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Two Screenings of Visconti’s LA TERRA TREMA (1948) added to LIFE LESSONS Series

For over a week I have been pushing my All-Access Pass to the Life Lessons: Italian Neo-Realism and the Birth of Modern Cinema to the limit, seeing incredibly interesting films, a few of them never before screened in the States. (Including Italian-only archival prints with hand-cued Powerpoint subtitles.) I've already racked up enough screenings to double the ticket-to-pass ratio, and I'm only halfway through the series. I'll be writing about these experiences here at filmlinc.com, but first I want talk about a late addition to the calendar (screening this Thursday, November 12th). This is the film in the series I have most looked forward to seeing projected: Visconti's haunting La Terra trema (1948).

While other neorealist and proto-neorealist films in this series have put on-location shooting and nonprofessional actors excellent use, to my taste Visconti raises the bar. He builds his film, the story of a family of underpaid, near-starving fishermen risking everything to challenge the tradition of injustice that prevents them from receiving a proper share of the sale of their catch, as a hybrid of both an ethnographic document of the life of working fishermen and an adaptation of Giovanni Verga's I Malavoglia. And while many of the films I have been loving in the series (Bitter Rice and Shoeshine) have leaned heavily on the use of the "people from the streets" to flush the crowds and fill secondary character roles, Visconti trusted nonprofessionals for leading roles as well. He was quoted as saying (and I'm searching for a better reference for this often repeated anecdote — please comment with your leads) that by using skilled laborers in main roles, he hoped to access a depth of emotional truth impossible with trained actors. (Reminds me of director Robert Bresson's discussion of "models" versus actors in his classic text, Notes on the Cinematographer.)

Originally meaning this film to be the "oppression of the workers" episode of a three part Communist trilogy, Visconti decided to film only this first tragic episode. Given the goals of the experiment — La Terra trema designed to be the most thorough account of the struggle of the workers ever filmed — Visconti hoped the film would thus prove politically activating for his audiences. And while it did receive the Golden Lion at the 1948 Venice Film Festival, the politics of the film proved activating also for his political detractors. Seizing on the production history of the film for ammunition, they decried it as common, as an artistic failure, as an exercise in pamphleteering.

Well, I suspect that audiences on Thursday will agree with my suspicion that contempt shown for the film must have been exclusively (right-wing/Catholic) politically motivated -- as the years pass, this film remains one of my favorite experiences of cinema, and one of the crucial touchstones that propelled me towards Shindo's The Naked Island (1960) Bresson's (politically antithetical) Au hazard, Balthazar , the bell sequence of Tarkovsky's Andrei Roublev, as well as back to the fathers of Soviet cinema: Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko.

And yet, can I really say I have properly seen Visconti's film? And I don't mean this as a fussy cinemaphile, but really, given the available copies, I'm speaking practically. I have seen both a fuzzy VHS copy of this film (I believe in the Middlebury College media library) and a quasi-legitimate import DVD rental. In both cases, the quality of the filmmaking and the performances were striking enough to continue to haunt me despite the dismal video transfers. (The kind of transfers that make you want to check out the NYU MA in Motion Image Archiving and Preservation, or at least read Richard Roud's A Passion for Films.)

I was driven to see the film again, particularly to watch details of life in the house of the fishermen, the tracking shots through the dockyard marketplace, and sequences of men working the sea (and being devoured by it).  Visconti's film offers me access into the lives of these half-real, half-fictionalized men and women, and seeing artisan fishermen at work with their boats and nets — at the top of their abilities — borrows some of the power of ethnographic cinema, work like the "men working" films of Phill Niblock, for narrative filmmaking.

Thursday, I have a chance to see this film projected for the first time in my life. Heck, I'm tempted to see it twice. Anyhow, please note that it isn't listed in the print edition of the Walter Reade calendar, but only on the filmlinc.com website -- so do yourself a favor and make sure not to miss it!

— Matthew Griffin

About Matthew Griffin, Film Society Correspondent

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