summer 2007 series

What would we do without Rialto Pictures? Founded in 1997, Rialto Pictures has been delighting cinema buffs ever since with its restorations and re-releases of classic foreign films. In 1999, Rialto received a special "Heritage Award" from the National Society of Film Critics in recognition of their invaluable efforts to make foreign film masterpieces available to a new generation of film goers. Cornell Cinema has had the great pleasure of screening these wonderful new prints, including Carol Reed's The Third Man, Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur, Julien Duvivier's Pépé Le Moko, Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D, and most recently Melville's Army of Shadows. We get teary-eyed just thinking about these amazing films in beautiful restored prints.

This summer we're excited to catch up with Rialto's ever expanding slate of classic gems by screening two of their most recent restorations: Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her and the little-known black comedy Mafioso by Alberto Lattuada.

From Melissa Anderson's review in Time Out New York when the new print of Two or Three Things premiered at Film Forum:

“The Her in the title of Jean-Luc Godard's midperiod masterpiece (one of many made between 1963 and '67) has a dual referent—the film's anti-star, Marina Vlady, playing a Parisian housewife named Juliette Janson, and the city of Paris—the first of many plays on words. 'Mama, what's language?' Juliette's precocious son asks. The answer: 'Language is the house man lives in,' a paraphrase of Heidegger. Godard's own language (his voiceover is whispered conspiratorially throughout the movie) interrogates politics, prostitution (the film was inspired by a series of 1966 articles about Parisian housewives turning tricks), conspicuous consumption—and himself. 'I forget everything, except that I'm back at zero and I have to start from there,' the director confesses.

“Filmgoers, too, may find themselves forgetting everything they once knew about watching movies; Godard, in Brechtian mode, deliberately distances audiences, constantly interrupting the 'action' and refusing to psychologize his characters. The acting is in quotation marks; what's most important is the system of signs. Those not familiar with semiotics need not despair; the sound of Two or Three Things may be greatly inspired by Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure, but the look is pure pop. The French tricolor forms the bold palette of the redoubtable cinematographer Raoul Coutard; visual set pieces include the magnificent imagining of the birth of the cosmos in a coffee cup. In a cine-tract with thousands of ideas a minute, the film's beauty never fails to transfix you.Ó

A selection of the 2006 New York Film Festival, Mafioso was also one of the best reviewed films of the year. Marc Savlov's review from the Austin Chronicle follows:

“Mafioso, a genius Italian comedy shading toward the darker aspects of its title, has been plucked from obscurity and given a sparkling new cleanup job (its first since the original release in 1962) by Rialto Pictures, whose staff deserves a big fat cannoli for their efforts. Not only is Mafioso historically important as one of the first Italian films to deal with the concept of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra—it's also a brilliant feat of sustained comedy that roves across the Italian and comic geography from Neopolitan pratfalls to bleak unsettling Sicilian existentialism. As shot by director of photography Armando Nannuzzi, Mafioso overflows with gritty, neorealistic splendor, but everything, including Piero Piccioni's note-perfect score, is done in support of the magnificently entertaining Sordi as the voluble, multitasking family man Nino Badalamenti, a Fiat factory head who takes his Northern, cosmopolitan wife and their two blond children to visit the paternal in-laws down Sicily way. Needless to say, the city spouse finds the ways of the country altogether backward (and what's up with that mustache on sis?), while Nino finds himself in thrall to the local don (Attanasio). I'll not spoil the absolute delight of Mafioso by saying more, although I will say that this is the sort of masterpiece that will obliterate memories of lesser, later efforts in the 'meeting the parents' comedy lineage. Brilliant.Ó

Images: (left): Two or Three Things I Know About Her , (right) Mafioso