Ciao, Marcello!

Saturday, September 22, 2018
Castro Theatre, San Francisco

An overdue homage to a great star 60 years after the making of “La Dolce Vita”, featuring the works of four directors for one actor in one day. Presented in collaboration with The Leonardo da Vinci Society, The Consul General of Italy and The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. With gratitude to Luce Cinecittá, Janus Films, Kino Lorber, and Paramount Pictures.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) 119 min. BD.  10:00 AM
Directed by Vittorio De Sica with Sophia Loren

8½ (1963) 138 min. 35 mm  1:00 PM
Directed by Federico Fellini with Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimèe, Sandra Milo

A Special Day (1977) 106 min. 35 mm.  3:30 PM
Directed by Ettore Scola with Sophia Loren

La Dolce Vita (1960) 173 min. DCP.  6:00 PM
Directed by Federico Fellini with Anita Ekberg

Via Veneto Party  9:00 PM-10:30 PM

Divorce Italian Style (1961) 105 min. 35 mm  10:30 PM
Directed by Pietro Germi with Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli

Marcello Mastroianni

A more intimate Marcello, who after the 10 years in the theater under the artistic wing of Luchino Visconti, arrives to the big success of “La Dolce Vita”, never forgetting the intimate life of the average Italian of the time. He molds and changes according to the director that he works with, giving us a kaleidoscope of images of Italy of the 60s. Marcello said: “Yes! I confess, I prefer cinema to theater. Yes, I prefer it for approximation and improvisations, for its confusion. Everything is cinema! A hotchpotch where everything is mixed together, where everyone is okay from jailbirds to poets…”

Marcello Mastroianni was only eleven years old when he entered the legendary gates of Cinecittá for the first time. A moment he would never have forgotten, he entered as an extra in a film by Beniamino Gigli called “Marionette”. He was born in Fontana Liri, a small town not far from Rome, on September 26, 1924. He died in Paris on December 19, 1996. His life as an actor was extraordinarily lucky and intense. He spent many years as a great theater protagonist interpreting legendary and memorable dramas. Then he spent years and years building a vast filmography: he acted in more than 170 films, many of which are absolute masterpieces and many are forever milestones in the history of worldwide cinema.

Amelia Antonucci, Program Director: “In the year 2000, during my time as Director of the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, I had the honor of presenting to San Francisco a retrospective of 22 films starring Marcello Mastroianni, entitled “The Stuff that Dreams are Made For” at the Pacific Film Archive and at the Castro Theatre from January 14th through Feb 12th: A whole month of Marcello! I am proud that after 18 years later, I am able to present again an homage to this unforgettable actor and star, with five titles in one day at the same venue – the Castro movie palace. Cinema Italia San Francisco, the company that I created to present Italian classic cinema in San Francisco. Following Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio De Sica, Anna Magnani, Dino Risi, Lina Wertmüller, Michelangelo Antonioni, this is our eighth series.”

“The Latin lover, the quintessential continental, the world weary Don Giovanni: for over five decades Marcello Mastroianni epitomized and complicated onscreen masculinity, and remains a key symbol of postwar Italian cinema.” – Film Society of Lincoln Center

10:00 AM
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domani)
Dir. Vittorio De Sica, Italy/France, 1963, BD projection, 119 min.
Italian with English subtitles
Mastroianni + Loren x 3: the duo light up this breezy triptych of tales about love, sex, and class. In the first, Mastroianni is the harried husband of a sexually voracious Loren, who’s staying pregnant to stay out of prison; in the second, they’re a pair of sophisticates tooling through Milan in a Rolls-Royce; and in the third, he’s the gotta-have-it client whose trysts with her high-priced prostitute are constantly thwarted (Loren’s sultry striptease is justly famous, but Mastroianni’s wolf-howls of delight put the scene over the top). De Sica’s Oscar-winning charmer deftly combines naughty bedroom comedy with neorealist social commentary. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar® at the 1965 Academy Awards®
Print provided by Kino Lorber, New York City

1:00 PM
8½
Dir. Federico Fellini, Italy, 1963, 35 mm film projection, 138 min. Italian, French, English, and German with English subtitles
In Federico Fellini’s monumental landmark of Italian cinema, Mastroianni anchors an irresistible mélange of behind-the-scenes farce, marital tragicomedy, surrealist theological vignettes, poeticized flashbacks, and elaborate projections of private fantasies. Mastroianni plays hotshot filmmaker Guido Anselmi, struggling to get his latest passion project off the ground, while juggling relationships with various women. Notable for its bracing formal modernism and wry self-awareness, 8½ is at its heart a compassionate tribute to the wrenching aches and pains, and ephemeral ecstasies, of the creative process. The film features archetypal yet emotionally precise performances by Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale, as his wife, his mistress, and his idealized muse, alongside the colorful supporting roster of producers, journalists, movie stars, and clergy who swarm around Guido as he struggles to actualize his ambitious magnum opus. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar® at the 1964 Academy Awards®
35 mm film print provided by Janus Films, New York City

3:30 PM
A Special Day (Una giornata particolare)
Dir. Ettore Scola, Italy, 1977, 35 mm film projection, 106 min.
Italian with English subtitles
May 8, 1938: all of Rome is turning out to see the spectacle of Hitler’s visit to Italy. Among the few not attending are a harried housewife and mother-of-six (Sophia Loren) and her across-the-way neighbor (Mastroianni, Oscar-nominated), a suicidal ex-radio announcer. She’s a conservative Mussolini supporter; he’s a homosexual enemy of the state. But after a chance meeting, the two share a life-changing day that will challenge their assumptions about people, politics, and sexuality. Gorgeously photographed in creamy sepia tones and driven by two virtuoso central performances, this tender, daring chamber drama is a more-relevant-than-ever look at fascism’s human cost. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
Winner of Best Foreign Film at the 1978 Golden Globes
35 mm film print provided by Luce Cinecittá, Rome

6:00 PM
La Dolce Vita
Dir. Federico Fellini, Italy, 1960, DCP projection, 173 min.
Italian with English subtitles
Fellini’s panoramic portrait of contemporary Roman decadence — parties, paparazzi, and promiscuous sex — is one of world cinema’s most fêted films and one of the key works in the great director’s canon. With La Dolce Vita, Fellini inaugurated the cycle of ambitious, visually extravagant, episodic, self-conscious, autobiographical works that cemented his reputation as an artist of international stature and gave rise to the term
“Felliniesque.” Marcello Mastroianni, is one of his signature roles, is the film’s protagonist, a world-weary gossip columnist and would-be serious writer utterly compromised by the amorality and debauchery of the New Babylon in which he lives. Anita Ekberg co-stars as the latest Hollywood sex goddess, come to Italy to star in a Biblical epic; her foray into the Trevi Fountain is one of modern cinema’s most iconic scenes. The film’s opening sequence is almost as celebrated: a huge statue of Christ being transported by helicopter over the rooftops of Rome. “Oh look, there’s Jesus!” exclaims a bikinied woman sunbathing on a terrace. La Dolce Vita’s Rome is a phantasmagoria of such contrasts: the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material, the Christian and the pagan, the miraculous and the orgiastic. The film was a great succès de scandale in its day; the Vatican denounced it as disgusting and immoral, and even Fellini’s mother was given to ask her son, “Why did you make such a picture?” (The Cinematheque, Vancouver)
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1960 Festival de Cannes
DCP print provided by Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles

10:30 PM
Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana)
Dir. Pietro Germi, Italy, 1961, 35 mm film projection, 105 min.
Italian with English subtitles
Marcello Mastroianni plays an impoverished, bored Sicilian aristocrat who hatches an elaborate scheme to murder his wife after inveigling her into an adulterous affair. According to Italian custom, he would be justified in killing her, by defending his
“honor,” (divorce being forbidden in Italy). Conveniently he would be then free to marry his young, beautiful cousin, who seems to return his affections, right up to the film’s final, wicked shot. Director Germi, who co-wrote the slyly clever script with Ennio De Concini and Alfredo Gianetti, had a background in neorealist Italian dramas, and that would serve him well in his sendup of the Catholic country’s cultural habits and social mores. Mastroianni’s voiceover narration offers wry commentary on those traditions, effectively skewered by Germi. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called it “a dandy, satiric farce” and Time lauded Germi for “something wildly, wickedly, wonderfully funny. He has applied a cunning hotfoot to the world’s biggest boot.”
(Laemmle)
Winner of Best Screenplay at the 1963 Academy Awards®
Winner of Best Foreign Film and Best Actor at the 1963 Golden Globes
35 mm film print provided by Janus Films, New York City

TICKETS

Tickets and passes will go on sale in late July via CinemaItaliaSF.com
Prices:
• $12.00 matinee film (before 6:00 PM)
• $14.00 evening film
• $25.00 Via Veneto Party
• $70.00 festival pass (all films & party) ($60.00 for Italian Cultural Institute and Leonardo Da Vinci Society members)

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