Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Intersections between Italian and Slavic Cinemas, Jun 2023

For decades, critics have viewed Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first instalment in his famous German trilogy, simply as a (melo)dramatic depiction of Nazism’s rise, conceived in the director’s characteristic anthropomorphic vein. With Nazism cast as a lethal and sexually perverse phenomenon rooted in the previous generation’s foibles and weaknesses, the film’s hitherto ignored debt to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons (1872), however, directs viewers to a more comprehensive insight embedded in the film, namely that history repeats itself, and not obligatorily according to Marx’s famous formulation of the iteration as farce. Indeed, the murderous violence of Russia’s nihilism captured by Dostoevsky expands in Visconti’s film to a national apocalypse that belongs to one of history’s most tragic narratives. Cinematic taxonomy, however, has no category to accommodate Visconti’s original engagement with Dostoevsky’s text, for it falls neither within the established conventions of adaptation nor of intertexts.

Italy has long been a source of fascination and inspiration for Russian writers, artists and filmmakers due to its extensive cultural heritage. Russian filmmakers have played with how Russians view Italy, and they offer viewers the opportunity to see Italy through Russian eyes. Whether in collaboration with Italian filmmakers or on their own, Russian directors have sought to explore Italy: both its real geography and its imagined one. Imagined geography gives us a new way to examine Russian–Italian film collaboration. By examining the imagined geography of Italy in Ryazanov’s Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia (1974), Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), Mikhailkov’s Dark Eyes (1987), Kravchuk’s The Italian (2005) and Konchalovsky’s Sin (2021), this article proposes that Russian directors map similarity and inspiration onto Italy to establish an affinity towards Italy that exists beyond the boundaries of the film collaborations.

Unlike his predecessors, who made films about the event Milagre do Sol (‘The miracle of the sun’) that occurred in Fatima (Portugal, 13 October 1917), Marco Pontecorvo represents an enriched and original mystical gaze in his 2020 film Fatima. To achieve this, the Italian filmmaker drew inspiration from the creations of other directors, whose cinematic works have been described by some theorists or commentators as ‘mystical’. This article explores Andrei Tarkovsky’s influence on the mystical gaze in Pontecorvo’s film, considering the poetics of the four elements (air, earth, water, sun) and other motifs such as the bird or the angel, as well as various cinematic techniques. Going even further into the history of Soviet cinema, via Tarkovsky, this article shows that Pontecorvo uses various poetic means of expression specific to Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) and converts them into elements characteristic of the epiphany. In addition to these influences, there are also attributes of an original mystical gaze like Plato’s cave myth and the cave–cinema analogy.

This article provides a detailed analysis of references to other films found in two of Andrei Tarkovsky’s works, thus highlighting the films’ intertextual and intermedial nature. More specifically the article examines several referential elements found in Tarkovsky’s Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood) (1962) and Zerkalo (Mirror) (1975), which, as scholars suggest, borrow elements from Kazimierz Kutz’s Krzyż Walecznych (Cross of Valour) (1958) and Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), respectively. Through the theoretical analysis of filmmaking techniques as well as intertextual analysis, the article seeks to explain why and how Tarkovsky employs these references in his films. The article therefore examines the cinematography of the three directors in addition to their films’ visual stylistics and formal elements. By analysing mise en scènes, types of shots, lighting, editing and more, the article proves that the references Tarkovsky employs in his two films not only justify connections to his films’ main ideas but also serve as incontrovertible evidence that his films contain references and counterpoints to Kutz’s and Fellini’s works.

The main purpose of this article is to rethink the documentary filmmaking of Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra in the context of the new spiritual challenges of the modern era and to assess the potential of the audio-visual language of the travelogue Tempo di viaggio (Voyage in Time) (Tarkovsky and Guerra 1983) within the slow cinema discourse. This article focuses on the analysis of the ways to slow down the narrative in Voyage in Time. Apart from focusing on the significance of screen images, it aims to define the role of background audio content, including spiritual singing, which is used by the filmmakers in the prologue and epilogue to create a ‘circular frame’. The documentary narrative of Voyage in Time is transformed into a slow poetic film text in which the everyday rises to the level of the artistic, and the temporary to the level of the eternal.

Alexander Volkoff’s acclaimed silent masterpiece Casanova (1927) is an excellent example of the many links between Italian and Russian cultures: this international super-production, led by a group of Russian émigrés, is based on the memoirs of a famous Venetian, and shot largely in Venice. While the film’s production history is relatively well studied, little has been written on the relationship between the film and the text on which it is based. This article aims to fill in this gap. It demonstrates that Volkoff’s Casanova, often considered to be merely a spectacular genre film, actually offers a subtle reading of Giacomo Casanova’s autobiography. Volkoff’s Casanova both illustrates myths and stereotyped images linked to the famous adventurer and subtly questions them. It also highlights the contradictory nature of the character, reproducing many of the oppositions which underlie the original text of the memoirs.

This article investigates the reception of the Soviet film adaptations of Gianni Rodari’s Il romanzo di Cipollino (Tale of Cipollino) (1951), a book about the adventures of a clever and resourceful ‘little onion’ which was adapted to the screen several times in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR). In the first part of the article, the genesis of Rodari’s book is recounted along with the reasons for its popularity with children. Subsequently, the article outlines the history of the adaptations of Tale of Cipollino in the USSR, which were not limited to literary rewritings, but also saw Rodari’s work transposed onto films and a ballet. Lastly, the article presents an analysis of the Soviet film productions with Cipollino as the protagonist: the animated film Rovno v 3:15 (At 3:15 Sharp) (Dezhkin and Migunov 1959), a feature animation (Chipollino, Dezhkin 1961) and a filmstrip (Chipollino, Migunov 1964).

In recent years, the figure of the Italian filmmaker Rino Lupo (1884–1936) has taken on alternative developments that not only keep attention on his cinematographic work, but also expand to the birth of a new poetic centred on his numerous travels. The essence of Rino Lupo’s transnational and pro-European cinema is linked to an idea of the ‘search for beauty’ through ‘the discovery of the new’. In Poland, Rino Lupo worked on some of the most important concepts that were developed in the following years in Portugal and Spain. In particular, in this article I explore his period in Russia and Poland (1916–21), when Lupo began to expand his cinematographic activity beyond directing movies to creating a journal and a film school, the first in Warsaw.

This article traces and analyses the activities of Umberto Barbaro and Aldo Vergano in the People’s Republic of Poland during the late 1940s. It focuses on the production and reception of Czarci żleb (Devil’s Ravine) (Kański and Vergano 1949) in order to examine the extent to which the activities of the Italians were used by the Polish communist authorities for their own political ends. The article draws attention to the opinions formulated by both filmmakers and relevant critics in interviews about the relationship between film art and politics. This part of analysis is of crucial importance, as both Barbaro and Vergano came to Poland bearing the aura of artists who had been deprived of their jobs in Italy for political reasons. The article investigates how far these filmmakers were instrumentalized for political purposes by the Polish communist authorities.

In this article I discuss production, distribution and reception contexts of Michał Waszyński’s films Wielka Droga (La grande strada: L’odissea di Montecassino) (‘The great way: The odyssey of Montecassino’) (1947) and Lo sconosiuto di San Marino (The Unknown Man from San Marino) (1948), which were produced in Italy in the wake of the Second World War. Thus, I aim at reconstructing the wider political plan to which these films were inscribed, locating them on the backdrop of the Polish Army propaganda activity and diplomacy in Italy in the eve of the Cold War. An in-depth inquiry into archival documentation concerning different contexts of the films shows them as a nodal point for a complex set of problems. I show to what extent these films were entangled into diplomatic, political and ideological struggles between the Polish Armed Forces, the Moscow-dependent Polish government, the Allies and the Italian government in the early post-war years. On a more general scale, this analysis uncovers the negotiations over boundaries of what was acceptable in the Second World War depiction in Italian film culture.

In this article, I examine the influence of neorealism on the ideological and artistic establishment of the Polish Film School. In the first part, I discuss theoretical assumptions about the Polish Film School, focusing on its characteristics and the reasons behind its foundation. Then, I analyse neorealism’s contribution to the Polish Film School in the 1950s using examples from Polish literature. In the last part, I present an analysis of the two Polish films most strongly imbued with the spirit of neorealism: Pokolenie (A Generation) (Wajda 1954) and Godziny nadziei (The Hours of Hope) (Rybkowski 1955). Through a critical analysis of interviews and press coverage from 1953 to 1955 that takes the historical perspective of Italian neorealist films into account, I conclude that the Polish Film School was most fascinated by the Italian observation of reality and curiosity about human affairs.

Italian neorealist films were quite popular in Stalinist-era Poland (1945–53). As part of the propaganda strategy, they were used to create a negative image of life in western countries, thus confirming the omnipresent vision of ‘rotten capitalism’. The social criticism contained in neorealism was manipulated through a modal framework that explained to the Polish audiences all phenomena as a product of a bad social system based on injustice and exploitation. The aim of this article is to examine Polish reviews of two neorealist films: Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (De Sica 1948) and La terra trema (The Earth Trembles) (Visconti 1948) both presented to Polish audiences in 1951.

This article studies the representation of Central Eastern European refugees in post-war Italian cinema. In our essay, we identify three films that deal with ‘displacement’: Lo sconosciuto di San Marino (The Unknown Man from San Marino) (Waszyński 1948), Donne senza nome (Women without Names) (Radványi 1950) and Stromboli: Terra di Dio (Stromboli) (Rossellini 1950). In the immediate post-war period, Italy was a country deeply affected by a Central Eastern European refugee crisis. As Hannah Arendt wrote, many people were in a ‘stateless’ situation either because of the war or because they had fled Soviet domination. The three films represent refugees marginalized for their social status, cultural background or nationality as well as for their sexuality or gender. Starting from Noa Steimatsky’s revealing revision of neorealism vis-à-vis the story of the refugee camp at Cinecittà, we analyse the responsibility cinema had in the erasure of these asylum-seekers from the screen and public awareness.

In this article, we analyse the Italian and Yugoslav film co-productions in the context of the eastern/western politics of the Cold War era. In December 1957, the two countries signed their first co-production agreements, designed to foster reciprocal industrial and artistic cooperation. Although only two official co-productions were made, until the late 1960s, the two film industries cooperated on the making of about 40 films, during which time Yugoslav companies were denied artistic control and downgraded to a labour and locations supplier. By examining archival sources, we demonstrate that Italian state bureaucracy had a pivotal role in making film co-production an organizational field where subjects and institutions interact, regulate power relations and communicate. This allows us to highlight the role of co-production as a form of management of international relations, focusing on issues such as the lack of balance between partners and the financial rationale behind these arrangements.

The New Italian Cinema Events (NICE) was established in the United States in 1990, in 1993 in Russia and, over the years, in many other countries. Viviana del Bianco, artistic director of NICE, illustrates the history of this festival and explains the reasons of the success of the festival which launches young Italian filmmakers, thus giving them the opportunity to establish an international artistic reputation. In this interview, del Bianco also explains the genesis and cultural impact of the Contemporary Russian Film Festival in Florence established in 2019 which promotes the work of new Russian talents in Italy.

Professor Silvia Burini, director for the Centre of Russian Art Studies (CSAR), gives a historical overview of how and why the film festival Ruskino was established in 2011 and explains how it has changed over the years. The festival is unique in its kind because it comprises a vast community of university students, doctoral students, post-docs from the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, teachers as well as secondary school students and citizens of Venice. Another unique feature of Ruskino is its involvement with university and secondary school students with a competition for the best subtitling of the Russian films selected for the festival.

Nicoletta Romeo, artistic co-director of the Trieste Film Festival (TSFF), gives a historical overview of the TSFF established in 1989 and how it has changed in the past 30 years. She also explains how this festival, focused on Central Eastern Europe, is fully integrated in the economic, artistic and ethnic ‘fabric’ of the city of Trieste. The festival features films, auteurs and modes of cinematography that are less known in Italy, and in particular productions that belong to the so-called ‘cinéma du réel’, in other words, films that are not simply documentaries, but that represent a form of borderline cinema with documentaries recounting reality in a narrative way, often character-driven.