Testimonials
The myth of Cinecittà
Cinecittà had not yet been inaugurated, on April 28, 1937, that already this name, happily imposed on others in the ballot (Cinema City, Cinelandia), had passed to indicate more than a physical place or a complex of establishments, the ideal capital or even the heart of Italian cinema. In our historical panorama Cinecittà is far from being the only factory used for the production of films, but it is the one that in the collective imagination has summarized the entire map (Roman and otherwise) of the seventh art. Therefore, in journalistic use and in common speech, artists and personalities who have occasionally worked there are often put in contact with Cinecittà. Flowered on its own, the myth had its most credited celebrant in Federico Fellini. In the book Making a film (1980) the director tells of his first trip to Cinecittà when "up there, more than a thousand meters away, on a Frau armchair firmly screwed to the crane platform, with sparkling leather leggings, a neck scarf of Indian silk, a helmet on his head and three megaphones, four microphones and twenty whistles hanging from his neck was a man: it was him, he was the director, he was Blasetti "(p. 44). Repeatedly repeated with variations (sometimes Fellini claimed to have gone to Cinecittà to bid the star Osvaldo Valenti proposing the purchase of a brilliant fake), the story will then be scripted in the film Intervista (1987) which is a real tribute to the city of cinema from the past to the present. Fellini always came accentuating a visceral relationship with the factories in via Tuscolana, where over the course of over thirty years he has engaged in meticulous and fascinating reconstructions. To name just a few: the sidewalk in via Veneto with the cars in transit in front of the tables of the Café de Paris for La dolce vita (1960); the fantarcheological panorama of Fellini Satyricon (1969), for which film the director settled in an apartment inside Cinecittà, making home and shop; the ring road of Rome (1972); an entire district of Rimini and the profile of the Rex motor ship for Amarcord (1973); eighteenth-century Venice for Federico Fellini's Il Casanova (1976); the transatlantic liner of E la nave va (1983); the television megastudio of Ginger and Fred (1986). This brings us to the sad November 1993 when the master's burning room was set up in Theater 5,
However Fellini, although being the undisputed genius loci, is certainly not the first nor the only founder of the legend of Cinecittà. Alessandro Blasetti contributed to his growth, with the imposing scenography of his films, and many other international directors: from René Clair to Jean Renoir, from Mervyn LeRoy to King Vidor, from William Wyler to Joseph L. Mankiewicz. After the closure between the war and the post-war period, when it was reduced to a refugee camp, in the 1950s Cinecittà became the sumptuous stage of Hollywood on the Tiber with the relative catwalk of the great Hollywood stars. Do you start with the American production of Quo vadis? (1951) to continue with the Fly of War and Peace (1955), the Circus Maximus for the chariot race of Ben Hur (1959), the cyclopean constructions of Cleopatra (1963). On the turn of the 20th century, Dino De Laurentiis simulated the navigation of U-571 submarines (2000); Ettore Scola had you rebuild an entire road in Rome 1938, including the tram line, for unfair competition (2001). These initiatives have revived the splendor of the city of cinema after years dominated by fears that Cinecittà would end up hosting only TV shows or would be swallowed up by building speculation. During that dark period Marcello Mastroianni loved to tell his anguished recurring dream in which, when he arrived at the gates of Cinecittà, he had to crawl on all fours because the whole factory had mysteriously shrunk and was occupied by the Lilliputians. A Gulliver's dream of not difficult interpretation. In the avenues of the city of cinema there are events that have remained memorable. I ran into him, very busy, closed in his sweater and his eternal boots [...] and he came to ask me if I was going to listen to the speech of the Duce [...] Together we merged with the dense and whispering crowd that it was formed right in front of the second restaurant. "Second" implied category, and that was the restaurant where the workers and technicians ate [...] I looked around to see who was there: almost all the actors wearing stage costumes; surrounded by armigers Osvaldo [Valenti], in his black costume by Cesare Borgia [for The Mask of Cesare Borgia, the film that Elsa was also playing in the role of Dianora], Assia [Noris, protagonist of A Romantic Adventure] among the laces of the his romantic character, Maria [Denis] with Dorina's curls and ribbons in Goodbye Youth !, Alida [Valli] in Manon's busty dress, the small beautiful upright head, and many actors, illustrious or not, surrounded by extras in the most varied costumes: even Indian , dancers, odalisques half-naked under the veil trousers. Everyone spoke carefree, as if they had been there for a normal break from their ephemeral and hard work. Suddenly I saw the smile that Camerini was giving me from afar go off, and I found myself immersed in a sudden silence: the radio had begun to transmit Mussolini's voice. At first nobody understood. That voice spoke briefly and was so dry and peremptory that no one, when he was silent, could believe that he had finished speaking [...] Nobody spoke, nobody moved for a few eternal minutes [...] On Camerini's face, over there, hit by the sun, an amazed desolation shone through. Blasetti's eyes were wide open like an abused boy. Valenti was biting his upper lip and his face was hard, bad [...] ". In Cinecittà's mythography, alongside historical events such as the one evoked by de 'Giorgi, there is room for an infinite number of vintage cartoons Anecdotal flavor. Here on the set of Il fiero Saladino (1937), the first film shot in the factory, the young Alberto Sordi tried to conquer the young Alida Valli wrapped in the skin of a stuffed lion. Here the seventeen year old pupil of the Centro Sperimentale Agostino De Laurentiis (not yet Dino) dared to stop the producer Peppino Amato to ask him for work and his daring was rewarded with a small role in Batticuore (1939). Here the sixteen year old Sofia Scicolone,
Not infrequently, Italian cinema has mirrored the city of cinema by setting certain episodes of films in it. One of the most significant is Luchino Visconti's Bellissima (1951), on the subject of Cesare Zavattini, where a frustrated mother, Anna Magnani, would like to redeem herself through her little daughter pushing her to participate in the competition for 'The most beautiful girl in Rome'. The prize is a starring part in a Blasetti film, who spiritually impersonates himself accompanied by the musical theme of Dulcamara in L'elisir d'amore. Visconti recounts servitude and greatness of cinema, cutting out some of its characteristic typologies: see the fatuous factotum meddler interpreted by Walter Chiari, see (taken from life) the wise Liliana Mancini who, after playing the character of Iris in Under the sun of Rome (1948) by Renato Castellani, she adapted to earn her bread in the editing department, aware that "I know so many unfortunate people came out with the illusion of cinema!" ". A gray and unadorned Cinecittà is the setting for the story of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Lady Without Camellias (1953), a bitter portrait of an Italian diva embodied by Lucia Bosè. The avenue of hope (1953) by Dino Risi is dedicated to the famous 'tramway' which took you from Termini Station to Cinecittà in 34 minutes, the story of the ambitions and loves of three young aspiring actresses, as presented in a journalistic clipping of the time: "The avenue of hope is what leads to Cinecittà: together with the passengers, the white-blue trams of the Castles deposit an invisible load of hopes, uncertainties, disappointments, dreams, bitterness and tiredness in front of the magical Temple of Illusion every morning. They are old and new, aspiring artists who knock on the Mecca of cinema with fear and fearless boldness, losers to whom hope no longer smiles, extras who continue to hope in the part that will put them in view: a living world, grappling with the problem of daily bread perhaps more than with that of the dreamed glory ... "Returning to Interview, in Fellini's film the path of the 'tramway' becomes the poetic phantasy of an imaginary journey that sees incongruous landscapes parading beyond the windows celebration of the Grape Festival, the Marmore waterfall,
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