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Lo Spettatore, a Cesare Zavattini journal "created with film rather than ink and paper," first issue—documentary and fiction in pointillistic blurs, various directors have a go. From dusk till dawn with streetwalkers in the Carlo Lizzani opener, young and aged in "stories of abandonment and deceit." Police raids, taunting from mooks, mementos and bambole are cold comfort at the end of a shift. Desolate figures against blank screens begin Michelangelo Antonioni's reportage on suicide attempts, the woman in the park (I Vinti, Blowup) is a Chekhov reader. A nightclub dancer on the edge of the Tiber, in "il quartiere esistenziale di Roma" a teenager with bandaged wrists. "Why are you so pessimistic?" Dino Risi's view of a busy Astoria ballroom, curlicues of swinging and flirting for the benefit of Forman and Olmi. A reporter wanders through the labyrinth of a tenement building to rumba strains, somewhere there's a marital agency, Federico Fellini on the case. The delicate matter of a werewolf who needs a wife, it goes from satirical exposé to defense of the blonde naïf at the mercy of the big city. The feature story is on the peasant girl from Palermo, seduced and abandoned and running out of options and asked to reenact her sorrow for the camera. (Half act of commiseration and half theoretician's experiment, the segment is credited to Francesco Maselli but is clearly a Zavattini thesis.) Echoes of Umberto D. by the fountain, a foreglimpse of Hitchcock's happy ending (The Wrong Man). The lighter side of news for the close, Alberto Lattuada's ode to the fine Italian art of girl-watching from furtive glances to full-on leering, just the coda for a project suspended between neo-realism and New Wave. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |