Ettore Scola: obituary for the great Italian director – THE WORLD

Ettore Scola’s Handicap, one might say, was his year of birth: 1931. He was ten years older than Fellini (the great Zampano) sixteen years older than Mario Monicelli (the large commediante) and twenty-five years older than Luchino Visconti (the large Romantico). Neorealism, History ham, comedies – – When he began in the mid-sixties, to direct, the large waves from Italy who influenced the world cinema had lost, and who did not want deemed Epigone, had to find their own way. Scola was a: He was acting on the canvas, almost

But that never looked like theater.. Scola had realized in his first life as a screenwriter, that what he wanted to tell, could be telling most concentrated in a limited space. In a large apartment building, which is to leave on the day of Hitler’s visit to Rome, since all flow to the rally, to a frustrated housewife (Sophia Loren) and a gay radio announcer (Marcello Mastroianni): “A special day”.

In “Le Bal” not think of a single word

The slum on the outskirts of Rome, where a despotic patriarch (Nino Manfredi) defends his savings, to the extended family begins to poison his spaghetti: “Ugly, Dirty and Bad”, later like staged on German stages. The Dance Palace in Paris, on which hallway fifty years reflected contemporary history. “Le Bal”

Photo: AP Scola mid-October last year at the film festival in Rome

“Le Bal”, 1984> fobbed off at the Berlinale the Silver Bear (the Golden went to Cassavetes' "Love Streams"), best illustrated by Scola topics and his technique. He tells great story by reports of little people. A German Wehrmacht officer and a French collaborator dance together. On the toilet, a North African is beaten bloody during the Algerian War. May 1968 protesters to flee into the hall and dance to "Michelle".

This could be a historical revue, but Scola turned a double alienation trick: the performers repeated through all eras, from the individual so are types, and : It can not think of a single word, support the action are music, sounds, gestures and costumes.

In almost all his works interweaves Scola the “Macrostoria” with the “Microstoria” linearity runs often apart, the collective memory is found in individual experience , the official history of the private corrected. This balance has not been found as good as he is.

Scola has long been a member of the Communist Party and had erected in 1989 even as a shadow minister of culture. However, a militant Left, he was not, that can be read from his films. Their mood is more melancholy; many of the characters learn that they have to give up their most intimate desires, if they want to live in peace in their society, and they are charged with the price called loneliness.

The price for survival is loneliness

Before they run to their doom, they slow down before the worst possible development occurs, hide from his films. “Le Bal” ends – after half a century turbulentester French history – so that all go home and the lights will go out at the disco

Maybe. he knew his Pappenheimer just too good. In his last film “Gente di Roma” a local bus drives through the city – a variant of its enclosed spaces, just rolling – and brings a mother at a demonstration against Berlusconi. There she loses her cubs in the scramble, the way the Left has lost its objectives; Later, at the office party, the Socialists take not about to debate, but for watching football.

Half of his films never come out here because we’ve been us long more for America and China are of interest as for our European neighbors – and if they do, to embarrassing way: For “Splendor”, this bittersweet farewell to a cinema owner (Mastroianni), who has to give up his theater, let the rich hire Warner Bros. pull a single copy. If there is to discover a director in Germany, then the philanthropic Ettore Scola, who died on Tuesday in Rome.