7
Italian Cinema and Catholicism: From Vigilanti cura to Vatican II and Beyond

Marco Vanelli

Introduction

The relationship between Italian cinema and Catholicism—understood both as an institutional relationship with the Church and as a matter of doctrine and faith—is vast and complex, made up of conflicts, dialogue, official positions, and individual choices. It would be unthinkable to exhaust the topic in a single chapter. Therefore, an attempt will be made to highlight four particularly significant stages, in the hope that they will serve to stimulate further in‐depth analysis, and shed light for the reader on a topic often treated offhandedly and with harsh prejudice. The stages are chronological, reflecting: (1) the impact of the 1936 proclamation of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical letter, Vigilanti cura, which was both censorious and constructive in nature; (2) the birth of Catholic film production (a consequence of the encyclical’s constructive approach) with an ambitious project entrusted to the producer, Salvo D’Angelo, in the second half of the 1940s; (3) the moment of great cinematic auteurs, such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, who were able to interpret the reality of their time in the light of the Gospels; and (4) the historic Second Vatican Council and the development of religious themes in some of the significant authors of Italian cinema, such as Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi, Marco Bellocchio, and Roberto Benigni.

First Stage: Art or Morality?1

The first date of note in our itinerary is 1936, when Pius XI published Vigilanti cura, devoted to film. The document is important because it was the first official Vatican text to discuss exclusively the cinema, its dangers, and the resources it could offer to the pastoral vocation of the Church. The encyclical triggered great debate in Italy, not only within the Church. Even the eminent secular magazine, Cinema, published a comment on the papal text, entrusted to the pen of Padre Agostino Gemelli2 (1936, 51) that tried to capture what, in fact, was not included in the encyclical: the definition of cinema as art. What seemed of greater concern to the pontiff was, in fact, to exert moral control “against the abuses of cinematic representations”:

With vigilant care, as Our apostolic office demands, We follow all the praiseworthy work of the Bishops and the whole Christian people; and therefore it is with the greatest joy that We have learnt of the fruits that have already been brought forth and of the progress that is still being made by that provident undertaking begun more than two years ago: as it were, a holy crusade against the abuses of the art of the cinema, entrusted in a particular manner to the so‐called “Legion of Decency.” (Pius XI 1936, 2)

The inspiration for the encyclical was provided by the Legion of Decency: the kind of “blessed crusade” promoted by American Catholics against the spread of “immorality” in Hollywood films. It was a real battle, whose efficacy must also be extended to Italy:

The battle plan included, as its central, essential element, the action of a Legion of Decency or Legion of Honesty; namely the widest possible movement of faithful who, by means of a public pledge, committed themselves to boycott, and make others boycott, immoral films and the theatres that screened them. …

To achieve the moral cleansing of the cinema, the goal of the battle plan, it was vital to gather in the shortest time the largest possible number of Legion members, but above all to ensure their loyalty to the task they had assumed, so as to significantly reduce the proceeds of immoral films, the only argument that managers and producers, insensitive to morality, or intimidated by crises, could understand.

They resorted, therefore, to a campaign of pressure on public opinion … that, for the quality, quantity and strategy of the instruments used, was every bit as effective as the great American marketing campaigns. (Baragli 1968, 102–3)

The Centro Cattolico Cinematografico had already taken a step in the direction the pope suggested by producing the Segnalazioni cinematografiche, an inventory of every film distributed on Italian terrain, according to its moral value. Each entry gave a short synopsis of the film and an assessment intended to exclude, discourage, allow, and, only rarely, recommend, its viewing. Almost all films were excluded or advised against, and the few allowed were only those with a religious theme, a few documentaries, and harmless comedies starring Shirley Temple. The Centro Cattolico Cinematografico’s larger concern was to contain the danger of behavioral models derived, especially, from Hollywood films in which—for instance, in the screwball comedies—couples divorced easily (even though they often ended by getting remarried (see, e.g., Cavell 1999). Furthermore, the emancipated attitude of these films’ female characters was in stark contrast to the traditional mandated submissiveness of Italian women to the decisions of the male and, more generally, of the dominant institutions (family, church, state). Consequently, it only sufficed for adultery, a divorce, or a display of uninhibited or challenging behavior to appear in a film, for the Centro’s censors to prohibit its viewing.

Beyond this censoring activity, however, the encyclical encouraged a more positive attitude, aimed at contrasting valid cinematic products with the many films that were condemned. From the pages of Rivista del cinematografo, its official magazine, the Centro started to grow demand for Catholic film production, a move that could offer the public and the faithful alike films that not only were moral but also possessed cinematic quality. This trend attracted many supporters: some were convinced that the “quality” should essentially be moral, and that “healthy” and “educational” films should be produced for young people, while others pushed further, for the birth of a real cinema of Catholic inspiration, like the existing Catholic literature or Catholic theater, that would be capable of tackling every theme of human life, without reticence or banality.

The most convinced supporter of the latter thesis was Antonio Covi, a young documentary filmmaker, future Jesuit, and graduate of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (then as now the most important state institution for training film professionals). In a long‐forgotten article “Nostro cinema” (Covi 1941a), he predicts that “our” cinema, that is to say the cinema of the Catholics, would be permeated with realism, the life of the people, scenes filmed in actual places and not reconstructed in the studio. In a nutshell, he envisaged a Catholic neorealism. And this position is even more significant as Covi’s article was published a good two years before Luchino Visconti’s “Il cinema antropomorfico” (“Anthropomorphic Cinema”; Visconti 1943), which is usually considered the first manifesto of the neorealist movement.

Let us read from Covi’s article (84–85):

We have been thinking about this for some time.

And it often occurs to us—almost every day, I would say—to think that “finally” the blessed hour of “our” cinema has arrived. …

The cinema we dream of is an “apostolic” cinema, it must be therefore a weapon of faith for the spiritual elevation of the masses. …

We immediately feel like saying that our cinema is in need of air, that it wants to escape from the incandescent climate of the studio set, to shake off the painted backdrops and chase after the real and enchanting scenes of nature. No other art has such an ally in nature as cinema.

Anxious to keep our account at the level of the “truthfulness” of art, and therefore of an authenticity even as a result of reconstruction and re‐elaboration, we believe it is essential to place behind, and next to, the drama of man all the symphonic commentary of the landscape, seized not in its documentary coldness but animated and fused in the spirit of the action represented.

The outcome will be a single thing, alive and vibrant; Man will finally have “his” landscape, which is nothing but an ideal extension of himself, of his spirit and character, and our cinematic story will be enriched with a more lyrical note.

And so, against this backdrop, we will make the conflict, the thesis, the drama, appear. It was not difficult to predict that as “protagonist” we want the people, the people who believe and work, love and struggle, the simple and saintly people who live their day with God in simplicity and gaiety.

We are tired of seeing the usual idle, elegant and superficial fellows borne aloft as examples of our civilization; we want to see the rough, strong faces of the workers, calloused hands, simple but honest and generous characters, in a word our authentic people in all their genuine expressions of love for the Church, Homeland, labour and the family.3 (emphasis in original)

In the early 1940s, therefore, a debate opened in the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico about the differences between cinematic art and morality. On the one hand, there were Antonio Covi, the playwright and scriptwriter Diego Fabbri (also the Centro’s new secretary), and Luigi Gedda (president of the Centro and future president of Azione Cattolica), who advocated for a greater expressive autonomy for the cinema, though inspired by Christian values; on the other hand, there were the promptings of Padre E. G. Ruggi (1941, 81–83) to screen the heroic lives of the saints or the defense of the supremacy of morality expressed by Monsignor Luigi Civardi (1945, 24–25), who spoke of the superiority of “the good” over “the beautiful” in cinema:

Beauty is given by God as a gift of His generosity; goodness is commanded by Him as a duty, a necessity of life.

God gives beauty and delight to man, as a relief for the difficulties that accompany his earthly journey.

God demands goodness from man as a condition for reaching the supreme goal, which is to possess eternal happiness.

Things being as they are, it is evident that on the scale of human values good comes before beauty, and the moral value is always superior to the aesthetic value.

This explains why the Church, whose mission is to lead men to eternal happiness, is first of all preoccupied with the moral value of works of art, placing in a secondary position, but without devaluing it, aesthetic value. (emphasis in original)

One evident repercussion of the debate between art and morality was the fact that, starting in 1942, an aesthetic assessment was added to Centro Cattolico Cinematografico’s evaluations. Il giardino dell’oblio (The Garden of Allah, 1936) by Richard Boleslawsky elicited a more nuanced approach by the editors of the Centro (now joined by Fabbri and Gedda), to the point where there were films that were appreciated from an aesthetic point of view but condemned at the moral level. This was the case with the films of French directors Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, and Jacques Feyder, which still circulated in Italy despite the censorship that occurred during the war, comprising Luchino Visconti’s directorial debut, Ossessione (Obsession, 1943).

This last film was indeed considered commendable for its engagement “in the meticulous research of detail and the creation of atmosphere,” but “in its moral setting, the film is unacceptable for the crude verism with which the reproachful incident of adultery is recounted, without it being in any way found reprehensible” (Segnalazioni cinematografiche, 1943, 76).

Regardless of Monsignor Civardi’s views, the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico had admitted that a film could be beautiful but not good, and that aesthetics could pursue an autonomous path in regard to ethics. Instead of resolving itself and the search for doctrinal answers, the conflict between art and morality became more acute and self‐evident. It was the sign to move to a new phase, this time operational.

Second Stage: Catholic Production

The first great Italian Catholic production, Pastor Angelicus (1942), by Romolo Marcellini, a documentary produced on the 25th anniversary of the episcopal ordination of Pope Pius XII, marked an attempt to fill on screen the gap between art and morality. It was not the usual film montage made up of clips of existing newsreel, but a work of great production values that saw the pope “playing himself” in front of the first film camera ever permitted inside the Vatican’s private rooms. Influential names in the fields of culture and cinema worked on the film in different capacities, including Ennio Flaiano, Luis Trenker, Fabbri, Silvio D’Amico, and Alessandro Cicognini.

The intention was clearly not to make a film destined exclusively for parish theaters, but one with a normal distribution and its own objective cinematic value. On its release to coincide with the 1942 Christmas season, Pastor Angelicus garnered not only some positive reviews but also some devastating critiques by the Fascist press because it repeated the appeal for peace formulated by the pontiff in 1939 on the outbreak of the war.4 The distance between the Vatican and the Fascist regime was growing increasingly evident as the assessments of the Segnalazioni cinematografiche for 1945 prove: whereas, before the fall of Mussolini in 1943, the Segnalazioni endorsed all war propaganda documentaries that favored Italy and Germany, by the end of the war it was promoting all American and Soviet documentaries.

In this climate, so difficult in many ways, Catholic production gathered strength; despite Italy’s split over the Republic of Salò, the Nazi invasion, the Resistance, and the American landing in Sicily, work continued on an even more challenging film. But this time it was not a documentary, but a fictional film that told a story that was human, choral, and of a religious character—but with a powerful, realistic impact. Vittorio De Sica was asked by the Vatican to prepare it as director, along with his trusted scriptwriter, Cesare Zavattini. Production on the film, La porta del cielo (Doorway to Heaven, 1945), continued in Rome throughout the Nazi occupation and during the tense wait for the arrival of the American liberating army.

Zavattini’s (2002, 131) own account tells us a lot about the spirit that animated the project and the idea that animated Catholic production in general:

25 December 1943—I am completing the screenplay on Loreto [La porta del cielo]. I am working on it meticulously; De Sica is also taking it very seriously, so we believe that, although it follows along certain obligatory—and for many reasons extremely obligatory—paths, something good will come out of it.

Those from the Catholic centre [Centro Cattolico Cinematografico] are showing me high regard, also because of the constant seriousness with which I dedicate myself to this film and, if circumstances allow, would like me to make my own film in the future, giving me total freedom, total say, so long as the film is based on Christian morality, but who is not Christian? Christ is always present.

Legends about the film’s troubled production abound, probably circulated intentionally at the time of release to increase audience interest. Over time, books and films have emerged about the event.5 The fact that the Vatican had commissioned De Sica to make La porta del cielo gave the director a pretext for not accompanying the ousted Mussolini to the Republic of Salò, where some attempt was made to rebuild cinema along the lines of prewar Italian cinema. Numerous actors and technicians participated in La porta del cielo in an attempt to save themselves from the Germans, preferring to await the Americans. Because the set was the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, part of Vatican territory, it remained assailable by Fascists and Nazis only at the risk of an international diplomatic incident.

The film’s opening declares, “During the captivity of Rome, fighting against every kind of difficulty, men of Italian cinema produced this film with the desire to serve, with art, the Christian faith”—asserting the intention of placing cinematic art at the service of faith. However, years later, De Sica (2000, 38–39) told an American journalist he had agreed to make La porta del cielo solely to save his life, not out of religious conviction:

I made it [La porta del cielo] only to save myself from the Germans. As a matter of fact, the Vatican didn’t find it orthodox enough and destroyed the negative. We were in the middle of the war then. I was invited by a messenger of Goebbels to go and direct a German film school in Prague, because, you see, I was then at the top of my fame as a director. I told the envoy to give me time to think, but in truth, I was shaking because I knew they could put me on a train any time they wanted to. Then the Italian Fascists began insisting that I go to direct their school in Venice. I was saved by a marvellous man, D’Angelo, who was truly an angel, and who asked me to make a film for the Vatican. I said yes immediately, knowing that the Vatican tie would keep me alive. All the time the Fascists kept asking me when I would finish that Vatican film and come to Venice, and I kept telling them, I was at work on it. It took me two years; I completed it the day the Americans entered Rome. It was made to order. There are some good things in it, but the final scene of the miracle is horrible. It was a film made only to save myself from the Fascists (Figure 7.1).

Photo of a scene from the film Doorway to Heaven by Vittorio De Sica displaying the faithful in search of a miracle. A man in a wheelchair is positioned in front of a line of children in wheelchairs.

Figure 7.1 The faithful in search of a miracle in La porta del cielo (Doorway to Heaven, Vittorio De Sica, 1945).

There are more than a few good things in the film, and to all intents and purposes it is a project worthy of De Sica’s and Zavattini’s careers. True, with regard to the ending in which a miracle takes place in Loreto Cathedral, the initial idea of the script was not to have any miracle occur to the many pilgrims who go there and whose stories the film narrates. Perhaps the idea of the final miracle was introduced to give the film a more officially religious angle, although it must be said that the real miracle that we witness is that of faith and resignation, of acceptance of one’s own suffering, since the miracle‐receiver is not one of the characters the story follows. (This makes the miracle seem almost incidental—though not gratuitous—rather than part of a salvific narrative logic with a happy ending.) Another important theme that emerges from this scene, and that will be typical of neorealism, is that of solidarity: at the moment in which the unknown figure experiences the miracle, all the others say (and these are the concluding words of the film), “Thank you, Lord, one of us is healed, one like us.”

The D’Angelo to whom De Sica refers is Salvo D’Angelo, the producer of Orbis Film, the company that produced La porta del cielo. Thanks to this Sicilian architect, who previously worked as a set designer, Orbis Film and Film Universalia (which was its continuation and enlargement), strongly desired by Pope Pius XII, became the proof that quality Catholic film production was possible. For several years, following the end of the war, they played an important role in Italian cinema, giving opportunities to some of the best‐known names of the time, including non‐Italians.

With La porta del cielo, the goal of casting off the shackles of a dull and saccharine parochial cinema that Covi, Fabbri, and Gedda had set themselves a few years earlier seemed to have been achieved. From 1945 to 1950, D’Angelo emerged as a true, Italian‐style tycoon, a patron in the Renaissance fashion, who knew how to marry capital and art. Besides De Sica and Zavattini, he hired and worked with some of the best artists and technicians of Italian and European cinema. It is worth listing their names and the films he produced: Pietro Germi (Il testimone/The Testimony, 1946), Alessandro Blasetti (Un giorno nella vita, 1946; La gemma orientale dei papi, Castel Sant’Angelo, and Il duomo di Milano, 1947; Fabiola, 1949; Prima comunione/Father’s Dilemma, 1950), Romolo Marcellini (Guerra alla guerra, 1948), Mario Soldati (Chi è Dio?,6 and Daniele Cortis, 1947), Marcel L’Herbier (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei/Sins of Pompeii, 1950), Riccardo Freda (Guarany, 1948), Luchino Visconti (La terra trema/The Earth Trembles, 1948), Roberto Rossellini (La macchina ammazzacattivi/The Machine that Kills Bad People, 1952), René Clair (La bellezza del diavolo/Beauty and the Devil, 1950), Luciano Emmer e Enrico Gras (Bianchi pascoli, 1947; La madre degli emigranti, 1948; La via di Damasco, 1948; Romantici a Venezia, 1948; Isole nella laguna, 1948; I fratelli miracolosi dalle pitture di Beato Angelico, 1949), Umberto Barbaro e Roberto Longhi (Carpaccio, 1947; Caravaggio, 1948), Francesco Pasinetti (Il giorno della salute, 1948), Giacomo Pozzi‐Bellini (Lo zoo di pietra, 1949). In addition, included in various capacities were the Italians Diego Fabbri, Turi Vasile, Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Roman Vlad, Ennio Flaiano, Renato May, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Emilio Cecchi, Alberto Lattuada, Ignazio Silone, among others. Equally significant are the foreign artists D’Angelo contacted for various ambitious projects (which often remained only that) for international coproduction: Jean Cocteau, Marcel Carné, Robert Bresson, Julien Green, Jean Anouilh, Jacques Becker, Paul Claudel, Leopold Lindtberg, Carl Theodor Dreyer. Some of the French directors of whom the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico so disapproved in the past were now invited to put their artistic qualities to the service of Catholic production.7

Salvo D’Angelo’s vision was ambitious and cosmopolitan (he created the earliest cofinanced productions with France). It combined different media (he published a poetry magazine), and, above all, aimed to create the type of vertical concentration (production–distribution–management) that nobody in Italy had achieved. Indeed, in addition to producing and distributing titles it did not own (Magic Town, William Wellman, 1947; Germania anno zero/Germany Year Zero, Rossellini, 1948; In Name Only, John Cromwell, 1939 but distributed in Italy in 1948), Universalia could have counted on the entire network of parish theaters across Italy for the release of its films. However, there was a problem in that the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico’s inventory remained anchored to the same categories of moral evaluation as in the prewar period, making it impossible to screen any of Universalia’s films in parish theaters, since they included situations or scenes considered immoral. The operation attempted by Salvo D’Angelo—the leading edge of a Catholicism ready to interact with secular culture on the basis of common Christian cultural roots and open to collaborations with individuals on the Left and intellectuals beyond the world of cinema—faced many obstacles and was ended in 1950. Certainly, one reason was the Sicilian’s excessive financial nonchalance, but it should also be recalled that Italy’s first democratic elections took place in 1948, with the Christian Democrats, representing a conservative and exclusionary agenda, winning the majority of votes. Hence, the climate of broad understanding, of loyal and active collaboration between the anti‐Fascist democratic forces, Christian and secular alike, that had just drafted the republican constitution, came to an end. It had been in that climate that Salvo D’Angelo’s project found fertile ground, in the reconstruction of Italy’s democratic foundations in which Catholics participated with conviction.

There was also the fact that before the 1948 elections there was a serious fear in the Vatican that the Italian Communist Party might win. Therefore, any attempt to bring men like Zavattini or Visconti closer together could have had strategic repercussions had the parties of the Left gained power. Once this possibility was averted, the grand Catholic cultural design in the field of cinema started to become less necessary, as a Cold War atmosphere progressively established itself as well.

In 1950, as Universalia was closing down, Cinecittà was hard at work on the mammoth, American production Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951), and the foundations were being laid for “Hollywood on the Tiber.”

Third Stage: The “Folly” of the “Povericristi”

If the attempt to organize far‐reaching Catholic production was in decline, it did not mean that Catholicism did not continue its dialogue with cinema or that themes inspired by Christianity were not present in Italian films. In this work of mediation it is worth recalling Padre Félix Morlion, a Belgian Dominican monk who assumed a fundamental role in the trajectory we are discussing, with a profound impact on the work of Roberto Rossellini especially. Arriving in postwar Rome, Morlion founded Pro Deo University and began actively engaging in cinema as critic, cultural impresario, and religious consultant. He organized film studies courses at his university that employed some of the great names of neorealism as professors. His presence as a jury member at the Venice Film Festival in 1948 created an uproar:

Many come to the Palazzo del Cinema, at the Lido, in the evening to marvel at the celebrities rather than to see the films. Orson Welles and Paula Wessely, Mary Pickford and Pabst, Anna Magnani and Hoerbiger, Cocteau and Jean Marais in the stalls or balcony, are well aware of the admiration surrounding them.

But, perhaps, they aren’t aware that one other character attracts the public curiosity in a very particular manner: a character who sits every evening in the third row of the balcony, centre section. His figure, dressed all in white, is imposing; the vivacity of his expression, singular. This character is a Dominican monk, Padre Félix Morlion, a Belgian by birth, but Italian in temperament, as he likes to style himself. Great indeed is his esteem of Italy and its people, its cinema and art. Padre Félix Morlion is part of the jury that assigns the prizes at the end of the competition. This fact displeases some, who go around spreading ridiculous rumors as if the monk represented not a specific competence in philosophy and cinema critique that is already well recognized, but the Holy Office8 itself. (Vasile 1948, 12)

To Padre Morlion (1949b, 14–15) we owe the first significant recognition of the authorial role of the screenwriter and director in cinema, and, above all, acknowledgment of the spiritual and transcendental values of neorealism:

Italy’s main success is due, first and foremost, to affirmation of principle: cinema is not made to amuse adults as if they were children, but to move deeply, by placing man in contact with the reality of life which he too often passes without entering, without “touching,” without understanding. This is the great revolution against the artificiality and intricate banality of the American scenario, against the ultra‐complex formality of the French artists and of others who search only for the play of shade and light, of rhythm and editing. But at the base of Italian simplicity exists a deeper attitude: humility. All the films mentioned have as their subject the ordinary man: neither too rich nor too poor, not a saint but not a complete monster either—the man who does not hurl the challenge of his joy against Creation, but does not let himself sink into a hopeless abyss. All that exists in these films in terms of external movements serves humbly to express an interior movement of souls….

At the root of the realist drama of everyday life that the Italian school has been able to express so simply, humbly, and intensely is the inexorable appeal of a tragic interrogation that bears upon the limits of infinity.9 (emphasis in original)

Morlion began the practice of the “cineforum,” that is to say, the screening of significant films, recent or past, followed by a debate aimed at highlighting their expressive, artistic, and thematic qualities. Thus, cinema became part of the social sciences, and in parish theaters, even religious institutes, films began to be regarded as useful moments in the spiritual development of the devoted; screenings were organized and guided by experts trained in the university courses of the tireless Dominican.

Morlion was personally involved in producing some of the films by Rossellini, with whom he enjoyed a close relationship. Certain changes to “Il miracolo” (one of two episodes in Amore, 1948), Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (Stromboli, 1950), and Francesco giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis, 1950) are even attributed to him.10 The contact between the two men should not surprise since Rossellini’s oeuvre is among the most immersed in Christian themes, which were present since his first films. By way of example, it is worth citing L’uomo dalla croce (The Man with the Cross, 1943), produced during the war, which tells the story of a military chaplain, following the Italian army on the Eastern front, who sacrifices his life to save the souls of both Italian and Russian soldiers. But it is especially from Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) onward that we find a recurrence of figurative and narrative elements that refer to the Passion narrated in the Gospels, almost as if the different events recounted were in some way its present realization. Morlion’s presence beside Rossellini in his later films without doubt influenced his direction, as did Fabbri’s (rarely credited) collaboration on the screenplays.

Beyond the importance of these external contributions, the fact remains that Rossellini always displayed a deep personal interest in Christian themes, far beyond his religious convictions or any expressions of faith declared to the press.

The fact that a nonbeliever or a nonpracticing Christian might address religious subject matter is not at all surprising in Italian culture, which has always had a close link to all that has to do with Christianity, to the point that Christianity reverberates in common speech. Terms and expressions with no equivalent in other languages have long existed in Italian, such as: poverocristo, cristoincroce, eccehomo, vivere la vita come un calvario, or vivere una via crucis.11 These are common, ancient, working‐class phrases that expose the intimate cultural bond—even before faith—present in our traditional relationship with the evangelical word and the figure of Christ. They are used by nonchurchgoers, by nonbelievers, by communists, and by those who blaspheme. In common speech, the word “Christian” is a synonym of human being, tout court.

The Passion is therefore seen as an archetype, a completely human point of reference to describe the suffering of the last, the wretched, the povericristi. It is a paradigm of a real historical and existential reality. All this could not but merge into the great cinematic period of neorealism where characters can be read as modern incarnations of Christ, a Christ who in Roma città aperta takes on the visage of Anna Magnani, of the priest Aldo Fabrizi, or of the communist tortured to death. Indeed, in this his most famous film, Rossellini scattered a series of references to the stations of the Cross: under torture, the intellectual Manfredi has the mask of ecce homo; Don Pietro stumbles like Christ beneath the Cross as he enters his cell; Don Pietro, before he is killed, pardons his assassins in Jesus’s words (“Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do”); the slaughtered body of sora Pina is gathered and arrayed by the priest in a way that evokes the iconography of Michelangelo’s La Pietà. For Rossellini these references were a way of telling the audience indirectly that the events just lived through or still in motion carried within them traces of the Passion, dripping with innocent blood, and were the outcome of a struggle between Good and Evil (the first subject of the film was entitled, not accidentally, “La disfatta di Satana” or “Satan’s defeat”). In other words, he was saying that Christian truth was not exclusively a prerogative of the Church, but could be grasped in everyday human reality. One must also take into account that most men employed in the cinema at this time, even if they were or declared themselves to be believers, lived private lives that the Church would not accept (double families, concubinage, divorce, adultery, homosexuality, illegitimate children) and were excluded from ecclesiastical and sacramental life. But, as intellectuals, they were in fact allowed what was denied to practicing Christians who respected orthodoxy: that is to say, the right to read the Bible. Due to a completely Catholic paradox, the Word of God was considered inappropriate for personal reading, and a practicing Christian could only read it with the permission of a bishop. Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Zavattini, and the other masters of neorealism felt no institutional restraints, and so possessed a much greater familiarity with the Gospels than did the average devoted Christian. The insistence with which Rossellini’s or De Sica’s films locate the paths of holiness outside churches, in the streets, in human life, embodied in the actual, should not, therefore, be surprising. Even as he recounts the life of an official saint, as in Francesco giullare di Dio, Rossellini strips the film of all that belongs to classic iconography, devoted and mystical, and places Francesco and his young monks in a contemporary setting not much different from a medieval landscape, contrasting Christian “folly” to the disastrous rationality of the world—of the past but also of Europe, 1950. This contrast is intended in the Pauline sense of the quotation from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (1:27–28) at the film’s end: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.”

This theme powerfully recurs in three films Rossellini directed between the 1940s and the 1950s, where three female characters, Nannina, Karin, and Irene, discover themselves to be images of modern sanctity and at the same time new embodiments of the suffering Christ. The perspective of the incarnation is presented with a rising climax. In “Il miracolo,” due to human cruelty, Nannina relives the Passion. In Stromboli (Terra di Dio), Karin discovers that not only she as a human being, but also the animals and the inanimate world represented by the volcano, suffer the consequences of original sin—and that it is necessary to perform an act of abnegation and of faith to be reborn to a new life. In Europa ‘51 (Europe ‘51/The Greatest Love, 1952), the social and political history of the postwar era is part of Irene’s female drama of bearing the stigmata.12

Photo displaying Anna Magnani reenacting the passion in Roberto Rossellini’s “Il miracolo” leaning her back on a wall with stones with her right hand holding on the rock and left hand holding on a rope, eyes closed.

Figure 7.2 Nannina (Anna Magnani) reenacts the Passion in Roberto Rossellini’s “Il miracolo” (Amore, 1948).

Irene, the protagonist of Europa ‘51, experiences a trajectory of total divesting, like Francis of Assisi, until she becomes last of the last, accepting that the institutions of her time (the medical profession, judiciary, police, and, partly, the Church) condemn her to an insane asylum.

Because she differs from the standards of behavior considered normal by the society of her time, she is regarded as mad and, therefore, to be locked up. But here Rossellini grasps the Christian paradox (as earlier in Francesco giullare di Dio): the more the institutions remove her from normal life, the more she finds herself with forgotten creatures in need of consolation. In this way, Irene can fulfill her role as comforter, setting out on the path to complete sainthood. It turns out as Saint Paul said: “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.”

In this regard Rossellini (1987, 104–6) states:

Mine wants to be a message of faith, hope, of love. These virtues are tightly linked with each other, so that you cannot disregard one without eliminating the others, and vice versa. Mine wants to be an appeal to humanity, for humanity to believe in its values, and from there to progress toward God….

An anxiety of faith, hope, love is present in all my films. If I look back, I cannot say I betrayed my commitment [to this message]. Of course, not everything was expressed clearly; solutions to man’s most anguishing problems were not always found in a key of conviction and hope. But the problem of the spiritual, of the transience of human values, always appeared as the connecting tissue of the films….

Many have accused me of ambition, of arrogance, for wanting to present the whole European world, generalizing it negatively, without understanding that I tried to establish a dialogue between a suffering humanity, impatient for ideals and hope, and He who give this humanity justification and meaning. A very simple intervention: “Let us see what our most obvious flaws are and try to eliminate them.” A dialogue of simplicity and humility in the search for faith. Faith as love toward one’s neighbor, in humility, simplicity and joy.

Another Franciscan screen parable was released at the same time: Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951) by Vittorio De Sica, based on Cesare Zavattini’s novel, Totò il buono (1943). The protagonist, a young good man, simple, life‐loving, and full of spiritual vivacity, grows aware of social inequalities and organizes homeless people at the margins of a big city into a community of the poor, with rules based on solidarity. Because of an oil discovery, they are forced to leave. They fly away on broomsticks toward the sky, “toward a world where good morning really means good morning!” as the final sign says, because on Earth “the poor are a nuisance”—the original title of the film. Once again, thanks to this neorealist fable, the screen hurls an evangelical appeal to postwar Italians, already divided in opposing political alliances and struggling to win control of new democratic institutions.

Zavattini (2002, 167) sheds light on this contrast:

In spite of the criticism, even too harsh it often seems to me, in spite of everything, Miracolo a Milano is an important film that neither De Sica nor I should regret. I have seen men of different leanings, from Trabucchi to Ingrao, Omiccioli to Guttuso, from Carrà to Flora, Malaparte to Carrieri and Calcagno,13 enthused by it in a way that is so “childlike,” I would say, that I am convinced that there is something in the film that is common to everyone: a desire for goodness and the immense sadness that derives from life being as it is, and not how it should be. It’s something that really scared me: the fear that many have for the words of the Gospel. It frightened me, but I understand that it is right after all, because the word of the Gospel is radical in its simplicity—while never have we seen in the whole world days of greater compromise, days more … there you go … yes … more diplomatic than those that we’re living through. [In the face of such complicated maneuverings] what is elementary generates a great deal of annoyance.

And, again, the “foolishness” of which Saint Paul speaks seems to annoy the world’s “diplomats,” busy creating ideological fences, iron curtains, and Berlin walls.

Fourth Stage: Toward the Second Vatican Council and Beyond

The 1950s witnessed the appearance on the cinematic scene of a name that would create an earthquake: Federico Fellini. And, after him, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi, Marco Bellocchio, and many others, until we reach Roberto Benigni: all authors in whose work the Christian dimension, Catholic, in particular, is fundamental—and essential to understanding their oeuvres. We cite them here, in conclusion, to show how preconditions set in earlier decades found in them the beneficiaries of a vast and nuanced thematic, at the same time personal and collective. And to remember how the relationship with the institutional Church, with the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, and with individual representatives of religion may often have been conflictual, but was also subject to historic openings and courageous positions.

For Fellini, Catholicism was a composite element of his memory and the reality in which he grew up. Priests, nuns, processions, and the rites that appear in his films first of all have a choreographic function; they are part of the spectacular dimension of life that he rediscovers in the circus, the world of cinema, of television, of variety show, and of popular fairs. Attracted as he is by everything that lies beyond a rational and serious life, the clergy and religious orders, with their bizarre clothing, cannot but stimulate his creativity—almost as if they were a variant on the psychological type of the clown, the troubadour, and the variety‐show actor. But there is a religious content in Fellini’s films that was not unremarked upon by Catholic critics, beginning with La strada (La Strada, 1953): the mysterious presence of divine grace in human experiences.

When he took this theme to extremes in La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita, 1960), the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico and Italy’s clerical hierarchy attacked Fellini with unexpected venom. The film was considered scandalous and immoral, and its spiritual and theological content was denounced as a provocation. A practical result was a resounding, global success, to the extent that even the most God‐fearing were tempted to see this film‐monstre. The Jesuit fathers of Milan’s Centre San Fedele, where La dolce vita held its press premiere, bore the brunt of it. Padre Nazareno Taddei, who wrote a decisively positive analysis, was sent into exile for two years. But time proved him right; even the Osservatore Romano, which condemned the film outright with no appeal, garlands it with praise 50 years later.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s career was closely intertwined with the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), an event of historic renewal for the Catholic Church. For once in history, the Church was not only in step with the times, but even ahead of it in some areas. In “La ricotta” (an episode of Ro.Go.Pa.G, 1963), which was denounced for vilifying the state religion, Pasolini has a journalist ask the autobiographical character of the film‐director: “What do you want to express with your new work?” The director offers a response fit for Pasolini himself: “My profound, intimate, archaic Catholicism.” At the same time, responding to another question relating to death, he replies without hesitation, “As a Marxist, it’s something I don’t take into consideration.” The director’s responses reflect the fact Pasolini could be a Marxist without renouncing Catholicism; the two were Pasolini’s most important reference points, linked to two others that were also important for him: antiquity and death. Pasolini believed in a humanitarian Marxism and a revolutionary Christianity. His perspective was neither a politically strategic “Catho‐communism” nor an intellectual syncretism, but emerged from two needs equally rooted in him that allowed him to understand history and to blend in with the subproletariat that he so loved.

Photo of actors reenacting Passion in Pasolini’s “La ricotta” displaying man carrying a basket of fruits facing a man and woman dressed in robes while others behind them assist in lowering man from a cross.

Figure 7.3 Actors reenact the Passion in Pasolini’s “La ricotta” (Ro.Go.Pa.G., Roberto Rossellini, Jean‐Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ugo Gregoretti, 1963).

Although Pasolini was considered a scandalous individual and the maker of films condemned by the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964) was screened in October 1964 for the 800 bishops from all over the world who had gathered in Rome for the Second Vatican Council. It was an unprecedented ecclesiastical gesture that consecrated the film (and, indirectly, its author) in the name of ongoing internal change that still has repercussions in pastoral life. The Centro Cattolico Cinematografico was also adapting to the new age, changing its system of classification and issuing verdicts that were increasingly less crushing and more sensitive to positive provocations (although the same Pasolini was again at the center of ecclesiastical controversy a few years later with his 1968 film Teorema). By the 1970s, the Centro declared itself unable to classify two films, Fellini’s Roma and L’udienza (The Audience) by Marco Ferreri (both 1972), suspending moral judgment altogether.

Olmi and Bellocchio also asserted themselves during the years of the Council: the former, as a believer, seized on religion’s more positive aspects (E venne un uomo/A Man Named John, 1965), while the latter, beginning with his extraordinary debut (I pugni in tasca/Fists in the Pocket, 1965), threw himself into liberating vituperation against all the bourgeois and family hypocrisies that Catholicism protected and continues to protect.

Finally, to the case of Roberto Benigni. Presenting himself as an iconoclast at the start of his comic career, transgressive in language and content, from a deeply rooted popular communist tradition (typical of his Tuscan origins), and often targeting the pope or religious themes, he has evolved toward increasingly explicit statements of faith, to the point where there is no public occasion into which he does not insert a Christian reference. In La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997), his most complete film in this sense, he gives Guido (a name Benigni uses as a synonym for God in his theatrical shows) a salvific role in the life of his wife and son, bringing about salvation that asks no reward in exchange. Even Schopenhauer is evoked: “According to what Schopenhauer taught, I am what I desire.”

Guido is struck by this idea and draws inspiration from it for a series of positive applications. On different occasions (at the theater with Dora, in the camp when the dog is about to discover Giosuè), Guido manages to mold external reality to his will, almost like a magician. Leaving behind him the Nazi aspiration to nothingness (nihilism) and all the forms of hatred present in the world, Guido transforms Schopenhauer’s statement into the will to live and to love. Attilio does the same in La Tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow, 2005). After all, it was Schopenhauer who affirmed: “To the good man, the Veil of Maya (illusion) has become transparent; he sees that all things are one, and that the distinction between himself and another is only apparent. He reaches this insight by love, which is always sympathy, and has to do with the pain of others. When the veil of Maya is lifted, a man takes on the suffering of the whole world” (quoted in Russell 1945, 756).

With this in mind, in drawing this analysis to a close, we might note that it is not so surprising that Pope John Paul II sat beside Roberto Benigni at the screening of La vita è bella at the Vatican on January 10, 1999.

References

  1. Argentieri, M. 1996. Il cinema in guerra. Arte, comunicazione e propaganda in Italia 1939–1944. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
  2. Baragli, E. 1968. Codice Hays. Legion of Decency. Due esperienze U.S.A. Rome: Studio Romano della Comunicazione Sociale.
  3. “Benedetta Celluloide! L’esperienza Orbis‐Universalia negli anni del Neorealismo.” 2002. Special Issue. Ciemme: 138–39.
  4. Cavell, S. 1999. Alla ricerca della felicità. La commedia hollywoodiana del rimatrimonio. Turin: Einaudi.
  5. Civardi, L. 1945. Cinema e morale. Rome: Editrice Ave.
  6. Covi, A. 1941a. “Nostro cinema.” Rivista del cinematografo XIV (6): 84–85.
  7. ———. 1941b. “Chiarire le idee.” Rivista del cinematografo XIV (1): 3–4.
  8. ———. 1941c. “Per una critica cinematografica.” Rivista del cinematografo XIV (11): 154–55.
  9. ———. 1942. “Invito ai giovani,” Rivista del cinematografo XV (3): 30–31.
  10. ———. 1943. “Del conflitto nel cinema.” Rivista del cinematografo XVI (5): 51–52.
  11. Dagrada, E. 2008. Le varianti trasparenti. I film con Ingrid Bergman di Roberto Rossellini. 2nd Edition. Milan: Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto.
  12. De Sica, V. (1972) 2000. “Vittorio De Sica.” Interview. In Encountering Directors. Edited by Charles Thomas Samuels. New York: Capricorn Books. Reprinted as “Interview With Vittorio De Sica.” In Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by H. Curle and S. Snyder, 30–49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  13. ———. 2004. La Porta del Cielo. Memorie 1901–1952. Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano Editore.
  14. Gemelli, A., O.F.M. 1936. “Enciclica e cinematografo.” Cinema I (2): 51.
  15. Morlion, F. A., O.P. (1948) 1979. “Le basi filosofiche del neorealismo cinematografico italiano.” Bianco e nero, June. Translated in Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo‐Realism, edited by David Overbey, 115–24. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.
  16. ———. 1949a. “Le débat réalisateur‐scénariste: L’experience italienne dans la crise mondiale du scenario.” Revue Internationale du Cinéma 4: 7–11.
  17. ———. 1949b. “Primato dello spirito.” Scenario 1 (nuova serie), December: 11–15.
  18. Pius XI. 1936. “Vigilanti cura, Lettera enciclica di Papa Pio XI sul cinema.” June 29. In Sequenze. Quaderni di cinema. “Cinema e cattolicesimo” 1.II (7): 2–8.
  19. Pirro, U. 1995. Celluloide. Turin: Einaudi.
  20. Rossellini, R. (1954) 1987. “Incontri: Roberto Rossellini.” Rivista del Cinematografo XXVII (6): 16–18. Reprinted in Roberto Rossellini, Il mio metodo. Scritti e interviste, edited by A. Aprà, 104–6. Venice: Marsilio.
  21. Ruggi, E. D., O.P. 1941. “Il popolo e i Santi.” Rivista del cinematografo XIV (6): 81–83.
  22. Russell, B. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon & Shuster.
  23. Segnalazioni cinematografiche. 1943. XVIII. Rome: Centro Cattolico Cinematografico.
  24. Subini, T. 2011. La doppia vita di “Francesco giullare di Dio.” Giulio Andreotti, Félix Morlion e Roberto Rossellini. Milan: Il Libraccio.
  25. Vanelli, M. 2008. “Rossellini e la trilogia della santità.” Sanctorum. Annual monograph, Le devozioni nella società di massa 5: 71–87.
  26. ———. 2010. “Morale e arte cinematografica: un dibattito fra i cattolici italiani.” In Storia del cinema italiano. Vol. VI. 1940/1944, edited by E. G. Laura with the collaboration of A. Baldi, 542–53. Venice: Marsilio; Rome: Edizioni Bianco & Nero.
  27. Vanelli, M. and D. Treveri Gennari. 2010. “Did Neorealism Start in Church? Catholicism, Cinema and the Case of Mario Soldati’s Chi è Dio?” Film and Television Studies 8 (2): 198–217.
  28. ———. 2013. Chi è Dio? Il catechismo cinematografico di Soldati, Fabbri e Zavattini. Genova: Le Mani.
  29. Vasile, T. 1948. “Un Domenicano nella Giuria della Mostra Cinematografica di Venezia.” Rivista del cinematografo XXI (8–9): 12.
  30. ———. 1993. Un villano a Cinecittà. Palermo: Sellerio.
  31. Visconti, L. 1943. “Il cinema antropomorfico.” Cinema 173–74: 108–9.
  32. Zavattini, C. 2002. Io. Un’autobiografia, edited by Paolo Nuzzi. Turin: Einaudi.

Notes