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Spanish auteur Carlos Saura, known for a lifetime of movies made in the shadow of his country’s civil war under the Franco dictatorship and its aftermath, has died. He was 91.

The Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences said Saura died at home “surrounded by his loved ones.”

Fernando Mendez-Leite, president of the Spanish Academy, paid tribute to Saura, saying the filmmaker’s “highly personal, varied work and creative has left an indelible mark on the history of our cinema and Spanish culture. Personally I’m very sad, because I had the pleasure of knowing and dealing with Carlos for many years, whom I considered an a teacher and a friend.”

Saura had been due to receive the Academy’s Honorary Goya Award at a ceremony Saturday but instead received the statuette at home this week. The Spanish Academy added the 37th edition of the Goya Awards will pay tribute to “an unrepeatable creator.

To have and to hold, forever in history.

Dino Risi’s 1961 historical comedy “Una Vita Difficile” charts the history of Italy’s economic slumber and subsequent boom post-wwii. Never released in the U.S., the film now makes its New York City debut at Film Forum with a new 4K restoration.

IndieWire exclusively premieres the trailer for the Rialto Pictures feature, with the restoration carried out at Vdm by Studiocanal.

In 1944, Roman student and ex-army lieutenant Silvio Magnozzi (Alberto Sordi) is on the run from the Germans. Elena (Lea Massari) saves Silvio’s life by killing a German soldier, and the duo becomes lovers, with their romance spanning decades and numerous locations.

The classic of commedia all’italiana stars one of Italy’s biggest box office attractions, Sordi, opposite Massari, in the story of an on-again, off-again, then on-again relationship told against 17 years of Italian history — from the last year...

Rarovideo is back, with an excellent Italo war drama that finds humanist values in an appalling situation: a young Italian lieutenant is tasked with distributing 12 Athenian prostitutes to garrisons on the road back to Italy, to ‘service’ the troops. It’s a mixed group — a couple of the women have signed up to avoid starvation. The trek takes them directly into partisan conflict. Sympathetic director Valerio Zurlini assembles a terrific international cast: Mario Adorf, Anna Karina, Tomas Milian, Marie Laforêt, Lea Massari, Valeria Moriconi and Milena Dravic.

Le Soldatesse

Blu-ray

Rarovideo / Kino Lorber

1965 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 118 min. / Street Date October 25, 2022 / The Camp Followers / Available from Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Mario Adorf, Anna Karina, Marie Laforêt, Lea Massari, Tomas Milian, Valeria Moriconi, Milena Dravic, Aleksandar Gavric, Dusan Vujisic, Jovan Rancic, Dragomir Felba, Jelena Zigon, Alenka Rancic, Milica Preradovic, Rossana Di Rocco, Mila Cortini, Guido Alberti.

Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli

Production Designer:...

Italian actress Monica Vitti, best known internationally for starring in Michelangelo Antonioni’s breakthrough cinematic trilogy “L’Avventura,” “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse,” as well as in the director’s “Red Desert,” has died. She was 90.

The news of her death was tweeted by former Rome mayor and film critic Walter Veltroni on Wednesday.

Roberto Russo, il suo compagno di tutti questi anni, mi chiede di comunicare che Monica Vitti non c’è più. Lo faccio con dolore, affetto, rimpianto.

— walter veltroni (@VeltroniWalter) February 2, 2022

(Roberto Russo, her companion in these years, asks me to communicate that Monica Vitti is no more. I do so with great grief, affection, and nostalgia)

Vitti, known for her enigmatic, distant beauty — the All Movie Guide termed her the “high priestess of frosty sensuality” — had been retired for more than a decade due to Alzheimer’s.

Vitti and Antonioni had certainly enjoyed a fruitful collaboration, but in...

Director René Clément brings an entertainingly eccentric David Goodis crime story to the screen in high style. A big score is being prepped by an odd gang, played by a terrific lineup of talent: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Lea Massari and the elusive Tisa Farrow. Only partly an action thriller, this one is weird but good — lovers of hardboiled crime stories can’t go wrong. Studiocanal has restored the original version, a full forty minutes longer than what was briefly shown here.

And Hope to Die

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1972 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 141 min. / Street Date February 25, 2020 / La course du lièvre à travers les champs / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Lea Massari, Tisa Farrow, Jean Gaven, André Lawrence, Nadine Nabokov, Jean Coutu, Daniel Breton, Emmanuelle Béart.

Cinematography: Edmond Richard

Film Editor: Roger Dwyre

Original Music: Francis Lai

Written by Sébastien Japrisot from...

It’s a perfect movie for a dark time: Carlo Levi’s famed novel about a political undesirable became a major Italian miniseries by the great Francesco Rosi, starring the now-legendary Gian Maria Volontè. In Mussolini’s most popular years of make-Italy-great-again Fascism, a dissident is given an indefinite ‘time out,’ an exile to a small town in a corner of the country so remote and primitive that not even Christianity could fully change it. He expects nothing but receives revelations about his country, his life and one’s place in society. It’s meditative, it’s illuminating, it’s like a book one can’t put down. It’s also uncut, as opposed to the theatrical version that made a splash here in 1980, as simply Eboli.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1043

1979 / Color / 1:33 flat / 220 150, 120 min. / Cristo si è fermato a Eboli / available through The Criterion Collection...

By Fred Blosser

I saw many, many Italian-made sword-and-toga movies as a kid in the early 1960s at the Kayton, my neighborhood movie house, where they usually played on mismatched double-bills with B-Westerns, British “Carry On” comedies, low-budget noir dramas, and fourth-run Elvis movies. Many of these Italian epics were simplistic and formulaic, as if the producers figured that people had come to see spectacle, sex, and sword-fights, and never mind anything else. Regardless, more ambitious productions occasionally surfaced with slightly more dramatic substance and marginally higher production values. One such entry was “The Colossus of Rhodes” (1961), Sergio Leone’s first acknowledged directorial credit preceding his breakthrough success with “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964. The Warner Archive Collection has released the 1961 movie on Blu-ray with audio commentary by Sir Christopher Frayling, Leone’s biographer and longtime critical champion.

The script co-written by Leone has plenty of plot -- almost too much,...

The Colossus of Rhodes

Blu ray

Warner Archive

1961 / 2:35 / Street Date June 26, 2018

Starring Rory Calhoun, Lea Massari, Georges Marchal

Cinematography by Antonio Ballesteros

Directed by Sergio Leone

Fred Astaire once said of an undulating Cyd Charisse, “She came at me in sections.” So does the star of Sergio Leone’s The Colossus of Rhodes, a 300 foot titan whose sky-scraping vertical stance is at extreme odds with Leone’s widescreen frame. Save for some long shots, one of The Seven Wonders of the World is reduced to a slide show of disconnected body parts. Such are the giant-sized headaches of epic movie-making.

Even before an earthquake would wreak havoc on the community and topple the Colossus in 226 BC, Rhodes was a city in turmoil. Darios, a Brylcreemed military hero and would-be romeo has just dropped anchor but in lieu of a warrior’s welcome, he’s immediately ensnared in a two-pronged...

Chicago – The Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is in the midst of a series called “Journeys Through French Cinema.” The theme is based on filmmaker/film historian Bernard Tavernier’s documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema,” and highlights his experiences with the rich cinematic influences of French film. The series, which runs through August 2nd, 2017, is putting the spotlight on “La Choses De La Vie” (The Things of Life) on July 24th.

The 1970 film places a man named Pierre (Michel Piccoli) at a literal crossroads in his life. He had recently left his wife Catherine (Lea Massari) for a new love, Helen (a young Romy Schneider), but is having second thoughts about their coupling. En route to a business trip, he smashes his automobile and is thrown from the car. The film begins with the accident, and reconstructs his life’s dilemma...

It’s been fifty-five years since Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni premiered L’Avventura at the Cannes Film Festival, causing a major public and critical uproar while eventually walking away with the Jury Prize. (The Palme d’Or went to Frederico Fellini for La Dolce Vita – talk about a good year for Italian cinema.) L’Avventura was Antonioni’s fifth feature, directed when he was already 48-years-old. But it felt like something completely new: Ostensibly a missing persons drama about a woman (Lea Massari) who disappears during a boating trip, leaving her best friend (Monica Vitti) and lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) to

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Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

L’Avventura

Written by Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, and Tonino Guerra

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Italy, 1960

Michelangelo Antonioni’s enigmatic and brilliant L’Avventura is one of the benchmarks for international art cinema, a somewhat disputable designation that was, nevertheless, very much in vogue at the time of its release. Take the 1960 Cannes Film Festival for example, where L’Avventura debuted to one of the event’s most divisive responses, with initially more boos than cheers greeting this affront to conventional film narrative and form. Yet, this was also the year of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (the Palme d’Or winner), Chukhray’s Ballad of a Soldier, Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Kalatozov’s Letter Never Sent, and Buñuel’s The Young One, to name just a few of the other titles at the festival, where, ultimately, L’Avventura came away with the Jury Prize (shared with Ichikawa’s...

Rossana Podestà dead at 79: ‘Helen of Troy’ actress later featured in sword-and-sandal spectacles, risqué sex comedies (photo: Jacques Sernas and Rossana Podestà in ‘Helen of Troy’) Rossana Podestà, the sensual star of the 1955 epic Helen of Troy and other sword-and-sandal European productions of the ’50s and ’60s — in addition to a handful of risqué sex comedies of the ’70s — died earlier today, December 10, 2013, in Rome according to several Italian news outlets. Podestà was 79. She was born Carla Dora Podestà on August 20, 1934, in, depending on the source, either Zlitan or Tripoli, in Libya, at the time an Italian colony. According to the IMDb, the renamed Rossana Podestà began her film career in 1950, when she was featured in a small role in Dezsö Ákos Hamza’s Strano appuntamento ("Strange Appointment"). However, according to online reports, she was actually discovered by director Léonide Moguy, who cast her in a small role in...

"It's hard, keeping a relationship going when one's here and the other's there—but it's easy, too," one of the characters in L'Avventura quips. This prescient observation—that distance and alienation engender social relations as much as they encumber them—still rings true 53 years after the film's release, at a cultural moment when technology simultaneously unites and distances us. One of the defining works of modernist cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni's enduring masterpiece—now in its first new 35mm print in over a decade—only grows more poignant with time, as its social critique is revealed to be timeless. The bourgeois, vapid lives of Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti) are filled with yachts, lovers, and anomie; yet it's nevertheless sho...

Rome — Armando Trovajoli, an Italian who composed music for some 300 films and whose lush and playful serenade to Rome is a much-requested romantic standby for tourists, has died at age 95.

The city's mayor, Gianni Alemanno, mourned Trovajoli's passing, saying in a statement that `'the voice of Rome has been extinguished." The Italian news agency Ansa said widow Maria Paola Trovajoli announced the death Saturday, saying her husband had died a few days before in Rome but declining to give the exact date.

Roman by birth, Trovajoli began his musical career as a pianist, playing jazz and dance music. He appeared with many jazz stars, among them Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Louis Armstrong, Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.

In the 1950s, his prolific relationship with the film world took flight. Travojoli composed for many of Italy's hit movies of the next decades, especially comedies.

He wrote the music for...

La course du lièvre à travers les champs (The Race of the Hare Across the Fields a.k.a. ...and Hope to Die, 1972) is an interesting late entry in the career of French crime specialist René Clément, a kind of smorgasbord of his favorite stuff: hardboiled crime, knotty sexual triangles, a hero on the run, convoluted crime schemes, with a harkening back to childhood sins that suggests his classic Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952). This might suggest desperation to recapture past glories, but the film is also stuffed with experimentation and up-to-the-minute influences (a train station confrontation early on suggests Leone) which confirm the filmmaker as alert to new possibilities.

But the film could just as easily be approached through the sensibility of its writer, Sébastien Japrisot, a key figure in French cinema and crime cinema, or even through that of the author of the source novel, David Goodis.

The Italian master's challenging and difficult L'Avventura was booed at its premiere in Cannes. But nowadays the director gets something far more hurtful: indifference

This is the centenary year of Michelangelo Antonioni. He was born on 29 September 1912 and died in 2007 at the age of 94, having worked until almost the very end. As well as everything else, he gave us one of the founding myths of postwar cinema: The Booing of L'Avventura. For film historians, it's as pretty much important as the audience riots at the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

At the Cannes film festival on 15 May 1960, Antonioni presented his L'Avventura, a challenging and difficult film and a decisive break from his earlier work, replete with languorous spaces and silences. This was movie-modernism's difficult birth. The film was jeered so ferociously, so deafeningly, that poor Antonioni and his beautiful star Monica Vitti burst into tears where they sat. There...

In conjunction with La Furia Umana, Notebook is very happy to present Ted Fendt's original English translation of Luc Moullet's "Rockefeller's Melancholy," on Michelangelo Antonioni. Moullet's original French version can be found at La Furia Umana. Our special thanks to Mr. Moullet, La Furia Umana and Ted Fendt for making this possible.

Above: "John D. Rockefeller" (1917) by John Singer Sargent.

Drifting is the fundamental subject of Antonioni’s films. They are about beings who don’t know where they are going, who constantly contradict themselves, and are guided by their momentary impulses. We don’t understand what they feel or why they act as they do.

Psychological cinema could be defined in this way: it is psychological when you don’t understand the motivation of emotions and behaviors. If you understand, it means it’s easy, immediately, at a very superficial level... The filmmaker must therefore let it be...

Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au coeur)

Directed by Louis Malle

France, 1971

Louis Malle’s first narrative feature-film was 1958′s Elevator to the Gallows. A jazzy, contribution to the late-noir period it placed Malle conveniently between the too-cool gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville and the too-cool New Wave pictures of Jean-Luc Godard. Instead of continuing on this predetermined track, Malle took a left turn, and then another one. His refusal to be categorized is reminiscent of the varied work of an earlier auteur, the great John Huston.

After adding comedies, documentaries, and stark dramas to his repertoire, Malle turned to the film that, alongside 1974′s Lacombe, Lucien and 1987′s Au Revoir Les Enfants, would establish his reputation as a personal filmmaker, Murmur of the Heart.

Similar to Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, Malle takes a look back at his childhood in a coming-of-age film that manages to be gentle,...

• Deep Focus: In the Mind of One, & Into the Skin of Another:An analysis of the themes of alienation and escapism in selected works of Michelangelo Antonioni.Shaped by his visually powerful aesthetic techniques and complemented by a unique quality in the cinematic treatment of the environmental surroundings in his pictures, with particular emphasis and depth of meaning found in the images of his films, the works from director Michelangelo Antonioni employ a distinctive filmmaking sense in which to process a window of the world. With his particular filmic method, “Antonioni’s early interpreters saw his films primarily as an expression of ‘existential angst’ or ‘alienation’” , and some audiences saw a certain ambiguity in his films, this in turn alienated some of the viewers. In his body of work, Antonioni gives an entire ‘non-traditional’ discourse on the human condition and overtly details observations found in human behavior,

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