Breathless
(1959/Godard)/The Bicycle
Thieves (aka The
Bicycle Thief/1948)/8
1/2 (1963/Fellini)/La
Dolce Vita (1960/Umbrella
Region B Import Blu-rays)/I
Cannibali
(aka The Year Of
the Cannibals (1969/Raro
Video Blu-ray)
Picture:
B+/B/B+/B+/B- Sound: B-/C+/B-/B-/C+ Extras: B-/C+/B-/B-/B-
Films: B+ (Cannibali:
B)
PLEASE
NOTE:
All these Blu-ray release except
Cannibali
are Region B Imports that will only play on Blu-ray players that can
handle that version of the format and can be ordered from our friends
at Umbrella Entertainment at the link below.
One
of the great things about Blu-ray and HDTV is seeing classic foreign
films come alive in a way unimaginable before and what follows are
four classics (two of which have not been issued on Blu-ray in the
U.S. as of this posting) and a fifth very challenging film that comes
out of the traditions and innovations of the classics...
First
we have Jean-Luc Godard's
Breathless
(1959), the film that (along with Truffaut's The
400 Blows)
launched the French New Wave, offers a fast new style of editing that
had never been seen before, took the error of the jump cut and made
it a permanent part of cinematic language and put Godard on the map
as one of the most challenging filmmakers in the world. Jean-Paul
Belmondo is the crook who steals a car, lands Jean Seberg as his new
gal from America who he convinces go escape to Italy with him, but
the police are going to get him no matter the cost in this homage to
Film Noir and love of pure cinema that continues to be an influential
landmark.
The
film holds up well and to see it looking this great is like
rediscovering it all over again. A must see for all serious film
fans (and especially filmmakers more than ever), the film has lost
little of its edge, its ideas of form and has already been issued
twice by Criterion on Blu-ray in the U.S., but this version has
different extras. They include a 16-minutes-long 1965 interview with
Godard for the TV series Tempo,
documentary Room
[or Chambre] 12, Hotel de Suede
runs 80 minutes and features interviews with Belmondo, Claude Chabrol
& Director of Photography Raoul Coutard, the 7-minutes-long
Jean-Luc
Godard According To Luc
featurette with friend Luc Moullet and the Original Theatrical
Trailer. Only Room 12 and the trailer appear on the Criterion
edition, so die hard fans will want this version.
Another
film that launched a world film movement was Vittorio de Sica's The
Bicycle Thieves
(aka The
Bicycle Thief,
1948) which (along with Roberto Rossellini's Rome
(Open City))
launched Italian Neo-Realism. All the movie studios and industry
worldwide had been wiped out after WWII except those in Hollywood and
because Mussolini was such a big film fan, that of Italy. Not that
they had many resources, but there was enough to start filming and
rebuilding. However, there was little money and actors were scarce,
so the idea of using non-actors en masse as born and this brought a
naturalistic realism to filmmaking that had never been seen before.
The result was a new movement that dealt with the real politik of a
post-WWII world and Neo-Realism was born and would influence
filmmaking worldwide all the way to Coppola's 1970s hits like the
first two Godfather
films and many more.
Here,
a simple bicycle becomes the toll of travel, progress and rebuilding
for a young man, but when it is stolen, he and his father start
searching for it all over the place. De Sica, who was also an
effective character actor himself, uses the situation as metaphor for
loss, hope, emptiness, devastation and why tendencies for Italian
isolationism and alienation needed to become the Italy of the past.
The resulting film speaks volumes about the human condition, had its
own new kind of editing style and became as much of a worldwide
sensation as Breathless
would 11 years later. Also often imitated and ripped off, it is yet
another must-see classic and remains as remarkable and vital a work
as it ever was, especially as the cinema changes again and we enter a
new era. That the film foresaw the sound-bitten world of digital
video and video clips in its sensibilities without trying is
remarkable.
Extras
include the Original Theatrical Trailer and two featurettes: That's
Life
(54 minutes) on De Sica's career behind & in front of the camera
and Cesare Zavattini (56 minutes) about the man who wrote this film,
often worked with de Sica and did much more.
As
a result of these
innovations, more giants of cinema found as much commercial success
as they did critical raves. This more writerly filmmaking that spoke
to people about people was a revelation and maturing of filmmaking as
an artform. The list of filmmakers who benefitted are many, but when
it came to self-expression, Federico Fellini was in a class by
himself. With the energy of the French New Wave, this flashiest and
most explicitly visually dynamic of all the Italian Neo-Realists took
the film form to new heights with amazing works whose content was
matched by their substance. We are lucky to look at two of his best
here.
First
we look at La
Dolce Vita
(1960), a celebration of glamour that brilliantly manages to show its
dark side along with many memorable moments that still manages to
stun viewers today. The mighty Marcello Mastroianni plays a gossip
columnist (the term paparazzi was invented by this film) who intends
to fine the best side of this glamour no matter what and capture it
as journalistically and thoroughly as he can, but he quickly gets
sidetracked by the gaudiness and gorgeous Anita Ekberg (whose dance
in The Trevi Fountain is iconic) and much more. We previous reviewed
the film in its U.S. double DVD set at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2494/La+Dolce+Vita+(DVD+set
Seven
years before singing on the iconic album with the peel-able banana
produced by Andy Warhol, singer Nico shows up as herself in this
film, later immortalized on The
Velvet Underground & Nico
album, the forerunner of Punk Rock music and so much more in itself.
That is the kind of film this is, delivering gifts that just keep on
giving. A true classic, it is great to see it again and is yet
another must-see film.
Fellini
was far from finished as a giant thinker of filmmaking and a few
years later, gave us 8
1/2
(1963), which stunned the world with its ongoing tale of a man
(Mastroianni again) trying to tell a story while trying to express
his life and having some difficulty getting all of his thoughts and
feelings out of his system. At first, it seems we'll just get a
challenging narrative with the usual Fellini touches, but then the
film starts to take all kinds of interesting detours that still
somehow seem to stay in context to our suffering protagonist. Clowns
start to show up, we land up in places hat seem familiar yet
otherworldly and yet, this is not science fiction or fantasy.
Still,
we wait for the ending and it cannot seem to end or after 138
minutes, does not end. Why? What is Fellini saying? The results
are often brilliant, added to the cinematic vocabulary and it is a
beautiful film. It also so defined the often difficult frustrations
viewers had in watching it from being used to easy-to-read book-like
narrative films that it defined what a foreign film was. Decades
later, a TV beer add recognized this with an insanely successful
campaign that asked (including an amusing imitation of the visuals of
this film) why
are foreign films so... foreign?
It
then suggested beer should not be that way, so just drink their
simple beer and enjoy, but the ad inadvertently added to the
reputation of this film. Especially because Fellini compromised
nothing on this movie, that says something about its enduring
success.
Extras
on both Fellini Blu-rays include the 55-minutes long program The
Magic Of Fellini,
with Dolce
adding a set of trailers of mostly his films, a too-brief Cinecitta,
The Home Of Fellini
clip, interviews with Ekberg, Maurizio Porro, Ekberg again with
Mastroianni on the featurette Remembering
The Sweet Life,
an 8-minutes Cinema
Forever
piece and Fellini In New York (26 minutes) rounding out some nice
extras. 8
1/2
adds a 55-minutes featurette called The Lost Ending (ha, ha) and
Federico
Fellini's Mysterious Journey,
a featurette about a mysterious film project the genius never made
entitled The
Journey Of G. Mastorna
that is very intriguing.
With
all these movements in full swing and Godard abandoning his
filmmaking style for his odd Maoist period, other voices appeared and
this often included a more political cinema. Liliana Cavani's I
Cannibali
(aka The
Year Of the Cannibals
(1969) has a deglamourized, sometimes unrecognizable Britt Ekland
playing an Italian woman furious her brother is dead and that a new
law by the fascist Italian government will not allow her to even
touch his body, let alone pick it up and give it a proper burial. He
was dubbed a rebel, killed and is left to litter the street with
hundreds of others as an example to anyone else who opposes their
power.
She
decides to do something about it, joined by a mysterious young man
(Pierre Clementi, with referential Christ moments as the film attacks
religious complacency, et al) grab the body and are on the run (not
unlike Breathless)
and haver to think of what they are going to do next. She is named
Antigone and the classic Greek play is referenced here as well, but
the film ultimately is a sometimes scathing (possibly Marxist)
critique of any Fascism in the country that bred Mussolini.
The
bodies (which would decay and worse if actually left on the streets
as long as they are here) might remind some of Director Jamie
Thraves' classic 1995 Music Video clip for Just
by Radiohead that actually has subtitles and is shot widescreen.
Whether it is saying the same thing is another matter, but the
similarities are there in the best possible ways. Ekland has never
been so good or bold, Tomas Milan rounds out the leading roles and
all are backed by a solid supporting cast in a film that might
sometimes also look like science fiction, but is something different.
Though
I think Pasolini was able to go further in attacking the same things
in Salo
(1975, see the Criterion Blu-ray review elsewhere on this site),
Cannibali
is still a fine film in its own right and to have it on Blu-ray is a
real plus.
Extras
include a paperboard slipcase for the blue case, another text-rich,
nicely illustrated booklet on the film as is the case with Raro
releases, then the Blu-ray disc adds the Original Theatrical Trailer
and an interview with Cavani that lasts just over 26 minutes.
The
1080p 1.33 X 1 black and white digital High Definition image
transfers on Breathless
and Bicycle
can show the age of the materials used, but I have never seen either
film look so good on video and plenty of hard work went into saving
these films. The 1080p 2.35 X 1 black and white digital High
Definition image transfer on Dolce
(in the Totalscope format) is better than the U.S. DVD delivering the
detail that format and transfer lacked despite offering a nice print
and the 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition black and white image
transfer on 8
1/2
like it and Breathless can show fine detail you might not expect.
The
1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Cannibali
was shot in two-perforation, vintage Techniscope and processed in
35mm dye-transfer,
three-strip Technicolor prints. We get the usual grain, but the
color is not bad, if not always what you would expect from a true
Technicolor film print. Still,
this transfer has its moments and the best efforts were obviously
made to make this look good. Director of Photography Giulio
Albonico, who worked with Cavani before, also lensed Dead
Of Summer
with Jean Seberg, The
Savage Three
and the Alain Delon Zorro
from 1975.
He could make memorable images and his work is really good here.
As
for sound, all five films were theatrical monophonic releases and are
here in different sound formats to represent their sound offered here
in DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 1.0 lossless Mono mixes save Bicycle,
which is here in Dolby TrueHD 1.0 lossless Mono. Bicycle
and Cannibali
tend to be a little weaker, though the fine Ennio
Morricone score on Cannibali
is not as bad affected as it might have been, so someone did their
best when restoring the audio.
To
order any or all of the
Umbrella import Blu-rays reviewed here, go to this link:
http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/
-
Nicholas Sheffo