Masters of cinema: Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti and the new Italian cinema

“Each time I tried communicating with someone, love disappeared”. This one sentence is the only way to compare three very different directors who arrived at the same time (1960) and the same place (Rome) from such different beginnings.

Antonioni’s L’avventura captures emotional alienation while Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is the shock of the new alongside Visconti’s Marxist Rocco and his Brothers. All began in neorealism then burst onto the international scene in 1960.

Two recent Italian films, Call Me By Your Name and The Great Beauty, created a new romantic realism.
Call Me By Your Name speaks to everyone who has been in – and thrown out – of love, but there is more to it than even that. James Ivory adapted André Aciman’s novel but Luca Guadagnino gave it a new inflection.

The Great Beauty, a shimmering coup de cinema to make your heart burst, won the Golden Globe and the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2014. Rome is one of the great cities of cinema, which means continuous change and flow. The Great Beauty plunges headlong into the current. Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty sets out to explain Rome today, just as Fellini did with La Dolce Vita in 1960.