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My Voyage to Italy (Il Mio viaggio in Italia) (1999)
Starring Martin Scorsese. Cinematography by Phil Abraham and William Rexer. Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. Produced by Barbara De Fina, Giuliana Del Punta, and Bruno Restuccia. Written by Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Raffaele Donato, Kent Jones, and Martin Scorsese. Directed by Martin Scorsese.
Martin Scorsese is not only one of the most highly influential and well respected filmmakers in the history of cinema, but is also one of the most well educated and respectful students of art. In 1995 he was commissioned by the British Film Institute to create a made for television documentary about the history of American moviemaking. The project was titled “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” and it was very well received and by film critics and enthusiasts.
A few years later he decided to make a companion piece to the documentary featuring the highly influential films of his parent’s native land; Italy. Despite his roots in America, Scorsese has been greatly influenced by Italian cinema and made the feature to showcase the films that have made their way into his psyche.
He begins the film by remembering the stark contrast between the fantastic American westerns that he would see in the movie theaters and the dark Italian films he would see on his family’s sixteen inch RCA-Victor television set. The Italian film industry would demand worldwide attention in the late 1940’s during the recovery of the brutal Second World War. In response to this terrible time in Italy’s history, neo-realism was born; a genre of film that would blur the lines between documentary and fiction and would expose the reality of their pain and suffering.
The neo-realism film movement began with the great Roberto Rossellini and his film Roma, città aperta. Scorsese details the evolution of Rossellini’s work from the next two films in his post-war trilogy, Paisà and Germania anno zero, to his supposed betrayal to neo-realism, Stromboli, terra di Dio.
Scorsese continues his discussion of neo-realism and its impact on the world with the works of Vittorio De Sica. De Sica is the man behind such films as Sciuscià and Ladri di biciclette (generally considered to be the peak of neo-realism). Scorsese recalls the Italian Minister of Culture’s accusations of “washing dirty linen in public” with De Sica’s bleak Umberto D.
Eventually we reach the sixties and the heyday for the amazing Federico Fellini. La Dolce vita, Fellini’s breakthrough picture, represented a new freedom in filmmaking that eventually became less of a film and more of an event. Scorsese then caps his feature with a look at 8½; Fellini’s dreamlike autobiographical project that Scorsese cites as “the purest expression of love for the cinema that I know of.”
That type of personal comment is what makes My Voyage to Italy such a special picture. Scorsese doesn’t just analyze these films in a textbook-like fashion. Instead he breaks them down and shares how they relate to him personally. Any fan of Scorsese’s work, or anyone who loves film, would defiantly be at a loss to miss this great documentary.
Budget: $???
Total US Gross: $8,527
Genre: Documentary
Runtime: 246 Minutes
US Release Date: 10/12/01
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Awards: none
Tagline: The Movies That Inspired One Of Hollywood’s Greatest Filmmakers.
Quote: “I wish that every young person with an interest in film could have had the same experience that I had back in those days; to be young, open to everything, and to walk into the theater and have your expectations not only met, but surpassed time and time again. We all had one film that was a turning point, a touchstone, and I suppose that Fellini’s 8½ was mine.”
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