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Wikipedia
La Strada (English: The Road) is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naive young woman (Giulietta Masina) is sold to a brutish man (Anthony Quinn) and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show.
La Strada won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1956
Plot
Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), a fey young woman, learns her sister Rosa has died since going on the road with the Gypsy Zampanò (Anthony Quinn). Now the same man has returned a year later to ask her mother if Gelsomina will take Rosa's place. The mother accepts 10,000 lire and her daughter departs the same day.
Zampanò makes a living as an itinerant strongman, entertaining crowds by breaking an iron chain bound tightly across his chest, then passing the hat for tips. In short order, Gelsomina's naive and antic nature emerges, although Zampanò's brutish methods present her with a callousfoil. He teaches her to play the snare drum and trumpet, dance a bit, and clown for the audience. Despite her willingness to please, he relies on intimidation and even cruelty at times to maintain his dominion.
Finally, she rebels and leaves, making her way into town. There she watches the act of another street entertainer, Il Matto ("The Fool"), a talented high wire artist and clown (Richard Basehart). When Zampanò finds her there, he forcibly takes her back. They join a ragtag traveling circus, and Il Matto already works there. For reasons he himself cannot understand, Il Matto maliciously teases the strongman at every opportunity. After getting drenched by a pail of water, Zampanò chases after his tormentor with his knife drawn; as a result, both men are briefly jailed and eventually fired.
Gelsomina's difficulties with her forced partnership are the subject of frequent soul searching. After Il Matto's release from prison, he proposes that there are alternatives to her servitude, and imparts his philosophy that everything and everyone has a purpose -- even a pebble, even her. A nun suggests that Gelsomina's purpose in life is comparable to her own. But when Gelsomina offers the possibility of marriage, Zampanò brushes her off.
The separate paths of fool and strongman cross for the last time on an empty stretch of road, when Zampanò comes upon Il Matto fixing a flat tire. As Gelsomina watches in horror, the strongman satisfies his revenge on the clown with a series of blows to the head. Il Matto complains that his watch is broken before he collapses and dies. Zampanò hides the body and pushes the car off the road.
The killing breaks Gelsomina's spirit. After ten days, her affect remains flat and her eyes lifeless. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, Zampanò abandons her while she is taking a nap.
Some years later, he overhears a woman singing a tune Gelsomina often played. He learns that the woman's father had found Gelsomina on the beach and kindly taken her in. However, she wasted away and died. Zampanò gets drunk and wanders to the beach, where he breaks down and cries uncontrollably.
[edit]Cast
- Anthony Quinn as Zampanò
- Giulietta Masina (Fellini's wife) as Gelsomina
- Richard Basehart as Il Matto - the Fool
- Aldo Silvani as Il Signor Giraffa - Mr. Giraffe, the circus owner
- Marcella Rovere as La Vedova - the Widow
- Livia Venturini as La Suorina - the Nun
[edit]Production
[edit]Background
The idea for the character Zampanò came from Fellini's youth in the coastal town of Rimini. A pig castrator lived there who was known as a womanizer: according to Fellini, "This man took all the girls in town to bed with him; once he left a poor idiot girl pregnant and everyone said the baby was the devil's child."[2] In 1992, Fellini told Canadian director Damian Pettigrew that he had conceived the film at the same time as co-scenarist Tullio Pinelli in a kind of "orgiastic synchronicity":
"I was directing I vitelloni, and Tullio had gone to see his family in Turin. At that time, there was no autostrada between Rome and the north and so you had to drive through the mountains. Along one of the tortuous winding roads, he saw a man pulling a carretta, a sort of cart covered in tarpaulin... A tiny woman was pushing the cart from behind. When he returned to Rome, he told me what he'd seen and his desire to narrate their hard lives on the road. 'It would make the ideal scenario for your next film,' he said. It was the same story I'd imagined but with a crucial difference: mine focused on a little traveling circus with a slow-witted young woman named Gelsomina. So we merged my flea-bitten circus characters with his smoky campfire mountain vagabonds. We named Zampanò after the owners of two small circuses in Rome: Zamperla and Saltano."[3]
[edit]Filming locations
[edit]Music
The theme music, composed by Nino Rota, contains a wistful tune which appears in the story line as a melody played by the Fool on a miniature violin, and later by Gelsomina after she teaches herself to play the trumpet. Its last cue in the penultimate scene is sung by the woman who tells Zampano the fate of Gelsomina after he abandoned her.
[edit]Distribution
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, 1954 and won the Silver Lion. It opened wide in Italy on September 22, 1954, and in the United States on July 16, 1956.
[edit]Reception
Italy and France
Tullio Cicciarelli of Il Lavoro nuovo saw the film as:
...an unfinished poem, but one deliberately unfinished for fear that its essence be lost in the callousness of critical definition, or in the ambiguity of classification. La Strada cannot be classified nor does it sustain the weight of rational discussion and comparison (when the film was shown at the Venice Film Festival, many critics saw in it suggestions of Chaplin). The film should be accepted for its strange fragility and its often too colorful, almost artificial moments, or else totally rejected. If we try to analyze Fellini's film, its fragmentary quality becomes immediately evident and we are obliged to treat each fragment, each personal comment, each secret confession separately.[5]
In Il Secolo XIX, Ermanno Contini praised Fellini as:
...a master story-teller. The narrative is light and harmonious, drawing its essence, resilience, uniformity and purpose from small details, subtle annotations and soft tones that slip naturally into the humble plot of a story apparently void of action. But how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always clearly evident, not always interpreted with full poetical and human eloquence: it is suggested with considerable delicacy and sustained by a subtle emotive force.[6]
Released in France in 1955, Dominique Aubier of Les Cahiers du cinéma thought La Strada:
...belongs to the mythological class, a class intended to captivate the critics more perhaps than the general public. Fellini attains a summit rarely reached by other film directors: style at the service of the artist’s mythological universe. This example once more proves that the cinema has less need of technicians - there are too many already - than of creative intelligence. To create such a film, the author must have had not only a considerable gift for expression but also a deep understanding of certain spiritual problems.[7]
[edit]Influence
A musical based on the film opened on Broadway on December 14, 1969, but closed after one performance.
Serbian rock band La Strada took their name from the film.
[edit]Awards
Wins
- Venice Film Festival: Silver Lion, Federico Fellini; 1954.
- Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists: Silver Ribbon; Best Director, Federico Fellini; Best Producer, Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti; 1955.
- New York Film Critics Circle Awards: NYFCC Award Best Foreign Language Film; 1956.
- Bodil Awards: Bodil; Best European Film, Federico Fellini (director); 1956.
- Academy Awards: Oscar; Best Foreign Language Film; 1956.
- Blue Ribbon Awards, Japan: Blue Ribbon Award, Best Foreign Language Film, Federico Fellini; 1958.
- Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain: CEC Award, Best Foreign Film, 1958.
- Kinema Junpo Awards, Japan: Kinema Junpo Award, Best Foreign Language Film; 1958.
Nominations
- Venice Film Festival: Golden Lion, Federico Fellini; 1954.
- British Academy of Film and Television Arts: BAFTA Film Award; Best Film from any Source, Italy; Best Foreign Actress, Giulietta Masina; 1956.
- Academy Awards: Oscar; Best Writing, Best Original Screenplay; Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano; 1957.
Note
- La Strada won more than fifty international awards, including an Oscar in 1956 for Best Foreign Language Film, the first prize ever given in that category
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