The Secrets of Flesh and Stone: Gender and Hisotry in Italian Cinema - Crime of Honour: Italian Comedy of the 1960s - Early Bulgarian Cinema - Italian Contemporary Film - Fritz Lang in America - Vladimir Visotsky: the Actor-Myth - At the Margins of Italy: The Social Periphery in National Cinema

The Secrets of Flesh and Stone

Men and Women to Tell Different National Histories in Italian Cinema of the 1990s and 2000s

During the 1990s Italian cinema turned its back on national history dedicating many films to a scarcely defined present. One reason for this lack of historic themes might be that directors who reached their individual and professional maturity in those years are marked by the time of terrorism, which is a history still painful to collective memory. By the end of the decade and with entering the new millennium, Italian history was readmitted to the big screen and covered historic periods like World War II, the 1970s and 1980s, which are the years of terrorism, and the present, a time of political distress.

The choice of historic moments makes evident that men lead the discourses of these films about history. The female roles in these stories are marginal and function only to support the hero on his public path. Films showing female protagonists like Del Perduto amore / Lost Love (Placido 1998) about a young Communist during the 1950s or Il Resto di niente / The Rest of Nothing (De Lillo 2003) about Eleonore de Fonseca, an interesting figure of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 are exceptions. They are not historic female figures with power and the films' focus lies on the discovery of local realities or individual destinies as part of a bigger historic reality.

It is argued that in recent Italian cinema male characters interpret historic events to respond to the present day collective emotional needs to come to terms with certain periods of history, while female characters narrate the unofficial social history. The different use of gender in the discussion of history is investigated analysing two examples, Romanzo Criminale / Crime Novel (Placido 2005) and Amore molesto / Nasty Love (Martone 1995).

Crime Novel tells the story of a group of Roman delinquents during the 1970s and early 1980s. They want to become influential criminals and get involved in kidnappings, drugs, prostitution and gambling. While a police investigator is on their track, certain state representatives have the interest to protect them.
The film is based on the hynonymous fictional book by Giancarlo De Cataldo and refers to the criminal organisation of the Banda della Magliana. The film narrates the gang's presumed and never proved knowledge about the kidnapping of the president of the Christian Democrats Aldo Moro in 1978 and its involvement in the explosion of the train station of Bologna in 1980 as well as its unquestioned responsibility for the assassination of the journalist of the Osservatore Politico Internazionale Mino Pecorelli in 1979.
The value of the film lies in discussing cinematically the paralysing years of the terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, Crime Novel is an exception among this kind of films as it does not reconstruct the events nor does it take the sides of the good ones like Buongiorno, notte / Good morning, night, the film by Marco Bellocchio on the Red Brigade and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. In Crime Novel, all sides, criminals and state representatives, have dark spots on their consciousness. Then, it is not a traditional history film though it uses original television coverage, at times touching on the genre of the doco-fiction. It pursues no educational aim as it does not provide clarifications for the events of the time nor does it have an investigative aim as it does not attempt to give new facts about the crimes. The sense and explanation for the terror the gang spread is located in the individual psyche and personal reasons of the criminals. Also, the narration from the perspective of the gang stands in opposition to director Michele Placido's aspiration to follow the footsteps of Italy's political cinema of the 1970s, best represented by the films of Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri. Their heroes investigated state corruption and Mafia crimes and although they were lonely, at times violent outsiders, they knew what was right and wrong.
Yet, for obvious historic reasons, Crime Novel cannot be like the investigative films of the 1970s, because until today the years of terrorism are an open wound in the nation's consciousness. Many political and economical details from the period still cannot be made public or discussed in the media. The years of terrorism are still under a veil of silence. Then, what can be contested to the film as cultural product, meaning its lack of clarification of the circumstances of the historic time, has its explanation in the difficulty or rather impossibility to reveal the complex relationship between organised crime and the state until today. The film makes this difficulty present several times for example when a shadowy figure, representative of the state, asks the gang to find out where Aldo Moro is hold hostage by the Red Brigades.
Crime Novel as a film on history seems more a political comment on the present, not so much a film about the past. It excludes the ideological context of the crimes committed and explains them exclusively with the greed of the gang members to be "somebody". Therefore the interior mode of narration and the occasional impression that the criminals are romantic heroes can be justified.

In terms of gender, the Banda della Magliana is played by the best young actors the Italian cinema had to offer over the last ten years. All characters are arrogant, violent, sexist and disloyal. They pursue egoistically their own satisfaction, indulging in violence and destruction, and they have lost their ability to distinguish between good and evil. Yet, they interpret the values of male friendship and friendship, not lacking rivalry and betrayal. An aspect common to the gang members and to the police investigator is their understanding of women as objects and exchange goods. Only two women make part of the story. One is a prostitute and is bought to be the girlfriend of one of the criminals. The other is an art historian and a stranger to this world of crime and death, who has fallen in love with one of the gang members. Hence, the woman is conceived either as whore or virgin, she either corrupts the police investigator and draws him to the side of the gang or she represents the chance for salvation and escape from the world of crime.
Crime Novel is fundamental to the creation of a cinematic memory of the terror of the 1970s and 1980s. The official history told by these male characters gives voice to a historic period that has not yet found its public space. Although the film is coded in the historic genre, it makes clear in its narrative choice that the past, even though obscure, still influences the present significantly, even in fiction. The second film analysed, instead, tells a history that is known but neglected.

Nasty Love is a film about the female body caught in the social history of the Italian nation. It is a metaphor for the unease young Italian women feel today with regards to womanhood and femininity as they are confronted with the social tensions between traditional patriarchal values and emancipation. The film tells the story of Delia, who grew up in Naples during the years after World War II. Suddenly her mother dies, a suicide. At the funeral Delia is tormented by doubts about her mother's death and investigates its circumstances. Reconstructing the last days of her mother's life, she immerses into the city, metaphor for her own past, where memories from her childhood rise and she is forced to come to terms with a truth she repressed many years ago, to have been sexually abused.
The film's discourse about Italian women draws a timeline from the 1950s to the 1990s. The first period conceived the woman as the legal and economic property of her husband, father or brother, while the second is still imprinted with signs from this past, like the news coverage on the politician Alessandra Mussolini, representative of right wing gender understandings.
The social history told focuses on the female body, men's fight over its domination and their control over female sexuality. During the 1950, when Delia was a child, the woman was still understood by the Mediterranean concept of honour which defined strictly the behaviour, rights and duties between the sexes. In this archaic concept, female sexuality and women's behaviour defined male honour. Emblematic of this idea is a scene regarding the portrait of a gypsy painted by Delia's father. She tells her uncle that the model was her mother. She was slapped and told never to say such a thing again. He did no explain to her that her mother's good conduct, including the control of her body in public, built her father's honour and with this the possibilities of selling paintings. Hence, the guardian of wealth was the woman and her sexual purity, which when spoiled diminished the power and possession of her family and its men.
To little Delia though it appears that her mother resisted these rules of conduct consciously by smiling at men on the tram and wearing with joy the feminine dresses she made herself, obstaculating the aspirations of social rise to petit bourgeoisie her father aimed for so strongly after the miseries of war. In the course of the film, the adult Delia realises that the distorted image she had of her mother as an unruly woman was only because her frustrated father treated her like this. She had internalised her father's ideas about women and used them to repress the pains of her sexual abuse telling a lie about her mother kissing another man which led to the separation of her parents.
For the Italian woman and the Italian society the 1950s and 1960s brought a social modernisation which could not be stopped, but also traumas which were not overcome but repressed. The social change, expressed in mini-skirts and pre-marital sex, remained exterior and Delia, like many contemporary women, is surrounded by a male mentality still dating from the time of her childhood. Not much has changed for the Italian woman of the 1990s as Delia is still understood in the categories of virgin and whore. She can only liberate herself from this mentality and prejudice against women by leaving Naples, leaving what represents her suffocation and conceiving her femininity as a right which she has neglected herself so far by not having a partner or children.
Then, the film represents Italian women on a path of mediation between a traditional patriarchal mentality and emancipation. It gives voice to an emotional and psychological history of generations of Italian women still looking for its place in official history.

In conclusion, Italian cinema of the 1990s and 2000s portraits a marked difference in the relationship the genders have with the past. The man is connoted with the historic genre and He does not question the narrative discourses on the past. They are presented as fact, even though from a personal, interior mode of narration like in Crime Novel. Male protagonists are shown to trust an institutionalised and historicised past and its representation, stressing traditional gender identities and roles using them as a point of reference to position the social difficulty in dealing with the obscurity of this past. The confrontation of the woman with history, instead, passes through the questioning of what is given as true narrative of the past; therefore the detective genre is often applied. She embarks on the dismantling of what appears truthful and searches for the authentic images and words behind discourses created by and in relation to men. The past, referred to specific historic periods like World War II or the 1950s is never made the core means for identification, as happens in male centred films. For Delia the past is a fact that has taken her identity and influences her present life.
Italian cinema's re-admittance of consciousness about history among both genders is crucial, because as the film analyses have shown, not all conditions from the past are overcome by the Italian society and the portrait of official history is still bound to traditional gender understandings.

Rada Bieberstein

Crime of Honour

Pietro Germi's social criticism about the Southern question in Divorce Italian Style (1961)

To rediscover the significance and diversity of the Italian cinema of the 1960s is a challange, especially when trying to work out not only the film aesthetic but the social and cultural value of films who picture Southern Italy. In the following, the focus will not lie on the security of the timely distance which is treated in the historic interpretations of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard / Gattopardo (1963), nor on certain political aspects of the region discussed in the films of Francesco Rosi. Rather, the question of national identity as presented in the Mediteranean or Sicilian comedy will be investigated.

Three are the masterpieces of the Mediteranean comedy: Divorce Italian Style / Divorzio all'italiana (1961) and Seduction Italian Style / Sedotta e abbandonata (1963) by Pietro Germi and Marriage Italian Style / Matrimonio all'italian (1964) by Vittorio De Sica. However, the South of Italy is not a homogenious territory, so that the Naples from Marriage Italian Style discusses different social and cultural issues than the grotescs of Germi's Sicilian countryside. Therefore, lets focus on Divorce Italian Style.

The golden years of the commedia all'italiana have made the themes and problems of Italian society of the 1960s their prime issue discussing the economic miracle, consumerism, the anxieties of the individuals and the battle of the sexes. The comedies of Germi, instead, comment on the society of Southern Italy - its structure, mechanisms and rules.

Divorce Italian Style has been of great importance to Italian film history offering many opportunities for discussions and analysis like it immense social significance not only to have reflected on national customes and certain laws, but to have given voice to a reality, the impossibility to dissolve a marriage, about which the Catholic Curch and the leading party had prohibited any mention. Further, much has been written about the role of the film in Germi's career and about his use of the body for comedy. Not at last, the impact the film had on the genre of comedy and its influence on contemporary Italian directors like Giuseppe Tornatore (1956) need to be mentioned.

Rather, the aspects which locate the film in the national discussion on the nation's identity and the question of the South / la questione meridionale will be examined, because as Gian Piero Brunetta (1) said: "Divorce Italian Style does not aim at putting the spotlight on archaic aspects of a society apart from Italy, but wants to show that the backwardness of the South is part of the national story that needs to be understood and approached in order to understand its role in the block of the modernization of the country."

Divorce Italian Style then is a realistic portrait of Sicily during the 1960s - a small town with disoccupied and illiterate people, with the main topic of the town's men of honour being women, the Comunist party giving dance night for men only and the Catholic Church advising its sheep to give their political vote to the Christian Democrats with whom the Church will block among others the intriduction of a divorce law untill 1970.

This is to say that Germi does not place the characteristics adn problems of the South among outlwas like in In the name of the law / Nel nome della legge (1948) like he did in his previous films, but in the context of the customes and rules of behaviour between the sexes, which are encouraged through the national legislation like the laws in favour of crimes of honour show.

The main character, Fefè, wants to free himself from his wife, because he has fallen in love with his cousine Angela. But he can't marry her, as divorce is not possibile in Italy of the time. As a solution to his problem he considers the crime of honour and the film evolves aroung his plotting of the offence of his honour his wife would have comitted, allowing him this way to proceed with the crime of honour.

The film shows newspapaer articles on trials for crimes of honour and shows court scenes. Fefè will read ot loud the article 587 on the crime of honour, which says: "How causes the death of a spose, a daughter or a sister, because he has come to know of her intimate relationship outside marriage ina state of rage and this relationship offens his honour or the one of the family, faces three to seven years of jail."

This absurd law leans on two fundamental pillars of Sicilian society, which are honour and the right and obligation to self-justice - two features which during the 1960s still made part of the ideal image of a Sicilian and especially of Sicilian manhood. Yet, it must be said that these characteristics have not lost any of their significance during the 1970s as Lina Wertmüller's film The seduction of Mimì / Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (1972) shows. While the imposibility to disolve a marriage had drastic consequences in Southern Italy, less fatal solutions were found in the North like living apart, even though this could have dramatic consequences too like the film Marriage outlaws / I fuorilegge del matrimonio (1963) by the Taviani brothers tells.

But Germi makes the game no pleasure neither fort he protagonist nor fort he spectators, as he gives the imaginary lawyer of Fefè the task to cite the exact meaning of the word "honour" from a lexikon: "Honour ist he sum of moral and civil attributes which make a man respected and respectable in the community he lives in. Ist his something bygone?" However, Germi is not only a moralist but also a Catholic and he unmasks with a biblical phrase the hypocrisy with which Sicilian men regard issues of honour and women, those men who love spying other men's wifes: "Who looks at a woman with passion has already sinned in his heart." Both argumentations of the lawyer on honour and women ar ein favour of Fefè and the crime of honour, but put in relation to the historic context of Sicily in the 1960s, they are only ridiculous, because Fefè uses the very rules of the Siclian society against the system. This is to say, as he can not divorce he looks fort he wholes in the value system of the society and of the national law, to ensure that he can marry his loved one anyway. It needs to be said though, that despite the love for his cousin, he is aware that his persuit of personal satisfaction is insane when it requests the death of his wife. Yet, he does not question the Siclian concept of honour nor the existance of a law in favour of the crime of honour. This is done by the film for him, for the Italian society and for Italian legislation.

At first sight one could conclude that Germi's film simply exposes the ridiculousness of the legitimation of the crime of honour and with this if certain Sicilian traits, but in a more sublte and significant way he accuses other, bigger, national mechanisms in the encouragement of the Sicilian mentality like the Chatholic Church, the instittution of the family and the local community - the principal point of social reference of the country. The influence of the church was greater in the South than in the North and it eagerly took part in all events of the local communities. In the film for example, the evening when the small town's cinema was crowded as all wanted to see the scandalous film The sweet life / La dolce vita (Fellini 1960), Fefè's wife decided to escape with her lover. Fefè's private affairs become the town's gossip and the catholic priest does not hesitate to use the incicdent to talk against the Fellini's film as he considers the behaviour of the woman a result of a certain kind of art - which is La dolce vita, a film that fosters sin and bad behaviour. With this sequence Germi makes clear that the Church was approving the patriarchal and hirarchical concept of authority on the the Sicilian society is grounded and which reflects in the structure of the family and the relations between the sexes.

Another community, the one of the Comunist Party, took a different position to the one of the Church. The speaker announced to his comrades that the moment had arrived in which also Sicily had to face the secula problem of the emancipation of the woman and he asks of them an onjective and democratic opinion about the behavious of the woman. Great was the speakers astonishment when he heard his comrads shout swear words. This understanding of the woman by Sicilian men, which conceived her only as vergin and saint or prostitute and sinner, was soon to be confronted with greater freedom, mobility and independance of the Italian woman, which wore mini-skirts, worked and drove cars. The first to not this, would be Fefè, as his new wife wears an interesting bikini in the last shot of the film and flirts with a sailor.

On a first look, it seems that Germi uses his portrait of Fefè and the inhibitants of the small town only to show the origins of the cultural, social and legal backwardness of Italy. But Germi's social engagement is read differently by the Sicilian director Tornatore (2): "In his way, Germi was a free man: he didn't hesitate to poke ironic fun at themes and people that the critics and society of the day were afraid to touch."

The critical discourses of Germi's films about the state of the South were ignored by most critics of the past, labelling him as a moralist and as a constructor of prejudice, because his description of Fefè was a stereotype of the Sicilians which was to close to the image the Italians had in their collective consciousness. The image of the infantile and self-centred Fefè with his moustaches, half closed eye-lids and this hair full of gel became the international image of the Sicilians and of the Italians. Yet. To reduce Germi's comedies to a play with stereotypes does not due him justice, rather he made visible the obvious. To the directors, the contributions of his films in "setting a beginning of the important and significant act of moral self-criticism, the exam of consciousness, which will be significant in order to liberate the Italians from their psychological state of puerile immaturity in which they like to abbandon themselves, because it prohibits them to see preoblems clearly, which makes them deny the knowledge of reality and its battles." (3)

Germis description of the reality in Divorce Italian Style, which was so tragic that it became comical and grotesc, has made laugh many international spectators, but to the home audience it left also a bitter-sweet aftertaste. However, his depiction of the Siclian mentality, which in the past and in the present needs to be described as archaic, is confronted with his modern understanding of cinema as spectacle where voice-overs and music become the film's narrators, where an unexpected use of the zoom and o subjective and narrative camera were the commentators of the screen-happenings and fast editing and the rising of the recording time made his characters appear grotesc. So, the contrast between an industrialised and emancipating country in movement as represented by the camera, the recorder, the ventilator, the train, the car and the pictures of the movie and the Sicilian mentality, encouraged by the Italian law, the Catholic Church and certain political powers, which refuses the progress if society and the emancipation of the individual, is also shown on the visual level.

Divorce Italian Style then is so important to the discourse of the question of the South and to the finding of the national identity, because, as Germi (4) says: "Cinema helps humans to see themselves, to get to know themselves. That‘s why cinema is unentbehrlich for the Italians. Because if they suffer something, than it is the chronic disease to have never learned to consider themselves concretely, to judge themselves."

Rada Bieberstein

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(1) Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del cinema italiano: Dal miracolo economico agli anni Novanta. vol. 4. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001, p. 371. "[…] non vuole puntare l'attenzione su aspetti arcaici di una società staccata dal resto dell'Italia, ma vuole dimostrare come il sottosviluppo del meridione faccia corpo con la storia nazionale, ne sia una componente da affrontare e capire nella sua specificità e nel ruolo frenante rispetto alle spinte modernizzatrici."

(2) Pietro Germi. The Latin loner. ed. M. Sesti. Milan: Olivares, 1999, p. 71.

(3) Caldrino, Orio. Pietro Germi, la frontiera e la legge. Rome: Bulzoni, 2004, p. 27 „[...] a dare inizio a questa importante, decisiva opera di autocritica morale, a questo esame di coscienza, che sarà decisivo per far uscire tutti noi italiani da quello stato di puerile immaturità psicologica cui spesso ci abbandoniamo, perdendo il contorno preciso dei problemi, rinunciando a conoscere la realità, a combattere.“

(4) Caldrino, Orio. Pietro Germi: la frontiera e la legge. Rome: Bulzoni, 2004, p. 27. „Perchè il cinema aiuta gli uomini a vedersi, a conoscersi. E il cinema è proprio indispensabile agli italiani: i quali, se soffrono di un male cronico, soffrono proprio di questo: di non aver mai imparato a sapersi vedere con concretezza, a sapersi giudicare.“

Early Bulgarian Cinema | (top)

Curiosities from Alexandr Janakiev's publication "Cinema bg" 2003

Bulgaria has the youngest and least well known film history among the Eastern European countries. This is not due to a missing film production, not even nowerdays, or to a low technical or aesthetic quality. To cinema enthusiasts the Bulgarian animation film and films like The goats horn / Kozijat rog (1971) are well known. Maybe one of the reasons for the little knowledge about Bulgarian film abroad lies in the history and culture of the country itself, not at last because Bulgarian film makers refer continuously to their history like in the current film Letter from America / Pismo ot Amerika (2001). Bulgarias position of a bridge between the political, ethical, cultural and religious worlds of the West and of the East makes dealing with its history rather special and complex.

The first Lumière apparatus came to Russe, a town along the Danube, in 1897 showing newsreels. The Bulgarian audience had a number of technical devices producing "moving pictures" to choose from like the Bioscop 1904 and the Biograph 1908. Vladimir Petkov was the first Bulgarian to buy a Cinematograph in 1903 and travel around the country.
The first film shots made in Bulgaria took also place in 1903. The Englishman Charles Nobel travelled to Bulgaria on order to shoot the Uprising of Ilinden in which the Macedonians opposed their Ottoman oppressors.

The interest of the Bulgarian public in film was so big that the first cinema was built in 1908 in Sofia. This building "Modern Theatre" (Moderen teatr) survived the bomb attacks of the Second World War and is used as cinema still today. „Modern Theatre“ became the official representative of Pathé in Bulgaria and Macedonia. Two shows a day were offered and the programme was changed three times a week. In 1913 the daily shows rose to a number of four, at times five viewings. Thanks to the founder and owner of „Modern Theatre“, Karlo Vakaro, a big number of cinemas where built throughout the country. By 1924 the company „Modern Theatre“ had obtained such a position on the marked that it was the biggest film distribution company on the Balkans and the Near East, having offices in Bukarest, Istambul, Solun, Izmir, Belgrad and Athens.

The strengthening of cinema in the Bulgarian industry and society brought along the first Bulgarian film pioneers. The first Bulgarian films and documentations were made around 1909 - 1910. The significance of the company „Modern Theatre“ shows also in her role in producing the first Bulgarian feature film. In 1914 the theatre actor Vasil Gendov (1891 – 1970), the first all-round talent of Bulgarian cinema, persuaded the company to this project. In Blgaran is galant / Blgaran e galant, which had its premier on 13. January 1915, Gendov played the main role and was director. This comedy tells the story of Blgaran who falls in love with a young lady and can not let his eyes of her. The lady decides to teach Blgaran a lesson because of his impertinence. She lets him accompany her to the market and pay the bill in an expencive restaurant. On their walk the lady meets her husband and suggests to him to take a carriage so that the "carrier" can be freed from the weight of the purchases made. The couple drives away the carriage and leaves Blgaran behind.
Between 1927 and 1939 Gendov shot four other films talking in a melodramatic manner about the life in the big city. During the Second World War nearly all his films were destroyed in the bombings. After the war in 1948 it was the task of this pioneer of the Bulgarian film to built up an film archive from which was the beginning of the later National Bulgarian Archive.

Among the Bulgarian critics and intellectuals serious and openminded discussions about cinema and film took place quite early. They realized the success this medium had with the public and thought of how to use it for the intellectual and spiritual education of its users. This characteristics of Eastern European film to perform not only the task of entertainment but also of education via film is important in the Bulgarian mentality. From the era of the silent film until today film serves to cope with a difficult history covering also 500 years of Ottoman tyranny. In 1913 the first edition of the journal "Cinema" (Kino) came to light. The film and art critic Cavdar Mutafov (1898 – 1954) commented on all films of world cinema which also came to Bulgaria like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (1923). Kiril Krstev (1904 - 1991), humanist and writter, published in 1929 his book „The attempt of an aesthetics of cinema".

A very particular educational tast had the school kinematograph initiated by the state. This institution was found in 1922 and aimed to spread knowledge in schools by the production and showing of documentary films. Throughout the country either mobile units or cinema hall in the schools were built. For the support of this institution in 1925 the "State Film Laboratory" (Drzavna proizvoditelna filmova laboratorija) was found which later came to produce most of the films screened. With these institutions the beginning of the Bulgarian state film industry is marked. It is only in 1941 that the school kinematograph ceded its activity.

The high interest of the Bulgarian society in cinema lead to the consideration of an institutionalized educations for the jobs in film indutry. In 1921 three schools existed occupying themselves only with drama and acting education. Also in 1921 the school "Luna" and its film production and distribution company were found. For a long time this was the only institution in Bulgaria providing an education for the various technical jobs in film industry. The history of higher education in cinema and film beginns in 1973 with the foundation of the "Higher Institute of theatre art" (Vis institut za teatralno izkustvo VITIZ) in Sofia, which since 1990 has become the "National academy of theatre and film art" (Nazionalna akademija za teatralno i filmovo izkustvo NATVIZ).

During the 1920s „Modern Theatre“ had a vast offer of films though dominantly German, American and French productions. In the middle of the decade the number of American films rose considerably because of the branch of FANAMET in Bulgaria. FANAMET was the union of three big American companies: Famous Players Film Company (later Paramount Pictures), First National and Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. The advantage of having this office in Bulgaria was that the American productions didn't take two to three years to come after their releases. In 1928 the represenation was shut down. Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer opened its independant office in Sofia in 1930.
At the beginning of the 1930s the Bulgarian cinema leaves its beginnings behind and will turn to more professinal film productions in the years to follow.

Rada Bieberstein

Ciao Bella | (top)

New Italian cinema

Bread and Tulips / Pane e tulipani (1999), The last kiss / L'ultimo bacio (2001), Casomai (2003) - who doesn't know it, the Italian cinema of the last years. Who could be more suitable for playing the main part in these films than the female.
The significance of the woman to the cinema of Europe's macho national is nothing knew. It is because of this and the apparent male dominance in Italian culture that brilliant cultural advocates like Antonioni and Fellini have questioned, undermind and ridiculed in their filmes the role of the male. The discussions on gender in film, its conventiones and stereotypes, have always had a particular way of articulation by focusing on the female characters. Todays attention on the female heros in Italian cinema is therefore only the continuation of a tradition of film makers to signal or illustrate changes occuring or those which should take place in the social and cultural machinery of Italian society.

Antonioni's films of the 1960s use the sensitivity of the woman to point out the consequences of the economic miracal for the individual. Fellini focused on certain male fears rising from the changing role and situation of the woman in society instead.

Through the last years the Italian society has undergone substabtial social, cultural and economic changes with which she does not seem to know how to deal. The image of emancipated women is being challanged by a reestablished image of Italy from 100 years ago. Working, divorced and sinlge mothers are facing traditional mothers and house wifes. This is at least the image Italian mass media offer of reality.

The question remaining: is the focus on the woman and her representation in Italian cinema today a step along the traditional footpath of Antonioni und Fellini and with this an attempt to offer suggestions for new relations between the sexes in the Italian society or are these love-films, fantasy worlds and new interpretations of the Commedia all'italiana only a new cover for an old idea of gender role models?

Some Thoughts on Fritz Lang in America | (top)

Evil, destiny and Dr. Mabuse

The films of Fritz Lang focus on the destiny of life. The German director splits and multiplies his characters in order to show that evil has many faces. The "Dr. Mabuses" of Lang have accompanied his work also after his emigration to America in 1934.

The stories of Fritz Lang's films are similar: an innocent person becomes involved in a socially dreadful situation. This situation is not within his own power. Fate has taken its course. The rebellion of the hero against this destiny is the actual fight he has to face, but will not win. Society asks too much of him. Too many are the possibilities, options and situation he has to manage. However, all of these will add to the fact that the hero will not be the sameafter this fight. Evil has taken a bit of his goodness.

The theme of destiny accompanies Lang throughout his work. In some of his German films like Destiny / Der müde Tod (1921) Lang sees fate as something the human being can not escape from. In other films like Dr. Mabuse: King of Crime / Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) it is a single person to represent evil, deciding upon the fate of the others. At the time of his emigration to America Lang understands this approach to life as „a negative attitude, showing the triumph of evil and a waste of human life for nothing.“(1)

In his films to come the characters will take charge of their lives and will therefore determin their destiny. It will be the person's character to reveal if he is good or bad and on which path of life he has chosen to walk. Questions like: "Where and when does guilt begin?" and "What is innocence?" will be at the centre of Lang's films.(2)

Lang takes another element of his German films over to America: the character of Dr Mabuse. In America Lang will make no other film with the figure of Mabuse. Instead, he will distribute his main features - the ability to transform into different personalities and to perform different social roles - among his new American characters.

This way Lang incorporates in a new way some of the principal questions of modernity into his films: "How and which way does the personality of the human being survive in the fragmented modern world?"; "How does the perception of oneself as part of a mass influence the individual?" and "How are these questions linked to the phenomenon of the city?"

Good and evil are still to be distinguished in his early American films. He still believes in the good of people as long as they fight their destiny and overcome it. In Fury (1936) Joe Wilson saves the lives of 22 people. Yet he does it so he himself canbe part of the living again. Frank James in The Return of Frank James (1940) will have to eliminate all people and objects that clinch him to his past. Only this way he can return to the freedom of the living. Good triumphes over evil. To the contrary, in his last American film Lang will not make a difference between the good and the bad people. The distinctions have become invisible.

The city of modernity is the place where people become anonymous. In this zone of non-existance it is possible to create illusions, blind people and commit crimes. The city offers various possibilities for people to create and live different personalities and identities.

In Lang's early films mass media served justice whereas at the end of his career it turned only into another part of the machinery without mercy - destiny. Destiny does not use guises any more as Dr. Mabuse used to. It demonstrates its power over the protagonists and objects by presenting itself in the guise of goodness.

Fritz Lang seems to be a director who had lost or given up his faith of the good in people. Before Lang returned to Germany he had given up on looking for the human beings themselves. „In fact people do not want to know who or how they really are, and they are certainly not interested in knowing their fellow human beings.“(3)

Rada Bieberstein

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(1) Eisner, Lotte: Fritz Lang, New York: Da Capo Press, Inc. 1976, p. 147

(2) ibid., p. 148

(3) ibid., p. 359

Vladimir Visotsky: the Actor - Myth | (top)

Actor, Poet, Singer, Philosopher

Well 25 years after the death of Vladimir Visotsky he still remains a myth. Which image has this leading figure of the Soviet culture of the 1960s and 1970s today and why is he still so fascinating?

Vladimir Visotsky said already in 1973 to be re-interpreting himself: "I don't sing my songs always the same way. I don't only tune the strings of my guitar, I also tune the words with regards to the mood of my audience, to the historic moment and to my own feelings."

Vladimir Visotsky was well aware of the multiple roles of actor, singer, poet, writer, rebel he presented his various audiences with. Using certain signs and symbols in his work he knew about their arbitrariness, about the importance of their context and about their intertextuality with his other texts. Visotsky has always aimed at overlapping and merging his different images and roles like for example when he sang his songs in his films.

However, the historical situation he was working in tried to press his public and social responsabilies into one particular image or direction and to oppress others. Despite these circumstances Visotsky had his own understanding of the multiple roles he embodied.

The canonic and predefined associations the arts of Vladimir Visotsky were allowed to envoke in his audience, according to the political context of his days, were always accompanied by the knowledge of the audience of these restrictions and their predisposition to read his art on multiple levels. This leads to the conclusioin that also today Vladimir Visotsky and his arts have to be read as a polysemic construction.

It is this polysemi that allowes Visotsky today to be of interest not only to his old but also to a new audience - nealy 25 years after his death. For the main message underlying all of Visotsky's roles is a universal one: humanity, love and not to fear to live.

Dyer's star theory will serve to read across the myth of Vladimir Visotsky's various self-representations and images:

Industry output deals with the publication of Visotsky's work. His films, poems and songs are meanwhile available on various media. Also as part of this output has to be considered the scientific research on Visotsky and its ways of public presence.

The second point is media output. The coverage on Vladimir Visotsky's 20th anniversary of his death in the year 2000 in a number of national and international media, not to forget the live coverage of the commemoration ceremony in Moscow on television, are noteworthy.

The public interest in Visotsky and his arts have left the euphoria of the public space behind and have turned towards the reflective inside of his admirorers - his tomb has always visitors with fresh flowers and whenever Shakespeare's Hamlet is studied at school one does not make use of just any theatrical interpretation, but of the one made by the Taganka Theater Group staring Vladimir Visotsky.

Point four of Dyer's star theory reflects upon what the star says and does. The television programmes and newspaper articles in which his quotes are to be found do not lack any up-to-date touch. This fact only strengthens the observation of the conscious polysemi of Visotsky and his images and conferms that he has actively contributed to the construction of his myth.

Today it is mainly the task of the researchers to ensure that the multiple levels and images of Visotsky and his work are examined in their context as a whole, just like he himself has constructed the material of his public persona and work.

If Visotsky is to be reduced to only actor or only poet or only singer or only rebel and the merging of these roles is omitted, than we, researchers and fans alike, will face a star that Emerson called boring and with this the vanishing of a myth.

Rada Bieberstein

At the Margins of Italy | (top)

Understanding the Condition of Women and of the South through Italian Cinema

The following brief considerations investigate the representation of the historical, cultural and social conditions that have caused the marginal position of women and of southern Italy in national film history. This location at the periphery of film is not defined by a small number of female characters or films on the South and the southern question (la questione meridionale), but by the use Italian cinema makes of them: both subjects have frequently been the symbols of the legal, social and cultural margins of the nation.

The analyses of a range of films from Italian film history is useful to discuss the historical conditions for the marginalisation of both subjects and to reveal how their cinematic image has reflected upon the consideration of both subjects in society. One aspect in particular, the concept of honour as it developed in Italy during the 19th century, needs to be considered in greater detail. It influences strongly the consideration of women and sexuality to the present and defines the southern Italian society until today. Not lastly, it deeply intertwines the apparently distinct subjects of women and southern Italy.

Film from the 1960s like Divorzio all'italiana / Divorce Italian Style (Germi 1960) or Sedotta e abbandonata / Seduction Italian Style (Germi 1964) and more recent productions like Amore molesto / Nasty Love (Martone 1995), Malèna / Malena (Tornatore 2000) or Respiro / Grazia's Island (Crialesi 2003) are examples for the persistence of this theme throughout national film history. In specific they illustrate how gender rules and conventions of a particular social condition - the rural Italy of the 19th century in which the honour and respectability of men was defined by the sexual purity of the women of their family - have determined the consideration and value of women in Italy.

While many films on the marginal condition of women are set in the South and linked to the southern set of mind, the representation of the South of Italy as at the margins of the nation is related to far reaching economic and political choices. These have been determined mostly during the 19th century and have fostered social phenomena like the concept of honour and criminal organisations like the Mafia. The films In Nome della legge / In the Name of Law (Germi 1948), Il Gattopardo / The Leopard (Visconti 1966), I 100 passi / 100 Steps (Giordana 2003) and Gli Angeli di Borsellino / Borsellino's Angels (Cesareo 2000), for example, cover various aspects of the southern question reaching from the unification of the Italian state in 1861, to the rise of criminal organisations and to the present day investigations into the politics and economics of the South shedding light on this marginalised aspect of Italian society.

The investigation of the representation of women and southern Italy in the nation's film history will lead to the conclusion that the reasons for this place at the periphery lie in history and politics. They are used as backdrop to focus critically on the consequences these situations have determined. Hence, to cinema women and the South are the metaphor for the problems and malfunctions of Italian society in general, because they are marginalised from other public discourses. At the same time the cinematic representation of the subjects is the only mass effective way to raise social consciousness about their condition at the margins.

Rada Bieberstein