Citizen Rosi: The Films of Francesco Rosi. "Lucky Luciano". Screening
Like all the great modern Italian directors, Francesco Rosi has roots in neorealism; he apprenticed with, most famously, Luchino Visconti on La terra trema as well as on Bellissima and Senso, which he cowrote. Yet Rosi is like no other director. An artist with a passionate commitment to truth, he is never for a moment fooled into thinking he has found it. Rosi constructs his films, mostly thrillers and political exposés, as dramatic inquiries, frequently into real situations, always into real social forces—the forces of corruption. Born in 1922 in Naples, he is a man of the South whose character was shaped by the unholy alliances that prevail there and the dichotomies of power they perpetuate. And this is how character is shaped in his films, from a vendor who gainsays the mob to the Sicilian bandit/guerilla Salvatore Giuliano who challenges all Italy; from the politics of poverty in Christ Stopped at Eboli to the poverty of politics in Three Brothers.
A committed leftist and an equally committed modernist, Francesco Rosi offers a body of films whose political and emotional impact is almost purely visual. Two great cinematographers—Gianni Di Venanzo for the black-and-white films and Pasqualino De Santis for the films in color—are his important collaborators. Pauline Kael wrote, “Rosi has one of the greatest compositional senses in the history of movies. . . . We’re led by the camera, and we trust its movement. Something more is always going to be revealed. Rosi is discovering life.”
A cubist Godfather, an abstract mobster ballet: the intertwining of men in “high” places is so thorough as to make the distinction between G-men and H-men impossible in Rosi’s powerful indictment of the collusion between CIA and Mafia heroin-mongers during and after World War II. As are most of Rosi’s films, Lucky Luciano is centered around a real-life protagonist who remains something of a mystery but whose power is manifest—and power (male power, money power, capitalist power) is the film’s true subject. Luciano (Gian Maria Volonté) is a character who never develops, in the dramatic sense, but rather materializes in a New York bistro and then slowly disintegrates in exile in Sicily, whence he apparently masterminds the international drug trade. Rosi’s confusion of beefy men is heightened by a media-rich, journalistic, and ultimately Marxist layering of information that is exquisite to watch. A highlight is squealer Rod Steiger, wining and dining in red pajamas, living in the cleavage of his buxom lover, and crawling between back-alley garbage cans to nestle and die.
General admission: $12
BAM Cinema Club Members: $7
Movie Moguls: Free
Other screenings
4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
