MY VOYAGE TO ITALY
Directed by: Martin Scorsese.
Produced by: Barbara De Fina, Giuliana Del Punta & Bruno Restuccia.
Written by: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Raffaele Donato, Kent Jones & Martin Scorsese.
Director of Photography: Phil Abraham & William Rexer.
Edited by: Thelma Schoonmaker.
Released by: Miramax.
Language: English and Italian with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: USA/Italy. 246 min. Rated: PG-13.
With: Martin Scorsese.
DVD Features: None.

This 1999 documentary plays as a post-WWII Italian film class taught by the most enthusiastic professor possible. However, since personal engagement with a particular subject does not always amount to much insight, this follow-up to 1995's A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies is informative enough to transcend the limits of a vanity project, but insufficiently exhaustive as a definitive history of late 20th century Italian cinema.

Perhaps that is the point. Narrated by Scorsese, the documentary catalogues the Italian films he cites as having had the most impact on his life and work. It becomes clear as the documentary goes along - with it being stated directly by him at its end - that his purpose is not to provide film buffs with a deeply analytical take, but to initiate younger viewers to the world of such master directors as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Roberto Rossellini; as well as to get as many people as possible into the habit of watching their films.

To this end, Scorsese succeeds in evoking the feelings awakened in him while watching many of these films on TV as a boy in New York's Little Italy. Indeed, the beginning sequences are startlingly autobiographical: Scorsese even provides some old film footage of his family that he managed to unearth. His enchantment with Italian films grows directly out of his urge toward self-exploration. Equally poignant are scenes featuring Scorsese standing on the rooftop of the building he grew up in, while behind him the Twin Towers are visible. They unwittingly embody the significance of historical remembrance and yearning for the past, part of Scorsese's purpose for making this film.

Though he deals with many strains of Italian cinema - including neorealism, the epic form, and surrealism - Scorsese does not examine their intrinsic contradictions. Though he points to such neorealist films as De Sica's Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto D (1952) as being documentary-like, he does not recognize that, though they broke ground dealing with the mundane and the hardships of the everyday, they were still a result of calculated craftsmanship, such as in the use of music. Very seldom does he relate how formal strategies found in theses films specifically inspired his own beyond their narrative themes. Moreover, the stylistic excess depicted in Federico Fellini's later films, such as 1963's 8½, is left to the viewer to be understood as surfacing in much of the later Scorsese oeuvre.

One wishes there was more perspective and context. Ultimately, with My Voyage to Italy, Scorsese achieves a detailed account of how Italian films affected him on a mostly personal level. It would be more appropriate to refer to the titular voyage in reverse: as that of the Italian cinema to him. Reymond Levy
August 23, 2004