L’amore, Roberto Rossellini (Italy, 1948): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Series | August 10 | 7 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

An epigraph from Rossellini calls this two-part film “an homage to the art of Anna Magnani,” but “homage” may not be strong enough to describe a work so deeply in the actress’s thrall. Based on a play by Jean Cocteau, the first segment, A Human Voice, focuses intensely on the voice—and face—of Magnani, alone with the telephone, talking her way through the end of love. Promising strength while evincing its opposite, Magnani creates a portrait of implacable grief. The film moves from claustrophobic interiority to the rustic open air for The Miracle, in which Magnani is coarse, funny, and unsentimentally touching as a naive goatherd pregnant by a mysterious stranger whom she believes to be Saint Joseph. Federico Fellini cowrote the script (also appearing as the dubious Joseph), and there is a touch of La strada’s Gelsomina in Magnani’s daft peasant soul. Fellini and Rossellini’s unconventional parable didn’t sit well with the American Catholic church, sparking a protracted censorship battle that ended in a key Supreme Court decision upholding cinematic freedom of speech.

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Rossellini, Tullio Pinelli, Federico Fellini, based on the play La voix humaine by Jean Cocteau and on a story by Fellini. Photographed by Robert Juillard, Aldo Tonti. With Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini. (78 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Cinecitta Luce S.p.A., permission Janus Films/Criterion Collection)

Tickets required: $5.50 BAM/PFA members and UCB students,  $9.50 Adults (18-64),  $6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and youth (17 & under)

Event Contact: bampfa@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0808