Bellissima

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Movie
German title Bellissima
Original title Bellissima
Country of production Italy
original language Italian
Publishing year 1951
length 116 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Luchino Visconti
script Suso Cecchi D'Amico
Francesco Rosi
Luchino Visconti based
on an idea by Cesare Zavattini
production Salvo d'Angelo
music Franco Mannino
camera Piero Portalupi
cut Mario Serandrei
occupation

Bellissima from 1951 is the third feature film by the Italian film and theater director Luchino Visconti . He wrote the script together with Suso Cecchi D'Amico and Francesco Rosi based on an idea by Cesare Zavattini . The co-authors removed the sentimentality of the narrative that Zavattini had created, which is located in contemporary Rome. Anna Magnani plays a spirited, eruptive nurse who wants to turn her talentless little daughter into a movie star in order to break out of her circumstances. For this goal she sacrifices her savings account and expects the child a lot.

Despite the financial failure of Die Erde quebbe , producer Salvo d'Angelo Visconti proposed to realize another film together, starring Anna Magnani, with whom Visconti had wanted to work for a long time. Visconti shows Magnani in shots that show her together with the space around her, whereby the film has extremely realistic features. The film director Alessandro Blasetti appears as himself, who is looking for a child for a role for a (fictional) film project. Bellissima is the only feature-length film in Visconti's oeuvre that is largely comical. He created a satire on the film business, on Cinécittà and the illusions caused by the cinema, whereby he does not exclude the representatives of the neorealist style from the criticism, in particular their use of "authentic" amateur actors. The work was shown at the Berlinale in 1952, but did not hit German cinemas until 1960.

background

The end of Zavattini's original draft was similar to that of bicycle thieves . Just as the little boy there takes his father by the hand and leads him away, the little daughter should take her humiliated mother by the hand to comfort. Wolfram Schütte described the scene in which the film people laugh at the botched test shots of the little girl, on which she bursts into tears, as central: “The film people's laughter at a true, unplayed feeling of fear and loneliness heralds one Solidarity of compassion and empathy, which (early) neorealism once believed to find its real fulfillment in it. Only cynicism remained of that in his commercialized late phase. ”Visconti's criticism also applies to Blasetti, who, unlike the other film people, does not laugh at the girl. Because Blasetti believes that “this undisguised child can be better exploited for his film, because it is more believable and more lifelike than the ornate dolls he has otherwise seen”.

criticism

The film-dienst described the film in 1954 as "psychologically closely observed and so full of human warmth that we have to speak of an example". Visconti had given his leading actress the right weight: the “extraordinary” Magnani “overplayed anyone who intrudes into the world, which she fills to the brim […] But not in such a way that she crushes all life around her. Something whole has emerged that is close to reality. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Wolfram Schütte: Annotated filmography . In: Luchino Visconti , Series Hanser No. 181, Series Film No. 4. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1975, ISBN 3- 446-12001-7, pp. 68-72
  2. ↑ a b Giuseppe Ferrara: Luchino Visconti . Editions Seghers, Paris 1970, pp. 37-43
  3. ↑ Michèle Lagny: Luchino Visconti. Vérités d'une legend . BiFi, Paris 1997 / Durante, Courbevoie 1997, ISBN 2-9509048-7-4
  4. ↑ Hans Helmut Prinzler: data . In: Luchino Visconti , Series Hanser No. 181, Series Film No. 4. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1975, ISBN 3- 446-12001-7, p. 150
  5. ↑ film-dienst No. 25/1954