Cinema is not at all or not only or not simply

a folk entertainment, it is even more, even

better; in fact it has been defined the

seventh art, the total art, because it both

hosts and needs all the other arts such as

music, moving sculpture, dynamic painting,

dancing, playing, poetry: so it is a true

sublime artistic synthesis. “Auteur Cinema”

conveys and breeds emotions, enriches and

creates culture.

Italy has always expressed great directors.

Important people of our culture

Vittorio De Sica Vittorio De Sica (7 July 1901 or 1902 – 13 November 1974) was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement. Four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: “Sciuscià” and “Bicycle thieves” were awarded honorary Oscars, while “Ieri, Oggi e Domani” and “Il giardino dei Finzi - Contini” won the Best foreign language film oscar.

“Shoeshine” (the English

translation of the Italian title “Sciuscià”) is a 1946 film and the first major work directed by Vittorio De Sica. In it two shoeshine boys get into trouble with the police after trying to find the money to buy a horse. Shoeshine is among the first of the Italian neorealist films.

In 1948 it received an Honorary Award at the Academy Awards for its high quality. This award was the precursor of what would later become the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

“Bicycle Thieves” is one of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism. It received an

Academy Honorary Award in 1950 and, just four years after its release, was deemed the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's poll of filmmakers and critics; fifty years later the same poll ranked it sixth among greatest-ever films.

Bicycle thieves

In post-World War II Rome, Antonio Ricci is desperate for work to support his family. He is offered a good position in posting advertising bills, but he needs a bicycle. So his wife Maria resolutely strips the bed of her dowry bedsheets (prized possessions for a poor family) and takes them to the pawn office, where they are exchanged for a bicycle.

On his first day of work Antonio is atop a ladder when a young man snatches the bicycle. The police take a report but warn there is little they can do.

Antonio tries to find it, but he doesn’t manage it. Then Antonio sees an unattended bicycle and he tries to steal it, but he is immediately stopped and attacked by the crowd. Only the desperate cry of his son Bruno, who moves to pity the bicycle owner, avoids him the prison.

The film ends with the sad return home of the two protagonists with Bruno shaking his father's hand to comfort him.

“Yesterday Today and Tomorrow” (perfect

translation of the Italian title “Ieri, Oggi e Domani”) is a 1963 Italian comedy film, with the Italian best actor (Marcello Mastroianni) and the Italian best actress (Sofia Loren). The film consists of three amusing short stories about three couples in three different parts of Italy. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” is a 1970 Italian film,

directed by Vittorio De Sica. The film is based upon Giorgio Bassani's novel of the same name. In the late 1930s, in Ferrara, a group of young friends get together for playing tennis and enjoying happy times. Some of them are Jewish and a rising tide of Fascism has imposed increasingly anti-Semitic restrictions in their lives. Barred from regular tennis clubs, they go to play at the estate of a wealthy and intellectual Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis. The two young Finzi-Continis, Alberto and his sister Micol, organize a tennis tournament. Oblivious to the threats around them, life still seems to be sunny at the large Finzi-Contini estate, keeping the rest of the world at bay. Their large estate is attended by the other young, above all Giorgio and Bruno, both of them fallen in love with Micol. The political events close in: Bruno is recruited and sent to the Russian front. By 1943 all the young Jews visiting the Garden of the Finzi-Continis are arrested and Bruno is killed in the Russian front. The Finzi-Continis are abruptly taken away from their contentment and illusory isolation. The fate of the Jews of Ferrara is being deported to the concentration camps. Final images show “far” happy days of Nicole, Alberto, Ernesto and Bruno playing tennis and, soon after, the empty tennis field, the hard present. The sequence is accompanied by the “El male rachamim”, a Jewish lament for the dead. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It won the Golden Bear at the 21st Berlin International Film Festival in 1971.

Federico Fellini ( 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. He is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards, becoming the person who won (together with Vittorio De Sica) the highest number of Oscars (four) for Best foreign language film in history.

Federico Fellini

“La Strada”

is a 1954 Italian neo-realist drama directed by Federico Fellini. The film portrays the journey of its two main characters: the brutish strongman played by Anthony Quinn and a naïve young woman (Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife) whom he bought from her mother and took with him to see the world; their encounters with his old rival the Fool are their road to destruction. It won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1956. It was placed fourth in the 1992 British Film Institute directors' list of cinema's top 10 films. This film influenced important songwriters: Bob Dylan cites La Strada as an influence for the song “Mr. Tambourine Man” ; Kris Kristofferson has said that La Strada was an inspiration for the song “Me and Bobby McGee”, which is heard in the road movie Two-Lane Blacktop.

“Nights of Cabiria” is a 1957 Italian romantic drama film based on an original story by

Fellini. The film is about a romantic prostitute wandering the streets of Rome and looking for true love but finding only heartbreak. Forty years later, the Times carried an important review by the critic Janet Maslin who called the film "a cinematic masterpiece" and added that the final shot of Cabiria is worth more than "all the fire-breathing blockbusters Hollywood has to offer". It was awarded the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1958.

“8½” is a 1963 Italian comedy-

drama shot in black-and-white. Its title is ironic and refers to Fellini's eighth and a half film as a director. As a matter of fact the main character is a director suffering from the artist’s creative block. In this film Fellini included veiled autobiographical references. “8½” won two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design (black-and-white). Acknowledged as an avant-garde film and a highly influential classic, it was ranked third best film of all time in a 2002 poll of film directors conducted by the British Film Institute.

“Amarcord” is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-

age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in a little village in 1930s Fascist Italy. The film’s title is a neologism taken from the Emilia Romagna slang which stands for "I remember". In this film the great Italian director mocks both Mussolini's ludicrous posturings and those of a Catholic Church that "imprisoned Italians in a perpetual adolescence" as it is easy to understand from the poster. The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Roberto Remigio Benigni is an Academy Award winning Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and film director, and a true showman in television.

Roberto Benigni

“Life Is Beautiful” is a 1997 Italian

tragicomedy drama film where Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish bookkeeper employing his naïf fertile imagination to protect his son from the “human” horrors during the three years internment at the Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . Part of the film comes from Benigni's own family history: before his birth Roberto's father had survived three years of internment at the same camp. The film has been and is still a critical success, winning Benigni the Academy Award for Best Actor as well as the Academy Award for the Best Original Dramatic Score and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The film also received mostly positive reviews. Despite the acclaim, the actor-director Roberto Benigni received criticism for the comedy elements incorporated into the backdrop of the Shoah. But Roger Ebert stated: "At Cannes, it offended some left-wing critics with its use of humor in connection with the Holocaust. What may be most offensive to both wings is its sidestepping of politics in favor of simple human ingenuity. The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter".