Roberto Rosselini. Vittorio De Sica. Anna Magnani. Mario Monicelli. Sophia Loren. Luchino Visconti. Marcello Mastroianni. Michelangelo Antonioni. Monica Vitti. Federico Fellini. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Sergio Leone. Francesco Rosi. Bernardo Bertolucci. Alberto Sordi. Lina Wertmuller. Marco Bellochio.
Quite a list, si? Clearly, Italy boasts a pantheon of directors (and a few immortal actors) that few countries can match. But where, one may ask, are the household names of more recent vintage? A few filmmakers come to mind — Giuseppe Tornatore (still best known for Cinema Paradiso), Gianni Amelio (Stolen Children) and Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) — but none of them has had an international success in years. Is Italian cinema’s glorious heyday over?
Hardly, although there was a dark period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Italian moviegoers ignored the small art house films that had been their country’s trademark (not counting Fellini’s flamboyant escapades, of course) in favor of television and big-budget American movies. Directors endured a crisis of confidence over the loss of their audience, and that itself was not a positive influence on their work.
“Clash of Civilization over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio”
The health of national cinemas usually goes in cycles, and Italy’s film industry is now quite stable and prolific. But in the last several years, U.S. audiences and distributors have cooled on foreign films, in part because the list of brand-name directors has shrunk to Almodovar, Michael Haneke, Takashi Miike, and Catherine Breillat. Even when an Italian film scores a prize at Cannes and/or an American release, like Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah or Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, there’s no mass rush to memorize the filmmaker’s name, anoint him (or her) as Visconti’s heir or even see his previous or next work.