Italian Cinema holds a very special place in our hearts; poignantly beautiful, funny, ground breaking and forever memorable.  Italian films have changed the course of filmmaking. In celebration of the inaugural Italian Contemporary Film Festival, which will make its debut June 26^th– July 1^st in Toronto, Canada, myETVmedia takes a look at some of the most outstanding and beloved Italian filmmakers.

Federico Fellini is perhaps Italy’s most celebrated filmmaker and was most recently the subject of a retrospective presented at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Winner of 3 Oscars, Fellini created an entirely new language for cinema in films like La Strada, Amarcord and Casanova. And La Dolce Vita, considered one of the great achievements in world cinema, brought filmmaking to new heights of introspection and social consciousness. Following a journalist over the course of a week in Rome as he searches for love and happiness that he will not find, La Dolce Vita established the term paparazzi as part of the english lexicon. And who could forget Anita Eberg’s voluptuous fountain frolic, forever entrenched as a defining image in modern cinema.

Italy also brought us two of the screen’s greatest legends. Although Marcello Mostroianni and Sophia Loren each enjoyed extraordinary individual movie careers, they became one of the most enduring and successful screen couples, starring together in 14 movies over a period of 20 years, the most memorable being “Marriage Italian Style“. Loren famously remarked, “Marcello is a man who thinks like a man, talks like a man, …is a man”. The couples’ versatility is acutely on display in Ettore Scola’s ”A Special Day“, where Mastroianni in an ironic twist plays Gabriel, a gay man finding empathy and love in the arms of Loren’s Antoinetta.

Lina Wertmuller in her films, The Seduction of Mimi and Swept Away expanded Italian cinema’s exploration of sexual politics in new and remarkable ways.  In 1976, Wertmüller became the first female Director ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for the astonishing film Seven Beauties, an epic and apocalyptic narrative, very funny but deadly serious about the horror of war and survival.Wertmuller introduced the world to the diminutive but huge screen actor Giancarlo Giannini. Their symbiotic relationship through the camera lens is now the stuff of legend.

Bernardo Bertolucci continued to break ground beyond Italy’s borders in 1972 with Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. Both Brando and Schneider could not forgiveBertolucci for his surprise tactics in shooting the famous ‘butter scene. Bertolucci’s foreign explorations continued with ‘The Last Emperor’, winner of 9 Academy Awards and was the first film ever allowed by the Chinese government to be made in the Forbidden City. His latest film Me and You is premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

De Sica, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Giuseppe Tornatore, Pasolini, Moretti and Monica Bellucci.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the History of Italian Contemporary Cinema….

Alfredo Romano

Read part 2 here: https://myetvmedia.com/feature/a-brief-history-of-italian-contemporary-film-part-2/