FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
MY VOYAGE TO ITALY
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
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