One can’t help being interested in other subjects and problems and trying new directions; one can’t forever shoot films in bombed cities. We all too often make the mistake of letting ourselves be hypnotized by a certain milieu, by the atmosphere of a certain moment. But life has changed, the war is over, the cities have been reconstructed. What we needed was a cinema of the Reconstruction.
—Rossellini, 1954 in
Cashiers du Cinema hesitating to be forever linked to his Neorealistic past. A genre which, he’s widely credited with Fathering. What’s profound here is that his works outside of Neorealism were widely unsuccessful commercially (with France as an exception); translating to me that while they [Italians] “needed” a cinema of the Reconstruction - they were too wrapped up in themselves to see that the courageous life changing art they needed, was right before their vary eyes, in his work. Like most things here, Italians don’t see just how good they have it. The
birthrate is falling at an alarming rate, they basically despise foreigners in their country, and they want a premium and monopoly on the goods created here - but they take no actions other than passing laws and harassing the police to enforce the laws. In the US or UK or Canada we’d be forced to innovate, but here it basically comes down to being lazy,
men don’t want to help around the house and the women don’t want the extra work. Men blame the women and women blame the men, and in 2 maybe 3 generations, they won’t have anyone to inherit these incredible legacy businesses or carry on the traditions their forefathers worked so hard to protect, at least not of their descent. Regarding the quote above, in the case of Italy, not filmmakers, they aren’t hypnotized in the milieu of a moment but rather - their own reflection.
