La contestation

One of these countless pseudo cinema vérité works which throve in the sixties in the wake of Godard and the events of 1968.This one is for highbrows ,die-hards.The rest of us can taketo their heel,or else they will yawn their head off.

Segment one is "l'indifference" :the beginning is some kind of illustration of Phil Ochs's song "outside of a small circle of friends"(1967);but soon enough is enough and when the reluctant driver appears ,it totally fails to convince.

Segment two is the most "avant-garde" ,so to speak ,of the lot: a dreadful pot-pourri of OM,Christian religion,group psychology(?).Some equivalent of one of Yoko Ono's pieces of work circa late sixties.

Segment three is Pasolini's contibution to this bill of fare:his favorite actor ,Ninetto Davoli,is wandering (dancing?)in the streets ,hoding a big paper flower(that's the title of the short).Let He who Hath understanding see the meaning.

Segment four is Godard's "l'amour".There are two sides:the political one,which focuses on Cuba,and some kind of self-criticism:his dogma ,his refusal to consider the movie as a story:at least here he says that it's not because you 've seen a lot of movies that you know the cinema;and that the seventh art is like maths before Euclide;and he goes not as far as to say that the nouvelle vague was Euclide.Modest,for a change.That does not make his segment interesting for all that.

Segment five takes place in an Italian university where student exchanges trivia about the Bourgeoisie's stranglehold on the culture.Plus ça change..

The precedent user complains about the different languages that they used in the different segments:now English,now Italian ,now French,even German;it's all in the cinema vérité game!

If you want to see a beautiful contemporary political movie that will not give you a headache ,take Luigi Comencini's "lo scopone scientifico" instead.

The '60s at its most annoying, this has got to be the worst of all the European portmanteau films. There's very little of worth in these shorts even if you're a die hard fan of the directors. The one possible exception is Godard's segment, "Amore," which is kind of pretty, mostly due to the two gorgeous actresses who star in it (Christine Gueho and Catherine Jourdan). Kind of an amusing cinematic deconstruction, it gets a bit lost in the leftist politics of the rest of the film. The first segment, by Carlo Lizzani, starts interestingly enough, as a cinematic study of the psychological principle of diffusion of responsibility. A woman in New York City is being attacked, but no one will help her. Then there's an auto accident, and a gravely injured woman is forced into the car of an unwilling bystander. The plot gets really silly as the driver of that car turns out to be a wanted criminal. The short just randomly stops. Bertolucci's segment comes next and is little more than some stuff left on the cutting room floor from his most recent feature, Partner. It's somewhat cinematically interesting, but it doesn't go anywhere and it gets annoying long before it ends. Pasolini's segment is third. It's probably the least annoying of the shorts, but it's also completely forgettable. Ninetto Davoli, that afro-ed boy who appears in many of Pasolini's films, walks along a busy street, often carrying a giant flower. Images of the Vietnam War are superimposed over the street scenes. Godard's sequence, which I've described above, comes next. The final and worst short is by Marco Bellocchio and Elda Tattoli. A bunch of student protesters burst into a university lecture and spout Maoist slogans. The subtitles become an uninterpretable wall of text after around one minute. It immediately brings to mind one of my favorite Kent Brockman lines from The Simpsons, when describing the 1960s: "What a shrill and pointless decade."

This film is an attempt by five different directors to present their take on the theme of "Love and Anger". Five well regarded film personalities were gathered to offer their views in a disjointed attempt to make sense of theme. Alas, what comes out on the screen is, at best, a boring display by some of these men, who have done much better work, to try to interest us with their mostly leftist views without convincing us. As DB Dumontiel commented in this pages, the more modern the five creators wanted to be, the more dated their contributions become.

Of the five segments shown, Carlo Lizzani's "L'indifferenza" is the only one that makes any sense. Filmed totally in New York, without an Italian dialog, it clearly illustrates one of the big problems in our society, and a phenomenon in our bigger cities where people totally ignore situations that claim for human intervention, as in the case of the selfish driver in this piece who tells the cops he doesn't want to get involved, and succeeds in doing so.

The Bertolucci vignette is a heavy critique on religion, as he directs the New York based theater group headed by Julian Beck and Judith Malina and members of their eclectic group performing a ritual as a church higher up is dying. The Passolini contribution shows a young actor, Ninetto Davoli, cavorting on Rome's Via Nazionale while over imposed pictures of legendary leftist icons like Che Guevara appear over the action in the film. The Godard piece, is pretentious, at best, and the last piece, by Marco Bellocchio, shows a university class as they discuss nothing.

This film might have appeared as revolutionary when it was released, but viewing it today, the only thing it elicits from the viewer is boredom and surprise in realizing that even great directors like the ones participating in this film can lay an egg without really trying.

Once interested in viewing a script outline or a detailed dialog box inspired by the short séance "DEL FIORE DI CARTA", you are kindly requested to refer to the Italian revue ANTEPRIMA, No 5, Sassoferatto , Ancona, Italy, published in January 1998, page 31, where I published the film scenario entitled "ISMAEL", with a prologue about Laura Betti's opinion Nicolas Xenios, ISMAEL, Omaggio a Pier Paolo Pazolini, Translated and adapted by Tea Boldrini. The story is about an archetypal three-membered family of the western cultural context , who walk and talk about death in their typical middle class apartment . In parallel, a Guillotine is being prepared in a medieval small town in front of the prison where the leading role, Ismael, is about to be condemned to death by the local judge. The crowd is invited to accomplish the procedure by gathering in front of the prison, where the execution will take place as soon as the flower Narcissus near his prison window will faint. The unexpected fact will be that the prisoner's daughter, after her long prayers to God, will decide to replace the real flower Narcissus near her father's window by a similar paper flower that will, naturally, never faint. The result is that FEAR of the eternity will replace the existentialists fear for DEATH and the prisoner's shadow will purchase him for ever and ever.

The text is published in Italian. You are welcomed to read and comment on it my Italian speaking friends. Bye thanks

Five short films joined together. I guess they're all about Love and Anger but then just about any story could fit that vagueness.

'Indifference' by Lizzani shows people being indifferent to a woman being attacked, homeless people, and some car-crash victims. It has an unsatisfactory ending. Was probably pretty topical at the time - a woman called of Kitty Genovese was killed in New York in 1964 while others looked on.

'Agony' by Bertolucci is awful - just a bunch of people in a room dancing around and occasionally making cryptic statements. I strongly recommend you fast-forward this one and stop it only if you seem some interesting images. At this point in watching the film I started to get worried: pseudo-intellectual artsy stuff. And we hadn't even got to the Jean-Luc Godard segment yet.

'Sequence of the Paper Flower' by Pasolini shows an idiot wandering the streets of an Italian city (Rome?) and chatting to people. Double-exposed over him are shots of war and politicians so this is probably trying to say something deep but it wasn't clear to me what.

'L'Amore' by Godard is actually pretty good! Witty dialogue between a couple talking about another couple in a film, along with some striking images. This one warrants a second viewing.

'Talk, Talk' by Bellocchio and Tattoli is also good, showing a group of students acting out a protest against university establishment. In May '68 there were many student takeovers of universities in France and around the world so this was pretty topical. The arguments are great, tackling whether to reform the system from within or to strike at it from without. My guess is that the title implies that students were engaging in too much talk and not enough action.

So only two of the five films work but at least all the films try to say something interesting which is more than most films today do.