#Otello Martelli

[lamiaprigione]

La dolce vita (1960)

[king-of-the-road]

La Dolce Vita (1960). Cinematography by Otello Martelli. Directed by Federico Fellini

[byneddiedingo]

Dots Johnson and Alfonsino Pasca in Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)

Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Harold Wagner, Merlin Berth, Mats Carlson, Dots Johnson, Alfonsino Pasca, Maria Michi, Gar Moore, Harriet Medin, Renzo Avanzo, William Tubbs, Dale Edmonds. Screenplay: Sergio Amidei, Klaus Mann, Federico Fellini, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma. Music: Renzo Rossellini.

The phrase "fog of war" was coined by Carl von Clausewitz in reference to the cloud of uncertainty that surrounds combatants on the battlefield, but it seems appropriate to apply it to the miscommunication experienced by the soldiers and civilians in Roberto Rossellini's great docudrama about the Allied campaign to liberate Italy in 1943 and 1944. The six episodes in Rossellini's film illustrate various kinds of problems brought about by language, ignorance, naïveté, and lack of necessary information. A young Sicilian woman (Carmela Sazio) struggles to communicate with the G.I. (Robert Van Loon) left guarding her; a Black American soldier (Dots Johnson) tries to recover the shoes that were stolen from him by a Neapolitan street urchin (Alfonsino Pasca) after he got drunk and passed out; a Roman prostitute (Maria Michi) picks up a drunk American (Gar Moore), but when he tells her of the beautiful, innocent woman he met six months earlier in Rome she realizes that she was the woman; an American nurse (Harriet Medin) accompanies a partisan into the German-occupied section of Florence in search of an old lover; three American chaplains visit a monastery in a recently freed section of Northern Italy, but only the Catholic chaplain (William Tubbs), who speaks Italian, realizes that the monks are deeply shocked that his two companions are a Protestant and a Jew. Only the final -- and the best, most harrowing -- section deals with the traditional concept of the fog of war, as Allied soldiers try to aid Italian partisans in their fight with the retreating but still fierce Germans. As in many Italian neorealist films, the actors are either non-professionals or unknowns, and their uneasiness with scripted dialogue sometimes shows -- at least it does with the English speakers; I can't judge the ones who speak Italian or German. There is also occasional sentimental overuse of the score by the director's brother, Renzo Rossellini. But on the whole, Paisan is still an extraordinarily compelling film, an essential portrait of war and its effects, made more essential by having been filmed on location amid the ruin and rubble so soon after the war ended. Glimpses of the emptied streets of Florence, bare of tourists and trade, are startling, as are the scenes that take place in the marshlands of the Po delta in the final sequence. The screenplay earned Oscar nominations for Alfred Hayes, Federico Fellini, Sergio Amidei, Marcello Pagliero, and Roberto Rossellini, but lost to Robert Pirosh for the more conventional war movie Battleground (William A. Wellman, 1949).

[g-man-pictures]

LA DOLCE VITA: SNAPSHOTS

Manipulated high contrast stills from Federico Fellini’s 1960 international masterpiece of cinema. The selected images with subtitles attempt to “freeze” and depict the timeless message of the film and screenplay. Original Cinematographer Otello Martelli and screenplay by Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and others.

[jonnyconsequence]

"Where there is pain, let me bring joy, and where there is despair, hope."

The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) Directed by Roberto Rossellini Cinematography by Otello Martelli

[sesiondemadrugada]

Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946).

[drinkingdownthepoison]

Federico Fellini, Le Notti di Cabiria, 1957

[lafiguraentutapiz]

La Dolce Vita. Federico Fellini. 1960

[tvln]

stromboli (it/usa, rosselini 50)

[cinesludge]

Movie #64 of 2020: Paisan

“If you fall asleep, I’ll steal your shoes.”

[genevieveetguy]

- I am ignorant, but I read books. You won't believe it, everything is useful... this pebble for instance. - Which one? - Anyone. It is useful. - What for? - For... I don't know. If I knew I'd be the Almighty, who knows all. When you are born and when you die... Who knows? I don't know for what this pebble is useful but it must be useful. For if its useless, everything is useless. So are the stars!

La strada, Federico Fellini (1954)

[lamiaprigione]

La dolce vita (1960)

[king-of-the-road]

La Dolce Vita (1960). Cinematography by Otello Martelli. Directed by Federico Fellini

[byneddiedingo]

Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949)

Cast: Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone, Checco Rissone, Nico Pepe, Adriana Sivieri, Lia Corelli, Maria Grazia Francia. Screenplay: Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Gianni Puccini, Corrado Alvaro, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Production design: Carlo Egidi. Film editing: Gabriele Varriale. Music: Goffredo Petrassi. 

Those of us of a certain age can remember when the phrase "foreign film" meant one thing: sex. Which was something the Production Code-ridden American film had long tried to persuade us didn't exist, or at least not outside of marriage. But when European filmmakers began to recover from the war, they were under no such constraints, so a certain whiff of the forbidden tended to accompany even the most artistically conceived French or Italian releases. Even the more austere Scandinavian films were the victims (some would say beneficiaries) of prurient distributors: Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monika (1953) was snapped up by one who cut it by a third, while carefully retaining Harriet Andersson's nude scene, and marketed it as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl. For a long time, what Americans associated with the phrase "French film" was not Renoir or Bresson, or even Godard or Truffaut, but Brigitte Bardot. And for many Americans, their introduction to Italian neorealism was not the documentary-like work of Roberto Rossellini in Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946) or of Vittorio De Sica in Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), but Giuseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, with its posters and lobby cards emphasizing the voluptuous Silvana Mangano. The story has it that Bitter Rice began with a documentary inspiration: De Santis was riding on a train and noticed that it was full of working-class and peasant women. He learned that they were returning from their annual work in the rice fields of the Po Valley, where women were the primary workers because their smaller hands made them more efficient at planting and harvesting. De Santis was a member of the Italian Communist Party, and the more he investigated, the more the exploitation of the rice workers seemed to him the perfect subject for a film of social commentary. His first film, Tragic Hunt (1947), about the struggles of peasants to form a cooperative, had been well received, and he got the backing for Bitter Rice from Dino Di Laurentiis's new production company. Together with Carlo Lizzani and Gianni Puccini, he put together a story and began casting, signing up handsome newcomers Vittorio Gassman and Raf Vallone for the key male roles and the young American actress Doris Dowling, who had just made an impressive appearance as a call girl in Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend (1945), for the female lead. And then he discovered 19-year-old Silvana Mangano and the fine line between serious social-problem film and exploitation film was crossed. Mangano's innate sensuality threw the story off track, to the point that even today all anyone remembers about Bitter Rice is her vivid presence in it. Poor Doris Dowling becomes a secondary player, and the much worked-over screenplay shows the sometimes awkward efforts to integrate Mangano's character into the original plot, in which Dowling and Gassman play thieves on the run, with Dowling's Francesca hiding out among the rice-workers, while Gassman's Walter cooks up a scheme to hijack the entire rice crop. There is much ado about a stolen necklace that turns out to be fake, and a little bit of social commentary about the conflict between the unionized workers and the freelance "illegals." Traces of the original documentary inspiration remain in the movie, in between scenes of Mangano dancing and seducing Gassman and Vallone, and De Santis is a keenly observant director with a gift for staging impressive shots, deftly aided by cinematographer Otello Martelli. But the failure to assemble a coherent story undermines the whole project, so, naturally, De Santis and Lizzani were nominated for the best motion picture story Oscar.

[artofcinema]

la dolce vita (1960) dir. federico fellini

it’s like a peaceful jungle. it’s easy to hide in.

drama | marcello mastroianni, anita ekberg, anouk aimée

[killer-klowns]

La dolce vita / Des femmes en maillot de bain saluent la descente de Jésus en hélicoptère.