 Film Outside Hollywood
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The Seventh Seal
Produced in 1957, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal epitomized the European art film.
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Each big producing firm in Italy had its own company of actors under annual contract. Actors like Emilio Ghione (who was a director as well as an actor, and has written a brief essay on the Italian film), actresses like Maria Jacobini, Gianna TerribiliGonzales of the unforgettable name, and the pre-eminent star Francesca Bertini, directors like Gabriellino d'Annunzio, Negroni, Righelli and Guazzoni all made up a picturesque and lively group. There were also Augusto Genina and Carmine Gallone, who were later to direct some fairly good films in France.
Ghione's films, such as The Masked Amazon and particularly the series called Za-la-Mort, as well as those of Negroni and of Pasquali ( Gipsy Love, Between Men and Beasts, etc.), all exhibited the same emphatic style, the same rather touching naïveté, the same overabundance of gestures and declamatory motions. The worst faults of the American film were already apparent here, and on an even larger scale. Film stars in Turin and Rome were far more pretentious and exigent than they have ever been in Hollywood.
Francesca Bertini, Hesperia and Pina Menicelli all created tremendous scenes with their producers and their directors, threatened to stop work unless they were given immense contracts, came late or not at all to rehearsals and engaged in bitter feuds with one another. Francesca Bertini insisted on making a Camille because Hesperia had just made one.
Each of these ladies was backed by a lawyer, Bertini by Barattolo and Hesperia by Mecheri, both of them millionaires who engaged in a mutual contest of "bigger and better" films and financial coups, to the lasting injury of the Italian film. Actors too, in emulation of the actresses, all became extremely temperamental, insisted on being given contracts and thought up fresh ways of being difficult. Febo Mari, while making Attila, refused to wear a beard, whereupon Alberto Capozzi, appearing in St. Paul, declared that he saw no reason why he should sport so ridiculous an appendage and insisted on being clean-shaven too. This war of the beards was typical.
Italy and Sweden, in particular, developed a notion of "national cinema" reflecting specific cultural traits in a mode in which they could be successfully exported. In France, Japan and Eastem Europe a similar process was under way, but in these countries the economic viability of "national" production was less dependent on the export trade.
Japanese films were hardly seen abroad until 1951, when Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The distribution of Eastem films in Arnerica and Europe did not necessarily mean . that they were fully understood by Westem critics and audiences.
The few Japanese fiIms that did reaeh Westem screens, such as those of Kurosawa, were often those that could be most easily incorporated into European traditions of filmrnaking.
The Seven Samurai becarne The Magnificent Seven, and another of Kurosawa's samurai films, Yojimbo (1961), was the basis for .the first spaghetti Westem, A Fistful of Dollars, directed bySergio Leone in 1964.
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1945 - 1960
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