Fifty years of Italian cinema (1955)

first Italian cinema reviews to initiate a regular and comprehensive critical service with regard to current films being shown in the various centers of film production of Italy by means of a group of correspondents. By this time, too, the enterprising Arturo Ambrosio, whose Nozze d'oro (The Golden Wedding) was one of the current successes, had returned from Moscow where he founded, as he put it, « a cinema studio under the patronage of the Czar ». While in Russia he produced Anfissa, Cossacks of the Don, Prisoner in the Caucasus and The Via Dolorosa of Reissa, the latter with Tatiana Pavlova. On the home front, meanwhile, production continued unabated with Cesarini's ineffectual Dante and Beatrice, followed by Ambrosio's own The Promised Bride and a second version by Pasquali. Nino Oxilia made In Hoc Signo Vinces (By This Sign Shalt Thou Conquer) and Joan of Arc, one of the earliest films to reveal the dark beauty of Maria Jacobini. Alberto degli Abati made a pretentious spectacle, Epopea Napoleonica (Epic of Napoleon) and Pope Pius X permitted himself to be filmed in a documentary, Le Grandi Teste Cattoliche (The Great Catholic Festival) in 1913. By this time films were as long as 4500 feet. In Hoc Signo Vinces, the longest of them all, ran to 9000 feet. « Filming in Turin is subject to the vagaries of its climate, » wrote one critic, « as far as outdoor shooting is concerned, but in Rome Cines has the sun all to itself. » Writers like the previously mentioned Oxilia and Comerio began to be attracted to the screen, journalists too, and even deputies from middle and upper echelon politics. In Rome, all film activity centered around the lively intelligence of Passini. It was the era of Administrative Councils and art committees, each with its own axe to grind in this fertile new ground, if we may be permitted a mixed metaphor. This Senator or that Deputy had a lady friend who would like to get into the movies. The right word to the right person. ...and it was done. Lawyers, esthetes, and even political columnists found their way into the studios, with the resultant nepotism, jealousies and bribes following in their wake. But the cinema has always had a tough constitution and it survived this sort of thing from the very beginning. Quo Vadis ? was the great event of 1913. Time has not dimmed the memory of its turbulent images, its great masses handled so fluidly, its barbaric circuses, Ursus among real lions, a really monstrous Nero, the whole giving a vertiginous effect through knowing direction. Ursus was played by Mario Castellano, Vinicio by Amleto Novelli, Petronius by Gustavo Serena, Poppea by Lia Orlandini, and Nero by Cattaneo. Did it contain exaggerations ? Were its esthetics of the picture post-card standard ? Was its technique not more than the perfection of mediocrity ? No matter. It is enough that Quo Vadis ? was the first Italian film to use a mass of people as the protagonist and that audiences beheld, for the first time on the screen, such solemn, terrible and overwhelming images. To insist that Italian literature, painting and the lyric theatre were copiously drawn upon for Italy's early cinema ma}' be quite true, but it is unimportant. Every country's cinema has expressed, and will continue to express, that country's artistic traditions, a national temperament that transmutes itself into a particular style. This is obvious. One cannot, therefore, denigrate Quo Vadis ? for its melodramatic appeal to the emotions without also failing to discover and define the poetic significance of Guazzoni's script, whose form was shortly to be