THE SUBJECT MATTER of La Terra Trema owes nothing to the war: it deals with an attempted revolt by the fishermen of a small Sicilian village against the economic stranglehold exerted by the local fleet-owning fish merchants. I might define it as a kind of super-Farrebique about fishermen. The parallels with Rouquier’s film are many: first, its quasidocumentary realism; then (if one may so put it) the exoticism intrinsic to the subject matter; and, too, the underlying “human geography” (for the Sicilian family, the hope of freeing themselves from the merchants amounts to the same thing as the installation of electricity for the Farrebique family). Although in La Terra Trema, a Communist film, the whole village is involved, the story is told in terms of a single family, ranging from grandfather to grandchildren. This family was as much out of its element in the sumptuous reception Universalia gave in its honor at the Excelsior in Venice as the Farrebique family had been at its press party in Paris. Visconti, like Rouquier, did not want to use professional actors, not even Rossellini’s kind of “amalgam.” His fishermen are fishermen in real life. He recruited them on the scene of his story’s action—if that is the proper term here, for here (as in Farrebique) the action deliberately resists the seductions of “drama”: the story unfolds without regard for the rules of suspense, its only resources a concern with things themselves, as in life. But with these negative rather than positive aspects of the story the resemblances to Farrebique end; La Terra Trema is as remote as could be in style from Farrebique.
Visconti, like Rouquier, aimed at and unquestionably achieved a paradoxical synthesis of realism and aestheticism but the poetry of Farrebique is due, in essence, to montage—for example, the winter and spring sequences. To obtain this synthesis in his film, Visconti has not had recourse to the effects one can produce from the juxtaposition of images. Each image here contains a meaning of its own which it expresses fully. This is the reason why it is difficult to see more than a tenuous relation between La Terra Trema and the Soviet cinema of the second half of the twenties, to which montage was essential. We may add now that it is not by means of symbolism in the imagery either that meaning manifests itself here—I mean, the symbolism to which Eisenstein and Rouquier resort. The aesthetic peculiar to the image here is always plastic; it avoids any inclination to the epic. As staggeringly beautiful as the fishing fleet may be when it leaves the harbor, it is still just the village fleet, not, as in Potemkin, the Enthusiasm and the Support of the people of Odessa who send out the fishing boats loaded with food for the rebels.
But, one may ask, where is art to take refuge if the realism one is proposing is so ascetic? Everywhere else. In the quality of the photography, especially. Our compatriot Aldo, who before his work on this film did nothing of real note and was known only as a studio cameraman, has here created a profoundly original style of image, unequaled anywhere (as far as I know) but in the short films which are being made in Sweden by Arne Sucksdorff.
To keep my explanations brief, I will only note that, in an article on Italian film of 1946, “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la liberation” (Esprit, January, 1948), I had examined some aspects of the kind of film realism then current, and that I was led to see Farrebique and Citizen Kane as the two poles of realistic technique. The realism of Farrebique derives from the object itself, of Citizen Kane from the way it structures what it represents. In Farrebique everything is real. In Kane everything has been reconstructed in a studio—but only because such depth of field and such rigorously composed images could not be obtained on location. Paisà stands somewhere between the two but closer to Farrebique for its images, while the realistic aesthetic works it way into the film between the component blocs of reality through its peculiar conception of narrative.
The images of La Terra Trema achieve what is at once a paradox and tour de force in integrating the aesthetic realism of Citizen Kane with the documentary realism of Farrebique. If this is not, strictly speaking, the first time depth of focus has been used outside the studio, it is at least the first time it has been used as consciously and as systematically as it is here out of doors, in the rain and even in the dead of night, as well as indoors in the real-life settings of the fishermen’s homes. I cannot linger over the technical tour de force which this represents, but I would like to emphasize that depth of focus has naturally led Visconti (as it led Welles) not only to reject montage but, in some literal sense, to invent a new kind of shooting script.* His “shots” (if one is justified in retaining the term) are unusually long—some lasting three or four minutes. In each, as one might expect, several actions are going on simultaneously. Visconti also seems to have wanted, in some systematic sense, to base the construction of his image on the event itself. If a fisherman rolls a cigarette, he spares us nothing: we see the whole operation; it will not be reduced to its dramatic or symbolic meaning, as is usual with montage. The shots are often fixed-frame, so people and things may enter the frame and take up position; but Visconti is also in the habit of using a special kind of panning shot which moves very slowly over a very wide arc: this is the only camera movement which he allows himself, for he excludes all tracking shots and, of course, every unusual camera angle.
The unlikely sobriety of this structure is possible only because of the remarkable plastic balance maintained—a balance which only a photograph could absolutely render here. But above and beyond the merits of its purely formal properties, the image reveals an intimate knowledge of the subject matter on the part of the film makers. This is especially remarkable in the interiors, which hitherto have eluded film. The difficulties attendant on lighting and shooting make it almost impossible to use real interiors as settings. It has been done occasionally, but the results from an aesthetic point of view have been far inferior to what can be achieved on exteriors. Here, for the first time throughout an entire film there was no variation in quality between interior and exterior as to the style of the shooting script, the performance of the actors, and the results of the photography. Visconti is worthy of the novelty of his triumph. Despite the poverty—or even because of the simple “ordinariness” of this household of fishermen, an extraordinary kind of poetry, at once intimate and social, emanates from it.
The masterly way in which Visconti has handled his actors deserves the highest praise. This is by no means the first time in history of film that nonprofessional actors have been used, but never before (except perhaps in “exotic” films, where the problem is somewhat specialized) have the actors been so skillfully integrated with the most specifically aesthetic elements of the film. Rouquier never knew how to handle his family without our being conscious of a camera. The embarrassment, the repressed laughter, the awkwardness are skillfully covered up by the editing which always cuts just in the nick of time. In La Terra Trema, the actor, sometimes on camera for several minutes at a time, speaks, moves, and acts with complete naturalness—one might even say, with unimaginable grace. Visconti is from the theater. He has known how to communicate to the nonprofessionals of La Terra Trema something more than naturalness, namely that stylization of gesture that is the crowning achievement of an actor’s profession. If festival juries were not what they are, the Venice festival prize for best acting should have gone to the fishermen of La Terra Trema.
Visconti lets us sees that the Italian neorealism of 1946 has been left far behind on more than one score. Hierarchies in art are fairly pointless, but cinema is too young an art still, too involved in its own evolution to be able to indulge in repeating itself for any length of time. Five years in cinema is the equivalent of an entire literary generation. It is the merit of Visconti to have managed a dialectical integration of the achievements of recent Italian film with a larger, richer aesthetic for which the term “realism” has not too much meaning now. I am not saying that La Terra Trema is superior to Paisà or to La Caccia tragica but only that it does, at least, have the merit of having left them behind from an historical standpoint. Seeing the best Italian films of 1948, I had the impression that Italian cinema was doomed to repeat itself to its utter exhaustion.
La Terra Trema is the only original way out of the aesthetic impasse, and in that sense, one might suppose, it bears the burden of our hopes.
Does this mean that those hopes will be fulfilled? No, unhappily, it is not certain, for La Terra Trema runs counter, still, to some filmic principles with which Visconti will have in future films to deal somewhat more convincingly than he does here. In particular, his disinclination to sacrifice anything to drama has one obvious and serious consequence: La Terra Trema bores the public. A film with a limited action, it lasts longer than three hours. If you add that the language used in the film is a dialectal Sicilian (which, given the photographic style of the image, it is impossible to subtitle), and that not even Italians understand it, you can see that this is somewhat austere “entertainment” and faces no more than a restricted commercial future. I am sincere when I say that I hope Universalia will play the Maecenas sufficiently to enable Visconti, while himself sharing the cost from his large personal fortune, to finish the trilogy he projects of which La Terra Trema is only the first part. We will then, at best, have some filmic monster, whose highly social and political preoccupations will nonetheless remain inaccessible to the general public. In the world of cinema, it is not necessary that everyone approve every film, provided that what prompts the public’s incomprehension can be compensated for by the other things. In other words, the aesthetic of La Terra Trema must be applicable to dramatic ends if it is to be of service in the evolution of cinema.
One has to take into account too—and this is even more disturbing, in view of what one has the right to expect from Visconti himself—a dangerous inclination to aestheticism. This great aristocrat, an artist to the tips of his fingers, is a Communist, too—do I dare say a synthetic one?
La Terra Trema lacks inner fire. One is reminded of the great Renaissance painters who, without having to do violence to themselves, were able to paint such fine religious frescoes in spite of their deep indifference to Christinianity. I am not passing judgment on the sincerity of Visconti’s communism. But what is sincerity? Obviously, at issue is not some paternalistic feeling for the proletariat. Paternalism is a bourgeois phenomenon, and Visconti is an aristocrat. What is at issue is, maybe, an aesthetic participation in history. Whatever it be, though, we are a long way off from the telling conviction of Potemkin or The End of Saint Petersburg or even (the theme is even the same) of Piscator. There is no doubt that the film does have propaganda value, but this value is purely objective: there is no moving eloquence to bolster its documentary vigor. This is how Visconti intended it to be. This decision is not in itself unattractive. But it involves him in a fairly risky bet, which he may not necessarily be able to cover, at least in terms of film. Let us hope that his future work will show us that it can. As it stands, however, it will not, unless it can avoid falling in the direction in which it is already leaning perilously.
* For a note on Bazin’s use of technical terms, see p. 181.