"Il mio viaggio in Italia" is a Documentary that
is a fascinating account of
the history of Italian cinema from the end of
World War II to about 1961,
that will be THE DEFINITIVE work of that important
period of Italian Cinema,
that touches on a hundred films. It was produced
for Italian Television, and
executive produced by fashion king Giorgio Armani.
It has been shown in
theaters in NY and Los Angeles.
The raves of the critics are resounding in praising
the Entertaining and
Enlightening manner that this documentary material
is handled, and an
Ultimate in Edutainment.
Four brief Critiques are followed, by Three Reviews,
and Five Hyperlinks.
They will bring you to your feet for a standing
ovation.
=======================================================
It's a moving and enthralling exercise, touched with genius – and,
at four
hours, six minutes, the best value you'll ever get from a trip to the
cinema....Clyde Jeavons
My Voyage to Italy is a love letter (to the movies, to Italy, to his
parents,
and especially to Rossellini, Visconti and Fellini) just as passionate,
reckless and beautiful.....Gary Mairs
"Firmly establishes the brilliant filmmaker as invaluable an educator
as he
is a director." -- Frank Scheck, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
"Will forever change and deepen the way you look at cinema."
Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES
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My Voyage to Italy [Il mio viaggio in Italia]
If Martin Scorsese never made another movie (which heaven forbid),
he could
unquestionably sustain a career as one of the greatest-ever teachers
of film.
This is an epic master-class in how to watch films, how to interpret
a
director's intentions, how to enjoy cinema (there is one marvelous
digression
in which Scorsese freezes the action to reveal the fleeting subtlety
of an
actor's comic timing). But this is more than a brilliantly entertaining
tutorial. A follow-up to the director's Personal Journey Through American
Movies (1995), My Voyage to Italy takes Scorsese – and us – back to
Italy,
to his Sicilian roots ('My grand parents were Sicilian emigrants who
were
barely literate in Italian. So it was through Italian films that I
actually
began to discover my family'), where we are treated to an impassioned,
analytical tour of modern Italian cinema, from the Neorealist revolution
wrought by Visconti and Rossellini, via De Sica and Antonioni, up to
Fellini's 8 1/2 (yes, there's more, much more to come). Made in 35mm,
with
generous film extracts, it's a moving and enthralling exercise, touched
with
genius – and, at four hours, six minutes, the best value you'll ever
get from
a trip to the cinema.....Clyde Jeavons
Director Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter Kent Jones, Martin Scorsese, Raffaele Donato, Suso Cecchi
D'Amico
Country USA-Italy,Year 2001,Running time 246 minutes
Sponsored by:Turner Classic Movies
RLFF Homepage
http://www.rlff.com/db_world/cinema.cgi/films/view_203.htm
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My Voyage to Italy (Il Mio Viaggio in Italia ) (1999)
Martin Scorsese
Internet Movie Database
As his own filmmaking curdles into empty virtuosity - Bringing Out
the Dead,
The Age of Innocence and Casino are all as dazzling as they are completely
unnecessary - Martin Scorsese has positioned himself as the cinema's
official
goodwill ambassador. He's been instrumental in the restoration and
re-release
of such classic films as The Golden Coach and Purple Noon. Long out-of-print
critical works by James Agee and Vachel Lindsay have been republished
under
his imprimatur. And if you tune into any documentary about cinema,
you'll see
him interviewed: garrulous, intense, crisply professorial in his sleek
Armani
suits, preaching the gospel of the movies.
Scorsese's new documentary, My Voyage to Italy,
is a passionately
idiosyncratic history of the Italian cinema, framed by stories about
his
immigrant family. Four hours long and comprised mainly of film clips
and
voice-over narration, it may seem like something only the most hardcore
of
movie geeks could love. Yet it's among the best films of Scorsese's
career, a
welcome return to form that gives unexpected hope for his upcoming
fiction
film, Gangs of New York.
This is not an encyclopedic tour of a national cinema.
Rather than
include a minute or two from a hundred films, Scorsese instead talks
through
substantial portions of about a dozen major works. These sequences
are edited
for time but never feel truncated. (Editor Thelma Schoonmaker uses
wipes to
distinguish between the cuts made for the documentary and those in
the
original material.) The unique rhythms of the original sequences are
respected, so that even when La Dolce Vita is cut to its highlights,
it still
maintains the turgid pacing of Fellini's original.
The film follows the careers of the great neo-realist
directors from the
eruption of the movement at the end of World War II through their growth
away
from grim naturalism into opulent period drama and surrealist fantasy.
Key
later figures - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci and the Taviani
brothers most prominently - are missing from the film, and a number
of the
Italian cinema's greatest achievements (Nights of Cabiria, The Leopard,
The
Conformist) are mentioned only in passing or neglected altogether.
This narrow focus comes not just because the neo-realists
comprise
Italy's most important contribution to the cinema, but also because
Scorsese
saw these films on television when growing up in a Sicilian neighborhood
in
Queens, New York. These works announced themselves as completely different
from the Westerns and musicals this movie-mad six year old was used
to. In
one of the film's most illuminating sequences, he butts a Roy Rogers
western
up against Roberto Rossellini's Paisan. The contrast is startling,
and gives
us a sense of what these films must have looked like in the late '40's.
The
Rogers is all primary colors, stirring music and the sort of broadly
heroic
storytelling young boys devour. The Rossellini is something else entirely:
stark black and white, no music at all, languid rhythms, non-professional
actors and a brutal story that edges forward incrementally rather than
leaping from event to event.
At its best, My Voyage to Italy manages enormous
complexity within a very
simple structure. As Scorsese works through passages from Rome: Open
City or
Umberto D, he ties the films to his family's history and makes clear
how
being touched by these films spurred him to make his own. He shares
his
awakening to the possibilities of the medium. His utter absorption
in these
films - he clearly knows this work intimately, and is as erudite as
he is
passionate about it - points inescapably to his own films. Sometimes
the
connections are obvious: Mean Streets, for instance, is a reworking
of
Fellini's I Vitelloni. The most exciting passages, however, point far
beyond
such easy correspondences. Scorsese's examination of Rossellini
demonstrates
that the ambivalent spirituality and drive for transcendence in his
own
movies has roots not just in his life but in the art he prizes; once
it is
understood what Scorsese sees in these films, the formal strategies
he
borrows from them gain weight beyond simple homage.
The early neo-realist work is most often shown in
spliced, scratchy 16mm
dupes, the blacks and whites washed out with time to a murky gray.
(The
videos are worse: the same terrible prints transferred too brightly
to read
the subtitles.) Here, the prints are lovingly restored, and it's finally
possible to see just how beautifully photographed these films were.
In their
austerity and the clarity of their vision, they evoke the work of great
documentary photographers like Walker Evans and Robert Frank. They
create a
rich, offhand sense of life unfolding before the camera, as though
the events
are being captured rather than being staged for our benefit.
In the final sequence, Scorsese describes Fellini's
8 1/2 as the "purest
expression of love for the cinema that I know of." This
is modesty: My
Voyage to Italy is a love letter (to the movies, to Italy, to his parents,
and especially to Rossellini, Visconti and Fellini) just as passionate,
reckless and beautiful....- Gary Mairs
My Voyage to Italy
http://www.culturevulture.net/Movies3/MyVoyagetoItaly.htm
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Il Mio Viaggio in Italia
Oct. 18, 2001
By Frank Scheck
NEW YORK -- Martin Scorsese's fascinating account of the history of
Italian
cinema from the end of World War II to about 1961, a companion piece
of sorts
to his seminal documentary "A Personal Journey Through American Movies,"
firmly establishes the brilliant filmmaker as invaluable an educator
as he is
a director. Equally personal and informative, insightful and passionate,
this
four-hour work establishes its goal of illuminating the joys of Italian
cinema to neophytes and experts alike.
Although its natural home eventually will be on video and television,
"Il Mio
Viaggio in Italia" has been picked up by Miramax for theatrical distribution;
despite its demanding length, it well deserves to be seen on the big
screen
thanks to the superb restoration of its numerous film clips. Screened
recently at the New York Film Festival, it is due to be exhibited
theatrically in Los Angeles soon.
As its title suggests, "Viaggio" makes no claims to be an exhaustive
history
of Italian cinema. Rather, it is a personal essay in which Scorsese
delivers
not so much an overview but rather a guide to the films and filmmakers
who
have had the biggest influence on him. Staring directly into the camera
in a
series of monologues, he describes his early years growing up in Little
Italy, watching Italian films broadcast on a black-and-white 16-inch
TV set.
Although there is a brief segment dealing with Italian silent epics,
"Viaggio's" first part deals principally with Italian postwar cinema,
most
notably the neorealist films made by such directors as Rossellini and
De Sica.
Part Two deals with the stylistic advances made by such filmmakers as
Visconti, Antonioni and Fellini, with the latter's works, most notably
"I
Vitelloni," "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2," having a particularly important
impact on Scorsese's work. For instance, "I Vitelloni," he informs
us, was a
strong influence on Scorsese's "Mean Streets."
Admittedly, considering its four-hour-plus running time, "Viaggio" might
be
digested more easily in installments than in its current format. And
one
might argue that the film clips, while expertly chosen and edited (by
Scorsese's longtime collaborator, the brilliant Thelma Schoonmaker),
might be
a bit too voluminous; many of the excerpts go on for 15 minutes or
more. But
there is no denying the passion or intelligence of this work, which
is meant
to be an encouragement to explore the films for ourselves rather than
a dry
history lesson. On that level, "Viaggio" fully succeeds.
IL MIO VIAGGIO IN ITALIA
Miramax Films
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenwriters: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Raffaele Donato, Kent Jones, Martin
Scorsese
Producers: Barbara De Fina, Giuliana Del Punta, Bruno Restuccia
Executive producers: Giorgio Armani, Riccardo Tozzi, Marco Chimenz
Co-executive producer: Raffaele Donato
Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker
Color and black and white/stereo
Running time -- 246 minutes
No MPAA rating
Hollywood Reporter</A>
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/source-213/?letter=m
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MovieWeb : Agent Orange - My Voyage to Italy
http://movieweb.com/columns/orange/rev_italy.html
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http://www.upcomingmovies.com/myvoyagetoitaly.html
Upcomingmovies.com: My Voyage to Italy
http://www.upcomingmovies.com/myvoyagetoitaly.html
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http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/archive/ilmioviaggioinitalia.html
Slant Magazine: Il Mio Viaggio in Italia
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/archive/ilmioviaggioinitalia.html
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Boxoffice Magazine [MY VOYAGE TO ITALY (IL MIO VIAGGIO IN ITALIA) Film
Review]
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