The day Rome was founded, April 21, but April 21, 1937. And so it was movies and Rome and babies and Mussolini and Papa the great industrialist, all together for a photograph.
Golden ages come and go. They come, most frequently, with the first springtime of some moral or political liberation. They go when the censor comes and the dictator takes over. (Czechoslovakia is a classic example.) But when the arts and skills combine for anything, from films to football — combine with passion and purpose in the brief explosion of a nation’s cultural energy — this sudden harvest of grace is not invariably subject to the rule of seasons. Quite often, a country seems to come into a golden age as unpredictably as a poet gets his inspiration. There is no reliable calendar for such beginnings. The end is easier to chart, easier to explain.
Sandro wasn’t yet born, not for two more years, but he’d been told about it: the grand opening of Cinecittà, his father and the Duce and little Roberto at the ribbon cutting.
For instance, when the virtue started draining out of Hollywood, the process may have looked mysterious, but the facts were clear enough. Business was too good — as simple as that. The box office was much too safe for much too long. The neighborhood movie palace was packed if the theater manager just turned up the lights on the marquee. Didn’t really matter what it said there. All he had to do was open the doors. It started in the forties — even then, the Hollywood air was getting stale. The war boom made the industry so fat, it lost its self-respect. The gold dust blew away. Drones and hacks reigned over a long age of plastic. Magic didn’t happen very often. Sometimes, yes (great books have been written in jail). But the muse was elsewhere.
What Sandro did remember was when the Allies bombed it, in 1944. Cinecittà, his father explained, was where they made the frivolous films Sandro’s mother liked, the ones she took Sandro along to. He was five years old and could not really follow what was happening on-screen. He ate his snack in the dark and then fell asleep holding his mother’s hand, his neck against the cold armrest, his wool coat covering his bare legs. White telephone films, they were called. Telefoni bianchi. There was always a white phone next to a bed. The tension of the scenes, the thing that gathered them taut, was whether it would ring. When the white phone next to the bed rang, through its earpiece came bad news, or a promise of devotion or a breach of it, this white instrument with flares at either ends of its handle, ear and mouth. The white telephone kept life’s pleasures and disappointments arriving to a lavish and dead surrounding, not unlike the lavish and dead surroundings of Sandro’s own home — the one that he and his mother returned to after their outing to the movies and then Passerini’s for hot chocolate — their villa in the Brera, so clean and ordered there was nothing for the servants to do but look nervously at Sandro’s mother and pretend to polish polished things.
In Italy, the very minute Mussolini quit the war, the white telephone, that celebrated trademark of Fascist high-society soap opera (for many years the principal Italian film product), went into the garbage can. The garbage can itself can become the symbol of the new ambiente. Italian directors, too poor to work in the old sound studios, took their cameras out into the streets to make Open City and Shoeshine. Rossellini, De Sica and the rest, under the flag of neo-realism, marched on the international film market. Hollywood kept the big money, but now, in every important sense, Rome was the movie capital of the world.
Why did the Allies bomb the place where they made movies? Sandro had asked his father as they looked at the photographs in the newspaper of its collapsed roofs, German tanks on the destroyed soundstages, German officers carting the still-usable cinema equipment away. His mother loved the telefoni bianchi, and young Sandro had felt that the Allies bombing Cinecittà, the Germans looting it, were attacks on her, and possibly on them, because the people in the films, the vulgar escapist fantasies that Sandro later understood them to be, depicted more or less his own reality.
Cinematic births and rebirths, breaking forth since then all over the globe from Stockholm to Tokyo, have taken off a lot of the shine. But even today, it can’t be said that all the gold has gone from Italy. Not as long as Fellini continues to get money for — and money from — those marvelous and very costly personal extravaganzas of his. Should fairness force me to include the name of Antonioni, that solemn architect of empty boxes? Must I admit that, as much as he maddens me, there are still serious film-lovers throughout the world who take him almost as seriously as he takes himself. I can’t deny that between them, these two have changed the shape of the horizon.
After the war ended the movies were different. The directors went out in the streets to film “real” life. Which was convenient, because Cinecittà was destroyed, and in addition to that problem there were people living in its ruins. From 1945 to 1950 displaced people, mostly children, lived in the film studios. If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance. You lived at Cinecittà, so be it. Sandro saw pictures in a magazine, orphans crammed into little warrens divided by hay bales and corrugated cardboard. They were using huge props from costume epics about ancient Rome as makeshift furniture.
In place of the old movie star, there towers over us now another sacred monster: the Great Director. As far as popular mythology is concerned, when Fellini hired his country’s foremost male star to play Fellini in a Fellini film about Fellini — his 8½ — the sun may be said to have set on the day of the actor. Wherever the gold may be, in this epoch the glamour is mostly behind the camera.
“They’re extras,” his father said, “for Rossellini,” when Sandro asked why children were living in the bombed rubble of the movie studios. Extras for Rossellini. It was actually funny, Sandro later thought, when he understood the joke. Rossellini was too busy casting regular Italians to play wretches, too busy casting them to portray the actual wretches who were living in the former kingdom of elaborate fictions. We must confront our reality directly, or so the idea went. And yet the idea — “reality directly” — was there at Cinecittà: children who had lost their transport during the war. Lost their parents. Who had dysentery. Who did not know their own last names, nor what country they should be returned to. The whole displaced nightmare of World War Two, there among fake Roman columns, and it was too incredible and strange to be dealt with by the neorealists. While real people suffered in movieland, the great neorealist director turned away from movieland to capture the supposedly real people, and what were they like, the Italians in Rossellini’s Open City? They were brave. Noble. Moral. Religious, humane, strong resisters to their German occupiers. Hilarious. This is fucking hilarious, Sandro thought, watching it with Ronnie when it played at the Coronet on Third Avenue in 1963. Practically all of Italy had celebrated Mussolini, and then the war had ended and suddenly everyone was an anti-Fascist, except for the bastards in Salò. As if the entire problem could be isolated to a few rich families in the lake district, where Mussolini had set up his exiled government. Families like the Valeras, whose villa was occupied by Germans. After the war, walking to school in Brera, Sandro and Roberto were pelted with rocks. Their father moved them back up to Bellagio, where the boys were pelted with cow chips, and once misled into a swarm of angry bees that stung and restung them more times than Sandro had thought possible. Was he stung because he lacked natural virtues, ones the children who pushed them into the bee swarm possessed? Had those children stood up to Mussolini? No. Did it matter who possessed natural virtues? No. A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (set primarily in 1975) contra Welles’s New Hollywood state of the union (published in Look in 1970, shortly after filming had begun on The Other Side of the Wind).
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