(Luchino Visconti, Italy 1951, 110 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, b/w)
Print source: Filmarchiv Austria, Vienna, Austria
Bellissima was only Visconti’s third film as director, yet already a noticeable cynicism had settled in, particularly in regard to the “new realism.” His first film, Ossessione (1943), a gritty tale of adultery and murder shot on location among the provincial poor, is often cited as the earliest feature in the Neorealist style. Visconti then took things several steps further with La terra trema (1948), which renounced professional actors and could pass for a documentary were it not for the dramatic plot and political rhetoric.
In the self-reflexive Bellissima, however, Visconti takes cinematic artifice—even Neorealism’s—as his subject. Anna Magnani—the international face of Neorealism, thanks to her performance in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945)—stars as Maddalena, a working-class mother who is determined to get her child (Tina Apicella) cast in the latest film by director Alessandro Blasetti. (Blasetti, a progenitor of Neorealism who did use non-actors, appears as himself.) He hopes to discover an unknown girl to star, and so the production company is running a contest. But the finalists are hardly the urchins of Shoeshine (1946). Primped, crimped, and trained to dance, they are more like dolls than “realistic” children, and so Maddalena begins to spend her hard-earned savings in a desperate effort to transform her daughter into a starlet.
Bellissima is set among the “unlucky” working poor of Rome—a world Count Visconti, an aristocratic Milanese whose wealthy mother was heir to the Erba pharmaceuticals fortune—knew nothing about (he slyly admits as much by conspicuously setting a scene involving a con man from the north in front of a Carlo Erba store). Though the film was shot on location around Rome and the Cinecittà studio, Visconti had begun to dispense with the trappings of Neorealism, ready to move past what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith recognized as Visconti’s “realist aesthetic.” Draperies, mirrors, and a disorienting visual complexity begin to appear, all in anticipation of Visconti’s next film: the operatic masterpiece, Senso (1954).
This print with German subtitles was struck during the transition era: it is on nitrate stock (with no edge code), though the print-through information suggests that the original camera negative was, at least in part, triacetate. It has 48 splices and a shrinkage of up to 1.1%.
– Ken Fox
This screening is free for passholders of the sold-out 10th Nitrate Picture Show. A limited number of single-screening tickets may be available for purchase in person at the Dryden Theatre box office on a rush-line basis. Rush tickets will be sold only if seats remain after the film’s spoken introduction has begun.