Michelangelo Antonioni had also collaborated with Rossellini. Accordingly, his first films were Neorealist documentary shorts (Gente del Po [People of the Po], 1947), but during the 1950s he turned increasingly to an examination of the Italian bourgeoisie in such films as Cronaca di un amore (1950; Story of a Love Affair), La signora senza camelie (1953; Camille Without Camellias), and Le amiche (1955; The Girlfriends), and in the early 1960s Antonioni produced a trilogy on the malaise of the middle class that made him internationally famous. In L’avventura (1959; The Adventure), La notte (1960; The Night), and L’eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), he used long-take sequence shots equating film time with real time to create a vision of the reverberating emptiness of modern urban life. Antonioni then began to use colour expressionistically in Deserto rosso (1964; Red Desert) and Blow-Up (1966) to convey alienation and abstraction from human feeling, and all of his later works in some way concerned the breakdown of personal relationships (Zabriskie Point, 1970; Identificazione di una donna [Identification of a Woman], 1982) and of identity itself (Professione: Reporter [The Passenger], 1975).
Monica Vitti (far left) in L'eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.Cineriz/Interopa Film/Paris Film; photograph from a private collection
While Fellini and Antonioni were putting Italy in the vanguard of modernist cinema, the country’s second post-World War II generation of directors emerged. Ermanno Olmi (Il posto [The Job], 1961; Un certo giorno [One Fine Day], 1968; L’albero degli zoccoli [The Tree of Wooden Clogs], 1979) continued the Neorealist tradition in his tales of ordinary people caught up in systems beyond their comprehension. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had worked as a scriptwriter for Fellini, achieved international recognition for Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964; The Gospel According to St. Matthew), a brilliant semidocumentary reconstruction of the life of Christ with Marxist overtones. Pasolini went on to direct a series of astonishing, often outrageous films that set forth a Marxist interpretation of history and myth—Edipo re (1967; Oedipus Rex), Teorema (1968; Theorem), Porcile (1969; Pigsty), Medea (1969), Salò (1975)—before his murder in 1975. Like Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci was a Marxist intellectual whose films attempt to correlate sexuality, ideology, and history; his most successful films were Il conformista (1970; The Conformist), a striking dissection of the psychopathology of fascism, Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972; Last Tango in Paris), a meditation on sex and death, and Novecento (1976; 1900), a six-hour epic covering 50 years of Italian class conflict. Other important Italian filmmakers include Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, 1962), Marco Bellocchio (La Cina è vicina [China Is Near], 1967), Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe [Blow-Out], 1973), Ettore Scola (Una giornata speciale [A Special Day], 1977), Vittorio Taviani " class="md-crosslink">Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani (Padre padrone [Father and Master], 1977), Franco Brusati (Dimenticare Venezia [To Forget Venice], 1979), and Lina Wertmüller (Pasqualino settebellezze [Seven Beauties], 1976).
Beginning in the 1970s, the declining European economy compelled many Italian directors to make coproductions with American, French, German, and Swedish companies. In order to maximize profits, several such films featured international stars in leading roles. This dependence on world markets—as well as the increased popularity of television throughout Italy—often led to the loss of national identity in Italian films, although such filmmakers as Roberto Benigni, Carlo Verdone, and Maurizio Nichetti were able to use the new situation to good advantage. Perhaps the most individual voice in Italian cinema during the 1990s was Nanni Moretti, whose humourous, satiric works, such as Caro diario (1994; Dear Diary), critique the social values of the late 20th century. Moretti’s family drama La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room) won the top award at the 2001 Cannes film festival. France
French cinema of the occupation and postwar era produced many fine films (Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis [The Children of Paradise], 1945; Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast], 1946; René Clément’s Jeux interdits [Forbidden Games], 1952; Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or [Golden Helmet], 1952; Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear], 1953), but their mode of presentation relied heavily on script and was predominantly literary. There were exceptions in the austere classicism of Robert Bresson (Le Journal d’un curé de campagne [The Diary of a Country Priest], 1950; Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé [A Man Escaped], 1956), the absurdist comedy of Jacques Tati (Les Vacances de M. Hulot [Mr. Hulot’s Holiday], 1953; Mon oncle [My Uncle], 1958), and the lush, magnificently stylized masterworks of the German émigré Max Ophüls, whose La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de… (1953), and Lola Montès (1955) represent significant contributions to world cinema. An independent documentary movement, which produced such landmark nonfiction films as Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1948), Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949; The Blood of the Beasts), and Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1956; Night and Fog), also emerged at this time. It provided a training ground for young directors outside the traditional industry system and influenced the independent production style of the movement that culminated in the French postwar period of renewal—the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave.
La RondeSimone Signoret and Gérard Philipe in La Ronde (1950), directed by Max Ophüls.Svanfilm; photograph from a private collection
The most important source of the New Wave lay in the theoretical writings of Alexandre Astruc and, more prominently, of André Bazin, whose thought molded an entire generation of filmmakers, critics, and scholars. In 1948 Astruc formulated the concept of the caméra-stylo (“camera-pen”), in which film was regarded as a form of audiovisual language and the filmmaker, therefore, as a kind of writer in light. Bazin’s influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, elaborated this notion and became the headquarters of a group of young cinéphiles (“film lovers”)—the critics François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer—who were to become the major directors of the New Wave. Bazin’s basic principle was a rejection of montage aesthetics—both radical Eisensteinian cutting and Hollywood-style continuity, or invisible, editing—in favour of the long take and composition in depth, or what he called mise-en-scène. Borrowed from the theatre, this term literally means “the placing in the scene,” but Bazin used it to designate such elements of filmic structure as camera placement and movement, the lighting of shots, and blocking of action—that is, everything that precedes the editing process.