Summary:
On hearing that his old friend Alfredo has died, famous filmmaker Salvatore ‘Totò’ Di Vita looks back on his childhood in the fictional Sicilian town of Giancaldo. His flashback begins shortly after the Second World War when, as a small child, he fell in love with the world of movies. Alfredo, the avuncular projectionist at the local ‘Cinema Paradiso’, befriends and trains the boy, until a double tragedy hits: firstly, Totò learns that his father has died on the Russian Front; then, a fire destroys the cinema and blinds the old man. The movie theatre is reopened with the investment of lottery-winner Ciccio, who employs Totò as the new projectionist. As the plot jumps forward into his teenage years, Totò falls in love, gets called up for military service and has his heart broken, before leaving Giancaldo behind to pursue his dreams. Back in the present, his return after many years for Alfredo’s funeral finds the cinema closed down and the town changed beyond recognition.
Analysis:
The intentions behind Cinema Paradiso are not difficult to identify. Simultaneously a nostalgic paean to a golden age of Italian film-going, and a lament at a contemporary crisis in the nation’s cultural polity, Tornatore’s Oscar-winning1 sensation is a didactic, emotionally manipulative exemplar of that most marketable of European genres: the ‘heritage film’. Its evocation of a simpler time is reductively quaint in its recourse to well-worn stereotypes of the Italian South, but through its representation of the movie theatre (as both a social institution and a source of artistic output) the film offers an intriguing glimpse into the Italian experience of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The cinema, here placed at the intersection of identity and cultural memory, acts as the mediator for a post-war sensibility, and the arbiter of the nation’s transition to modernity. The silver screen, indeed, provides the prism through which the film’s characters view the world around them and, through alignment with the figure of the young Totò, we too are placed in the position of a child, peering in fascination and wonder at the magic of the movies.
An emblematic scene comes early on when Totò, having pilfered individual frames of celluloid from Alfredo’s cutting-room floor, holds them up in turn to the flickering gas-lamp on the family dinner table. Each dusty frame provokes a brief utterance enacting a scenario lifted from Hollywood genre convention (‘Shoot first, think later.’/’Hey you bastard, hands off that gold!’). This sequence captures not only the wonder, but the malleability, of the cinematic medium; the wide-eyed child is not content merely to absorb the Dream Factory’s stories, but inscribes his own narratives into these tantalising fragments of filmic fantasy. Here Totò literally views his surroundings through the filter of cinema.
Such conceits permeate Cinema Paradiso, overtly framing each stage of Totò’s coming of age as a process mediated through cinema. Kept in the same tin box as his treasured film stock, for example, are photographs of his long-lost father whose image, appropriately, is conflated with that of Clark Gable in the child’s mind. Later, when the teenage Totò first sees his beloved Elena, it is through the eyepiece of a handheld cine-camera (and their first kiss takes place in the projection booth of the Cinema Paradiso). Finally, the protagonist’s loss of innocence is narrated when his surrogate father Alfredo, having previously expounded words of wisdom lifted from Spencer Tracy and John Wayne, impels Totò to leave Giancaldo behind and ‘discover himself’. When Totò asks if this is a line from Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda or James Stewart, the old man signs off by responding: ‘No Totò. This time I’m saying it. Life is not what you see in films. Life is much harder’.
Yet Cinema Paradiso’s engagement with the world of movies is more complex than the central character’s somewhat saccharine personal saga might suggest. Alfredo’s parting admonishment is in fact a disingenuous coda for a film that, throughout, so purposefully fuses the story of Italy’s post-war cinema with that of post-war Italy itself. By memorialising a specific ‘moment’ in the nation’s cultural history, Tornatore’s film offers a glimpse into the Italian experience in the years immediately following the Second World War, when a rapid transition towards a globally oriented outlook began apace. Giancaldo’s movie theatre is presented as the beating heart of the community: a civic hub and forum for loud exchanges of opinion,2 where various strata of society rub shoulders, where couples fall in love, and where the whole town congregates to laugh and cry (and, in one scene, die). More than this, though, the Cinema Paradiso acts as a facilitator, as the community negotiates a collective path through rapid changes in its cultural viewpoint: simultaneously a mirror for local identity and a window onto the outside world.
Nowhere is this more palpable than during the double bill that first introduces us to the townsfolk and their beloved cinema. The hushed solemnity that greets the preceding newsreel of Resistance veterans registers Italy’s recent wartime trauma, while the immediacy of the first feature – Luchino Visconti’s tale of hardship in a Sicilian fishing village, La terra trema/The Earth Trembles (1948) – is emphasised by a mirroring of film and audience (two men lament their illiteracy as they fail to understand the on-screen caption, which reads: ‘The Italian language is not spoken by the poor in Sicily’). Playing alongside these artefacts of local hardship, however, are the exhilarating products of another world, offering a participatory escapism to war-weary Europeans. Firstly, the action-packed trailer for John Ford’s seminal Western Stagecoach (1939) elicits excited Red Indian war-chants from the children in the front row. Then, the antics of Charlie Chaplin in The Knockout (Mack Sennett, 1914) have the whole town bursting into raucous laughter. By offering access to the allure of Americana, therefore, Giancaldo’s cinema registers the changes underway in Italian consciousness in the early post-war years as the output of Hollywood gained a telling foothold.3
This clear sense of mounting American influence is not, however, presented as a process of domination over native customs by a hegemonic force, but one of productive cultural blending, since numerous ‘classics’ of Italian cinema are shown commanding audiences’ attention alongside transatlantic imports (notably, In nome della legge/In the Name of the Law (Pietro Germi, 1949), Riso amaro/ Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) and I vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)); nor is the cinema itself shown to be displacing older forms of social interaction. On the contrary, Cinema Paradiso shows the medium seamlessly integrating with, and enriching, more traditional civic hubs. When a crowd is locked out of the movie theatre, Alfredo charitably turns the projector around to display the comedy film I pompieri di Viggiu/The Firemen of Viggiu (Mario Mattoli, 1949) on a wall of the town square. Later, fishing boats line up on the waterfront to get a makeshift view of outdoor screenings. On each occasion, a key public space of Sicilian society – the piazza, then the harbour – embraces the communal experience of cinematic spectatorship.
The South of Italy4 has long possessed a potent mythic force in the national culture: at once a locus for Italy’s past and a canvas upon which to project the fears and desires of nationhood. In turning to his childhood home, Sicilian director Tornatore consciously plugs into this pre-existing discourse to frame his tale of identity and loss. His meticulous weaving of the cinema into the fabric of this setting – in part through these literal ‘projections’ of fantasies and aspirations onto the spaces of the community – therefore implicates the medium as an integral agent in this memorialisation of a bygone era. While the close-knit community of the South takes on its familiar symbolic mantle as something that modern Italy has lost, the cinema comes bound up within it. The film’s denouement makes this marriage of film-going and social nostalgia explicit. When the adult Totò returns to Giancaldo for Alfredo’s funeral, the familiar piazza has become overrun with billboards and heavy traffic. He looks up at the old Cinema Paradiso: a derelict shell awaiting demolition to make way for a car park. Ciccio, the former proprietor, explains that ‘recession, television, video’ have led to its closing. Once again the message is clear: the modern world, with its fast-paced technologies, has caught up with the cinema and the town simultaneously.
This is, doubtless, a suitably elegiac ending for a film whose emotional appeal has been so carefully constructed around nostalgia, memory and loss. It is in many ways an apt document of the cultural shifts occurring in the 1980s, as the nation’s cinema entered a seemingly terminal decline in the age of Berlusconi’s media empire. Yet this is to oversimplify the significance of Cinema Paradiso. This ‘heritage film’ is, as the generic label suggests, espousing a consummate ‘Italian-ness’, but not just one of picturesque, elemental backwardness that so easily emanates from the dusty antiquity of old Sicily. The Italy memorialised in this film is also the one that underwent bewildering sociocultural change in the post-war era, and whose very identity was mediated by an increasingly cosmopolitan outlook. Within this historical context, the cinema is positioned as an integral and wholesome component in the evolution of the nation’s cultural imaginary. In the film’s very final sequence, Totò opens Alfredo’s bequest: the countless ‘kiss scenes’ that had been cut out of films at the bidding of Father Adelfio to protect the town from moral degradation in the 1940s, now spliced together into one continuous reel. This symbolises more than just the wonder of the cinema. Just as Totò had reinscribed his treasured fragments of celluloid at the dinner table, so Alfredo has used the medium to engage in a creative process of experimentation. The old projectionist’s parting gift is to remind Totò and the audience of the excitement, not only of spectatorship, but also of appropriation and adaptation. The cinema, finally, is not dead.
Austin Fisher
Notes
1. Cinema Paradiso won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1990.
2. This depiction appears to be particularly close to the actuality. Christopher Wagstaff records that the social context of terza visione cinema (that of ‘third-run’ provincial cinemas) was one in which audience members would come and go, and talk loudly during the films, except for those parts that grabbed their attention (1992: 253).
3. In the immediate post-war years a backlog of American films was released into the Italian market and by 1946 foreign imports (most of which were American) were taking 87 per cent of the nation’s box office receipts (Wagstaff 1998: 75).
4. The ‘South’ of Italy, known as the Mezzogiorno, is a conceptual entity traditionally denoting a large and diverse section of Italy comprising the mainland regions of Campania, Molise, Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria, as well as the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: Italy. Production Company: Cristaldifilm. Director: Giuseppe Tornatore. Producer: Franco Cristaldi. Screenwriters: Giuseppe Tornatore and Vanna Paoli. Cinematographer: Blasco Giurato. Music: Ennio Morricone. Editor: Mario Morra. Cast: Salvatore Cascio (Totò as child), Philippe Noiret (Alfredo), Antonella Attili (younger Maria Di Vita), Leopoldo Trieste (Father Adelfio), Enzo Cannavale (Ciccio), Jacques Perrin (Totò as adult).]
Further Reading:
Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema, London, Continuum, 2009. Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006.
William Hope, Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion, Cognition, Cinema, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Millicent Marcus, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Christopher Wagstaff, ‘A forkful of Westerns: industry, audiences and the Italian Western’, in Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), Popular European Cinema, London, Routledge, 1992, pp. 245–62.
Christopher Wagstaff, ‘Italian genre films in the world market’, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Stephen Ricci (eds), Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–95, London, British Film Institute, 1998, pp. 74–85.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.