Reading Time: 8 minutesBefore Dario Argento, before Lucio Fulci, there was Mario Bava. He shot other directors’ films for twenty years, solving problems with light and camera that no one else knew how to solve, and then in 1960, he directed his first feature and built Italian horror cinema more or less from scratch. He did it with… Continue reading Mario Bava: The Man Who Invented Italian Horror
italian cinema
The Poliziotteschi: Italy’s Answer to the American Crime Film
Reading Time: 6 minutesIn 1971, two American films arrived in Italian cinemas and changed everything. The French Connection and Dirty Harry showed Italian audiences a crime film that was faster and more violent than what Hollywood had previously offered, with a moral ambiguity that the Production Code had made impossible a decade earlier. Italian filmmakers watched these films,… Continue reading The Poliziotteschi: Italy’s Answer to the American Crime Film
Fellini’s Dream Sequences: Craft Lessons from 8½
Reading Time: 7 minutesItalian director and screenwriter Federico Fellini never studied psychology, but he spent decades in Jungian analysis, and the collaboration shaped everything he made. His dream sequences do not look like Freudian symptoms or surrealist provocations. They look like remembered dreams: specific, emotionally coherent, visually strange in ways that feel true to how the dreaming mind… Continue reading Fellini’s Dream Sequences: Craft Lessons from 8½