FILM

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents Days of Glory: Italian Neorealist Classics. The film series Days of Glory (which takes its title from the opening-night film, an omnibus production) showcases the highly influential Neorealist period in Italian cinema, including several films that have not been screened in Houston for years.

Born out of the ruins of World War II, the Neorealist movement’s first rallying cry came from screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who called for a new kind of Italian film, one with no need for plots (which attempted to impose “order” on an already lived-in reality) or professional actors. Instead, it would take to the streets and hills to document the true lives, sorrows, and pleasures of the Italian people.

Film Schedule:

Days of Glory (Giorni di Gloria) (Directed by Luchino Visconti, Marcello Pagliero, Giuseppe De Santis, Mario Serandrei, Italy, 1945, 70 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Friday, September 9, 7 p.m.  Rarely seen outside of Italy, Days of Glory is an extremely important work: the first documentary on the German occupation of Rome and the Italian war of liberation.

The Children are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano) (Directed by Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1944, 84 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Friday, September 9, 8:30 p.m. Follow the anguish of four-year-old Prico (Luciano De Abrosis) after his mother, Nina (Isa Pola), leaves his father for her lover.

Open City (Roma, città aperta) (Directed by Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945, 100 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Saturday, September 10, 7 p.m. New 35mm Print. Rossellini’s portrait of Rome under the German occupation centers on the manhunt for a resistance leader and its effect upon several characters, including a partisan priest, a corrupt actress, a Gestapo major, a gang of street kids, and a feisty pregnant woman (Anna Magnani) about to celebrate her long-deferred wedding.

Obsession (Ossessione) (Directed by Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1943, 140 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Sunday, September 11, 5 p.m. Transposing James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to a squalid trattoria in the Po Valley, Luchino Visconti plays it for a deft mixture of dour authenticity, studied narrative suspense, and ambiguous passions. Ossessione is a work of extraordinary beauty.

Shoeshine (Sciuscià) (Directed by Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946, 93 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Friday, September 16, 7:30 p.m. In postwar Italy, two scamps, Pasquale and Giuseppe, work as shoeshine boys, not just to ward off starvation, but to raise money to buy a white horse. With this goal they naively become involved in black-market activities that get them sent to a reformatory. The pitiful way society encourages the suffering of children functions as both theme and symbol for De Sica and screenwriter Zavattini, and this is eloquently played out in Shoeshine.

The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) (Directed by Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1948, 93 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Saturday, September 17, 7 p.m. Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist tale finds the despair of postwar Italy evident in the faces of its men.

Bandits of Orgosolo (Banditi a Orgosolo) (Directed by Vittorio De Seta, Italy, 1961, 98 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Sunday, September 18, 5 p.m. Set in the remote Sardinian countryside, De Seta’s first feature is as spare as the surrounding mountains, unforgiving in their barren majesty. In this trying expanse lives Michele, a simple shepherd who wants nothing more than to tend his flock. Wrongly associated with bandits, Michele, along with his twelve-year-old brother Peppeddu, flees with his sole possessions, the sheep, driving them across the bleak mountains to evade the carabinieri.

Accattone (Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1961, 120 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Friday, September 23, 7 p.m. Pasolini’s first film is set in the milieu of his early novels Ragazzi di Vita (1955) and Una Vita Violenta (1959)—the world of prostitutes, pimps, and layabouts living on the outskirts of Rome and existing outside of both bourgeois and proletarian morality.

The Earth Will Tremble (La Terra Trema) (Directed by Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1948, 155 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Saturday, September 24, 6 p.m. Visconti’s masterpiece of austere lyricism was shot in the Sicilian village of Aci Trezza. There, fishermen are kept in poverty by middle-class wholesalers. The Valastro family, led by the impassioned young N’toni, attempts to overcome this oppression and is ostracized in an ancient community, where the elders are content to complain about their exploitation in knowing proverbs, and the young think they can bargain a future.

Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano) (Directed by Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1951, 95 min., in Italian with English subtitles) ONE NIGHT ONLY: Sunday, September 25, 5 p.m. Written by the great neorealist writer Cesare Zavattini, Miracle in Milan is a fable set against a realistic backdrop of Italy in 1951.