A luscious film festival with all the Italia greats finishes out the Year of Italy in China this January in Beijing and Shanghai

Italian movies often conjure up images of sun drenched fields, dusty roads, cool evening shadows and the azure Mediterranean. No other country makes its physical presence so apparent on film as does Italy, and whether the film itself is shot in the intertwining back streets of Rome, the porticos of Bologna or the undulating hills of Tuscany, the mis-en-scene of the Italian drama always figures in with the unfolding of the story itself.

This unique physical character so conducive to film, and the richness of the films themselves, is the central focus of the "Italiana – Cinema Explores Italy" film festival, which will be screening movies in Beijing and Shanghai this January before moving on to Spain, France, the United States and Latin America. As the closing event of 2006’s Year of Italy in China, 30 films have been selected by the Cinecitta studio (Italy’s “Hollywood on the Tiber”) to showcase, according to festival promoters, not only the “bright sunshine and beautiful scenery” of Italy, but also the development of modern Italian cinema from the 1950s to the present.

"The Italiana [festival] wishes to be the first comprehensive 'window' on our nation to encourage both the Chinese audience and the Chinese film industry to learn more about us," said Alessandro Battisti, president of Cinecitta, during a press confernce last month.

Although the urban and rural scenery of Italy communicates a tranquil and picturesque atmosphere, the same cannot be said, however, for the filmmaking of the country itself, which has been anything but uncomplicated and uncontroversial since the 1950s.

The festival begins its selections with films shot during the post-war period when the country was on the verge of its cinematic “golden age.” Well-known and influential throughout the world, Italy can claim many luminaries both behind and in front of the camera during this period, from directors Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, to actors Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni and Alberto Sordi. The era finds Italian film moving away from the overly social character of post-war films and experimenting in new genres. One such experiment was Sergio Leone’s 1964 classic “Fistful of Dollars,” a “Spaghetti Western” that had a lasting effect on the way action movies in general were filmed thereafter.

As Fellini famously quips, “Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure” and despite this progress and innovation, the golden age of Italian cinema, with all its glamour and experimentalism, was soon supplanted by the baser predilections of Italian filmmakers and audiences. In the late 1970s, Italian cinema experienced a dramatic shift and international fame turned to international notoriety as the country became known for excessively gory, ultraviolent exploitation and horror films catering to the emerging and, as of yet, uncensored video market. The genre of the “Italian Horror” was born, and films like Ruggero Deodato’s “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980) and Joe D'Amato’s “Erotic Nights of the Living Dead” (1980) become responsible for causing the downward spiral of Italian cinema in that decade and the next.

The aesthetics of shock, sensationalism and exploitation eclipsed the art-house movies of the 1970s, and right up until the late 1980s Italian cinema sank into ill-repute and irrelevancy. Although there were a few exceptions, this state of affairs remained unchanged right up until 1990 when the release of Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso” was hailed as a return to mature filmmaking; popular attention once again sought out meaningful rather than sensationalist and commercial fare. The success of this film has been followed up by other films including Gabriele Salvatores’s “Mediterraneo” (1991), Roberto Bernini’s “Life is Beautiful” (1998) and Nana Moretti’s “The Son’s Room” (2001). When Moretti’s film (which will be screened at Italiana) won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, a front-page editorial in the Rome daily La Republica declared, "It is a victory for all those in Italy who share Moretti's love for culture, intelligence, zeal and intellectual honesty."

Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure.

As Antonio Monda, professor of Italian cinema and directing at NYU, notes, “After many years of fragility, there is a sense of going back to the more noble tradition of Italian cinema in contemporary Italian films.”

The period of 1990 to the present is widely acknowledged as a renaissance in Italian filmmaking, and Italian films are becoming more diverse, the voices of their filmmakers more polyphonous and the country is once again being internationally recognized for producing some of the world’s most exciting and innovative films.

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