncle because the family simply did not have enough to eat. He becomes a Communist, and much of the film covers his adult life working through the Italian political system.
There are scores of minor characters (most of them related either to Peppino or his wife), and back stories cover both Peppino and his wife's parents, and their five children. Other characters reappear throughout the story as kind of extensions of Bagheria. I particularly like the man who stands in the same spot, throughout the film, shouting (for the first half) "I buy dollars" and for the second half "three pens for 60 lira". He never ages. Why not? Because he is not a human being. He is as much a part of Baaria as the pavement. He is part of the lead character's memory. And we all remember people like that -- who seemed old when we were young and who seem exactly the same age now.
I think the UK critics got it wrong on this one and that Baaria will, in time, be seen as one of Tornatore's best – his Once Upon A Time In The America compared with The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.
Carl Dreyer's Mikael (Michael) is a great discovery. Long thought lost, it was recompiled in the 1990s and a DVD released in Germany 2004. There are still a couple of continuity errors and three or four points where I think they have got the order wrong.
However, as Brownlow has observed with Napoleon what happens is that you are never reconstructing a single film. You can never be sure which bits of film that you have got were actually the final versions used in the original film. In effect you might be putting stuff back in that the original director had left out. In a couple of places it looks to me that they had a bit of footage that looked suspciously like a bit of footage earlier on -- probably a bit of film that Dreyer did not use. For that reason the running time is put at "84-93 min".
Michael is a film about a famous painter's love for his model Michael. It's a "Chamber film". It's mostly shot indoors, and, for a silent movie, very "talky". It seems plain to us today that the painter, Claude Zoret (played brilliantly by the then famous Danish director Benjamin Christensen) is homosexual, while Michael (Walter Slezak) is less absolute in his sexuality.
A gold-digging Russian Countess, whose accustomed style of living was no longer matched by the size of her funds, looks to get some of Zoret's money, but "the master" as he is called, is less responsive than the Countess would wish. Michael, however, falls for her, and promtly starts spending money on her that he does not have. The Master bails Michael out time and time again because of his devotion to his muse. But, as we know, once love is lost, no amount of kindness or expenditure can win it back.
It's a deeply touching film and not for nothing known as one of the finest early examples of "gay cinema". That's a rather stupid piece of genre classification (you might as well call it "intergenerational love cinema". It's a film about love and about the unequal balance in all relationships, about the frequent occasions when it's given in one direction but is not given in the other. Or, as that great philosopher the cook Mrs Patmore said at one point in Downton Abbey "You're all in love with the wrong people!"
Of course, not many movies made in 1924 are going to be of much interest to the modern film-viewer from an objective viewpoint. But from a historical angle this is a fascinating film. Dreyer was only 34 when he made it, and there has been speculation that there's a certain degree of autobiography about Dreyer's own sexual preferences. The directorial technique is in places very forward-looking (his use of close-ups are very different from the mode at the time, although they are so standard today that we do not notice this) while in others it seems very old fashioned (the "iris" technique to make us focus on a particular person). Dreyer was extremely influential, not least on Hitchcock, who borrowed many of Dreyer's innovations for his own silent efforts.
But what makes it most interesting is that here we have a film that isn't horror, or comedy, or "blockbuster". It's a quiet serious film about human relationships. The "commentary" version is both good and bad -- the Danish academic makes some interesting points, but does so in such a fashion as to make them boring unless you are determined to sit it out. Academia does not have to be boring and you do not need to read a commentary as if it is a written thesis (which I suspect this commentary is). But, better there than absent!
_____________________
