Lina Wertmüller  

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"The notion of carnival is also pertinent to the work of Lina Wertmüller. Much of the harsh criticism of Wertmuller’s work has been grounded in a kind of “genre mistake” by which the carnivalesque origins of her art have gone unrecognized."--Subversive Pleasures (1992) by Robert Stam


"Lina Wertmüller's two films set in the Fascist period, Film d'Amore e d'Anarchia (Love and Anarchy, 1973) and and Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), adopted a completely opposite tone to Cavani's, but otherwise share with her a similar ambivalence."--Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (2013) by Giacomo Lichtner

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Lina Wertmüller (14 August 1928 – 9 December 2021) was an Italian film director and screenwriter.

She is best known as an auteur of 1970s art house films The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973), Swept Away (1974), and Seven Beauties (1975).

An often lauded scene in Wertmüller's oeuvre is the street flirting scene in The Seduction of Mimi.

Contents

Style and themes

The influence of Fellini's style is evident in much of Wertmüller's work. The two share a common empathy with the way their films view of the Italian working class, showing the realities of life for the politically neglected and economically downtrodden with a tendency towards the preposterous. Wertmüller's work also seems to exhibit a true adoration of Italy and its varied locales, beautifying elements of her film's locations with cinematography that presents the camera's subjects with a colorful extravagance that idealizes the distinctly Italian settings of her films. Her aesthetic is one that borrowed heavily from her background in theater, routinely using the camera in such a way that emphasizes performance and the grandiose comedy of her characters’ near constant state of emotional frenzy. Much of her work uses formal film tactics to dramatize the misapplication and destructive qualities that political ideology can have on individuals, satirizing common conceptions of revolution and the political status quo in the process.

Narrative and cinematic reflexivity are also commonplace in Wertmüller's films, as she rehashed and refigured signs and recognizable modes of presentation in a way that references her inspirations and the films of her contemporaries. This is made clear through her disruption of traditional conceptions of virtually all political dogma and the irrationality of her masculine, and occasionally feminine, figures, taking recognizable elements of society and film and critiquing them through doing away with any sort of narrative and character plausibility.

This is particularly evident in a film like her 1972 The Seduction of Mimi. This positions Mimi (played by Giancarlo Giannini) as an impossibly inept and simple man who fully embodies the notion of Italian machismo, as he fumbles his way through a world that throws a variety of ideologies and economic positions at him, all of which he readily inhabits. Mimi is perpetually successful in his performance of these roles, despite the audience's awareness of their inauthenticity that results from a diegetic (narrative) acknowledgement of Mimi's hapless ignorance. This element of critique in the film functions as one example of many of most prevalent themes in Wertmüller's work, as the underlying meaning for much of her work is a desire to deconstruct and subvert the institutions and social ideologies of a capitalist modernity. This socialist-inflected politicization of ideas of class and the institution are extended to sexuality and gender as well. Most of her films deploy these elements in conjunction with her affection for the theatrical in such a way that creates a unique concoction that is undeniably within the generic confines of Commedia all’italiana.

According to Peter Bondanella, "Wertmüller's work combined a concern with topical political issues and the conventions of traditional Italian grotesque comedy".

Films such as Seven Beauties and Swept Away feature scenes of sadomasochism.

Film career

1960s

After her years spent touring with an avant-garde puppet group, Wertmüller set her sights on film. In the early 1960s, Flora Carabella, a school friend, introduced Wertmüller to her husband, the famous Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, who in turn introduced to the auteur Federico Fellini who would become her mentor.

Although The Basilisks, which was scored by Ennio Morricone, was critically well received, it did not garner the sort of attention that her later works would.

Throughout the 1960s, Wertmüller produced a series of films that were well liked but that failed to garner international success. Of these films, her first collaboration with Giancarlo Giannini occurred in 1966's musical comedy Rita the Mosquito. As Darragh O'Donoghue described in an issue of Cineaste, generally "her early films comprise a fairly straight pastiche of neorealism and early Fellini (The Lizards, 1963, available without English subtitles on YouTube), an episodic comedy, two musicals, and a lovely Spaghetti Western (The Belle Starr Story, 1968, directed under the pseudonym Nathan Wich, and available in a bleached English dub on YouTube)-works where knowledge of generic predecessors was essential".

1970s

The 1970s for the socialist auteur saw the release of virtually all of her most influential and highly regarded films, many of which featured a collaboration with Giancarlo Giannini. According to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's Companion to Italian Cinema, 1972 "marked the beginning of Wertmüller's golden age". Beginning in 1972 with The Seduction of Mimi, and continuing until 1978 with Blood Feud, Wertmüller released seven films many of which are considered masterpieces of Commedia all'italiana. It was during this time she saw critical and international success, gaining traction as a filmmaker outside of Italy and in the United States on a scale that many of her contemporaries were baffled by and unable to attain themselves. In 1975, Swept Away won Top Foreign Film awarded by the National Board of Review in the United States and the following year, this period of highly celebrated creative output culminated in the 1976 film, Seven Beauties, for which she became the first female director to be nominated for an Oscar. This film, which again features Giannini in the lead role, pushes Wertmüller's specific brand of tragic comedy to its limits, following a self-obsessed Casanova from a small Italian town who is sent to a German concentration camp. The film was initially met with controversy due to Wertmüller's frankness in her rendering of the apparatuses of genocide as well as her perceived macabre insensitivity towards its survivors, but since has been accepted as her masterwork.

She signed a contract with Warner Bros. to make four films and her first for them was her first English language film, titled A Night Full of Rain, which was entered into the 28th Berlin International Film Festival in 1978. The film was not a success and Warner cancelled the contract.

1980s

Her 1983 film A Joke of Destiny was entered into the 14th Moscow International Film Festival in 1985 and Camorra (A Story of Streets, Women and Crime) was entered into the 36th Berlin International Film Festival in 1986.

In 1985, she received the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.

After this period of acclaim, Wertmüller began to fade out of international prominence, although she continued to expediently release films well into the 1980s and 90s. Some of these films were sponsored by American financiers and studios, yet they failed to have the breadth of reach that her 1970s output achieved. While these films are less widely seen and were neglected or disparaged by most, films like Summer Night (1986), Ferdinando & Carolina (1999), and Ciao, Professore are retroactively thought of as worthwhile.

She is known for her whimsically prolix movie titles. For instance, the full title of Swept Away is Swept away by an unusual destiny in the blue sea of August. These titles were invariably shortened for international release. She is entered in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest film title, Un fatto di sangue nel comune di Siculiana fra due uomini per causa di una vedova. Si sospettano moventi politici. Amore-Morte-Shimmy. Lugano belle. Tarantelle. Tarallucci e vino, which totals 179 characters. The film is better known under the international titles Blood Feud or Revenge.


Filmography

As writer and director
Year Title
1963 The Lizards
1965 Let's Talk About Men
1966 Rita the Mosquito
1967 Don't Sting the Mosquito
1968 The Belle Starr Story
1972 The Seduction of Mimi
1973 Love and Anarchy
1974 All Screwed Up
1974 Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August
1975 Seven Beauties
1978 A Night Full of Rain
1978 Blood Feud
1983 A Joke of Destiny
1984 Softly, Softly
1986 Camorra (A Story of Streets, Women and Crime)
1986 Summer Night, with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil
1989 As Long as It's Love
1989 The Tenth One in Hiding
1990 Saturday, Sunday and Monday
1992 Ciao, Professore!
1996 The Nymph
1996 The Blue Collar Worker and the Hairdresser in a Whirl of Sex and Politics
1999 Ferdinando and Carolina
2004 Too Much Romance... It's Time for Stuffed Peppers





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Lina Wertmüller" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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