1. My efforts at Vizio University turned to Martin Scorsese today. Yesterday, I read that in 1999 Scorsese made a four hour documentary, My Voyage to Italy, chronicling his experience with and the influence of Italian movies he saw in his youth and on into his early adulthood.
I looked in the usual places to see if this movie was streaming anywhere and, lo and behold, I found it at Internet Archives (archives.org).
I was stoked.
2. The documentary goes back and forth between Scorsese talking about his Italian/Sicilian family and his experience growing up in an immigrant/Italian neighborhood on Elizabeth Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side. (By the way, he grew up even closer to NYU than I indicated in my post yesterday. His family apartment on Elizabeth Street was about a ten minute walk away from Greenwich Village. Spatially these locales were close to each other; culturally they were miles apart [and not in a bad way].)
The Italian movies he saw, often on television, as a young guy came to be known as Neo-Realist films. The Italian movie studios had been decimated and looted during the Second World War. Filmmakers dealt with this by making movies on various locations and often made use of non-actors. These movies are not escapist. They tell often brutal stories about Italy under fascist rule and portray the depravation of life after the war ended.
These movies excited the imagination of filmmakers around the world. They blurred lines between fictional stories and documentary films. Lighting was often natural. Photographers took movie cameras where they'd rarely been before and told stories that grew out of the land and the people of Italy, not out of movie studios.
If you'd like to see the list of movies Scorsese shows generous clips from and discusses, just go to the Wikipedia page entitled, My Voyage to Italy.
3. I didn't finish this documentary. I will return to the last hour as soon as possible and pick it up with Scorsese's treatment of Fellini.
I changed things up around 9:00 and listened to Deadish at KEPW.org and blissed out on the parts of several Grateful Dead shows that they played over the years on August 4th. Jeff opened Deadish with live Jefferson Airplane from a show that featured both the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. I'm not sure I'd ever heard a tape of Jefferson Airplane in concert before and it was exciting.
I enjoy how the Grateful Dead's music frees up my mind and encourages my thoughts to wander.
I thought a lot during tonight's Deadish show about what I learned today about Italian Neo-Realism and about the movies I've watched over the years in which directors did not offer viewers escape, but worked to take audiences deeper into the realities of everyday life, whether urban streets, war battles, job sites, seedy bars and diners, and countless other places.
I thought about Laura. I loved this movie. Yes, it explored dark aspects of life like jealousy and murder, but did so within a setting that transported audiences out of everyday life into a world of wealth, dinner parties, fine furnishings, and fashionable clothes.
By way of contrast, I thought about The French Connection. In it, audiences are drawn into the grimy worlds of drug dealers, sketchy bars, a claustrophobic police precinct building, and a prolonged car chase scene that removes about as far from a studio back lot as we might imagine.
The impact of the Italian movies Scorsese introduces to us in My Voyage to Italy reaches beyond movies, doesn't it? I think of all those episodes of Law and Order and how in episode after episode we experience street scenes, investigations in run down brownstones, pawn shops, bodegas, liquor stores, and other places that take us closer to life as it's experienced in much of New York City, rather than offering us escape from it.
My recent studies at Vizio University sure have me wondering how and why, over the years, I've been so drawn to movies that don't provide much escape. Why, in junior high, was I more drawn to Cool Hand Luke than to say, Thoroughly Modern Milly. I don't know if I'll ever be able to answer that, but, who knows? Maybe with the help of the Grateful Dead my mind will wander to some possible answers!
A limerick by Stu:
They’re supposed to be hidden from sight.
With colors from gaudy to white.
Told to make sure they’re clean,
Lest by accident they’re seen.
And your preference for undies sees light.
National Underwear Day
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