The following notes on part one of Roberto Rossellini's L’Amore, La Voce Humana, were written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A restored DCP of La Voce Humana from the Cineteca di Bologna will be shown on Saturday, September 28 at 2 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular sceening space, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker Nancy Savoca. Admission is free!

By John Bennett

In the immediate postwar period of Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini was undoubtedly the most renowned practitioner of what was known as “Italian neorealist” cinema. Neorealist films—such as Open City (1945), Rossellini’s enormously successful depiction of war-ravaged Rome—were notable for their stories and styles that captured the hardships of World War II and its aftermath in Italy with a documentary texture. With Open City, Paisan (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948), Rossellini established himself as a the most prominent member of a cohort of directors that included Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Alberto Lattuada, and Giuseppe de Santis—all of whom made films with a certain realist grit that was, at the time, a rather novel development in world cinema. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the Italian economic boom began to cauterize the wounds of war, most of these directors began to drift toward a more psychological and heightened brand of filmmaking. No film is more representative of the earliest movement of this drift than The Human Voice, Rossellini’s 1948 short film.

The story of The Human Voice is simple: a woman (Anna Magnani, whom Rossellini had helped bring to international prominence with Open City) languishes in her dark and cluttered apartment as she has a final despairing telephone conversation with an invisible ex-lover. Rossellini’s choice in source material for The Human Voice is the surest sign of his break from neorealism; he drew from a theatrical piece by French writer, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. If Rossellini was one of the great champions of cinematic realism, Cocteau was a master of poetic filmic fancy. His Beauty and the Beast (1946), with its enchanted castles, magic mirrors and hexed princes, seems the antithesis of the grim and gritty collection of stories in Rossellini’s Paisan, which was released the same year. Yet in treating this material, Rossellini anticipates the more psychological cinema that would interest him throughout the 1950s in the films he made with screen legend Ingrid Bergman. The Human Voice, a story of love on the rocks, directly anticipates a film like Journey to Italy, a Rossellini/Bergman collaboration about the deterioration of a bourgeois marriage.

For a portmanteau feature entitled L’Amore, The Human Voice was paired with a second short film, Il miracolo (The Miracle). Rossellini helms this film as well, with Anna Magnani playing Nannina, a religious peasant who encounters a rakish man whom she takes as an apparition of St. Joseph. The man (played by none other than Federico Fellini, on whose idea the film was based) plies Nannina with wine until she passes out. When she discovers, weeks later, that she is pregnant, she tragically attributes the pregnancy to divine intervention but faces social ostracization from her conservative community. The result of this diptych of films is a pure showcase for Magnani’s range. The Human Voice allows her to be sullen, plaintive and agonized, while she demonstrates her ability to play a naïve and odd outsider in Il miracolo.

Indeed, a title card to Il miracolo, signed by Rossellini, proudly proclaims that “this film is an homage to the art of Anna Magnani.” In The Human Voice, that art is on the fullest display. Present in nearly every shot of the film, Magnani manages to give her character an arc of increasing frenzy and despair as last grains of sand fall away in the hourglass of her love affair with the unseen man. Magnani was a performer who made excess a virtue. Frequent close-ups allow us to see the control with which Magnani manipulates her expressions: her eyes widen in despair at times and shiftily dart left and right with suspicion at others, and well-timed teardrops punctuate the sentences of her conversation. Veneers of barely maintained calm slip away each time she fears that the line has been disconnected, illustrating the swiftness with which she could shift the intensity and aspect of her demeanor as a performer. As she grows more distraught over the dwindling minutes of communication with the man she loves, Magnani clutches with operatic desperation at the apartment’s curtains, just as she writhes with increasing convulsion amid her unmade bedding. Towards the end of the film, she distractedly bunches the telephone cord around her face and mouth, threatening to literalize “chewing the scenery” as an idiom. Though it runs a mere 35 minutes, The Human Voice gives one as palpable a sense of the grandeur and physicality of Magnani’s performance style as any of her feature length films.

On another level, The Human Voice reflected and anticipated elements of the personal lives of Rossellini and Magnani. In Tag Gallagher’s lengthy biography, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, he traces the romance that began between the two titans of Italian cinema from the mid-40s through its conclusion around the time of the production of 1950’s Stromboli. Around this time, Magnani anticipated making an American film with Rossellini about Italian immigrants in New York. Rossellini instead turned his attention to Stromboli, which starred Ingrid Bergman—an actress who replaced Magnani in Rossellini’s projects as well as his affections (Bergman and Rossellini married shortly after Stromboli’s release). Though The Human Voice marked the end of her collaboration with Rossellini, Magnani’s career continued to flourish: she went on to find global success delivering the same kind of thunderous, earthy, swaggering expressivity in films like Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1952), Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief (1960), and Daniel Mann’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

The Human Voice marked the first adaptation of Cocteau’s play. Yet since Rossellini’s inaugural adaptation, the piece has proven to be a perennial exercise for actresses. Ironically, Ingrid Bergman would go on to play the same role nine years after the dissolution of her marriage to Rossellini in a 1966 television adaptation (directed, somewhat incongruously, by Ted Kotcheff of First Blood fame). Sophia Loren played an older version of Magnani’s character in another Italian adaptation directed by Edoardo Ponti in 2014. The spareness of the material proved conducive to filming during the COVID-19 pandemic and Tilda Swinton became the Woman on the Phone for legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodovar in 2020. Scattered among these notable versions are innumerable iterations of the material, whether they be foreign television broadcasts, filmed theatrical productions, or independent calling cards. Nevertheless, one can assume that, with each new adaptation, directors and actresses refer back to the sense languor and lovesick agony that Rossellini and Magnani so skillfully conjured.

The following notes on Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine were written by Dr. David Vanden Bossche, alumnus of the Department of Communications Arts at UW-Madison. A new, restored DCP of the international version of Farewell, My Concubine will screen at the Cinematheque on Saturday, September 14 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

The winner of the Palme d'Or at 1993’s Cannes Film Festival (an honor it shared with Jane Campion’s The Piano), Farewell, My Concubine is a nearly three-hour epic spanning half a century of Chinese history, but at the same time an intimate story of two men who spend their lives performing at the famous Beijing Opera. This sumptuous visual feast is also the magnum opus in the oeuvre of Chen Kaige, whose own life shows striking parallels with some of the movie’s narrative. Sixteen during the cultural revolution, the young director turned his father, also a film director, over to the revolutionaries. Though father and son later reconciled (the senior Chen oversaw the art direction for Concubine), the guilt of this betrayal would haunt Chen for decades, influencing his honest portrayal of the cultural revolution in the film.

The film’s release history has also been a struggle between competing pressures, namely the Chinese government and its distributor, Miramax. Though the film was banned in China immediately after its release, its win at Cannes spurred international outcry for the Chinese government to back down and let the film back into theaters. Eventually the authorities agreed to release the film after 14 minutes had been cut, including scenes dealing with the Cultural Revolution and homosexuality, with the ending revised to match censorial demands. Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein then picked up Concubine for U.S. and U.K. distribution and also demanded cuts to the film: removing twenty minutes that filled out portions of the relationship between the two men. This is the version that has been widely available, though it was panned by the Cannes jury that awarded the original prize. Eventually, Miramax released the original cut of the film on DVD, and in 2023 Film Movement released a 4K restoration of the uncut original: the first time it’s been seen in U.S. theaters and the version screening at the Cinematheque.

Politics notwithstanding, this is also undeniably Chen’s most accomplished work stylistically; every shot and camera movement in Farewell, My Concubine reflects the refinement and precise execution of the operatic rituals and tableaus that occupy such a central place in the movie’s narrative. The story opens in the 1920s, depicting the brutal training required for little boys to become actors, focusing on Duan and Cheng, both of whom become entwined with their theatrical roles in the film’s titular opera. Duan always incarnates a mythic ruler and Cheng plays - as was the tradition - the female concubine who ends the opera committing suicide in a gesture of love. We witness their long careers throughout several decades, watching the actors rise from poverty to stardom. Fame nevertheless requires them to navigate the sometimes rapidly changing political landscape of China, bringing with it powerful new allies and benefactors of the theatre but also creating new adversaries and often the need to begrudgingly seek out the favors of powerful politicians and military rulers. Undergirding all this is the complicated relationship between the lifelong friends and scene partners (although they often find themselves on opposing sides), a relationship that is tainted by the harsh realities of life but also enriched by the unbreakable bond that comes from incarnating two famous lovers on stage.

Among the story’s most controversial elements in 1993 for Chen Kaige’s Chinese audience and censors were the clear homoerotic implications of the two men’s relationship and the ways their roles begin to blur the lines between performance and real life. The film’s homoerotic undertones are further complicated and reinforced by the presence of a woman who drives a wedge between the two men, a complicated, yet subtle love triangle developing. Gong Li plays the prostitute-turned-muse, Juxian, who becomes a pivotal element in both the strained relationship between the two actors and the negotiation of historic political turmoil. While he has often been seen as a politically critical voice whose work was regularly censored by national authorities, in more recent years and in the leadup to the 2000 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government softened their approach to the director. Similarly, Chen Kaige has agreed in recent decades to direct semi-propaganda films commissioned for the Chinese government andThe Battle at Lake Changjin (2021) became China’s highest-grossing film of all time.

Somehow balancing an expansive view of Chinese history with an intimate character study, Farewell, My Concubine manages to not only work as an intense melodrama, but also as a dark political tale on the messy process of regime change. The movie boldly suggests that the politically empowered, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, will ultimately turn against art and intellectualism, a message as relevant for the cultural revolution as it is still decades later. However, the film’s ultimate message is of uplift, suggesting that art and expression outlast any political upheaval, no matter how hard those in power attempt to destroy or limit its power to provoke, to reflect, or to stir the human spirit.

These notes on Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. The Grand Budapest Hotel will screen in the second part of our Thank You, David Bordwell series on Friday, August 30 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The screening will be followed by David Bordwell's video essay discussing Wes Anderson's visual style.

By Josh Martin

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity,” muses lobby boy-turned-reclusive hotel proprietor Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) in the final moments of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Spoken with the “imperceptible air of sadness” that the film’s novelist narrator identifies early in the picture, Zero offers one final remark: “He was one of them.” That faint glimmer in question is Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the meticulously mannered, quick-witted, and often hysterically profane concierge of the film’s titular establishment. Gustave is many things – a poet, a philanderer, a precise and dutiful manager – but above all, he is a man of decency and honor. At this stage of the film, Zero’s tribute to his friend and mentor is also a lament, a mourning of the loss of a man whose principles and dignity, much like the “enchanted old ruin” he managed, left him at odds with an increasingly violent and desolate age. “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it,” Zero opines, “but he sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” Imbued with that indefatigable grace by Fiennes, Gustave H. is the melancholy center of gravity in Anderson’s crown jewel, a film that remains an indelible creation.

Like many of Anderson’s recent works, which experiment with storytelling structures such as the stage-play-within-a-fictional-TV-show-within-a-film of last year’s Asteroid City, or the anthology of newspaper articles recalled by their scribes in 2021’s The French Dispatch, The Grand Budapest Hotel employs a complicated narrative approach matched by its play with aspect ratios, colors, and other elements of form. The film opens with a young girl visiting a memorial site for an author (Tom Wilkinson), whom we are told is one of the literary gems of the fictional European land of Zubrowka. The girl is carrying a copy of one of the author’s best-known works: The Grand Budapest Hotel. Here, Anderson cuts to the author of the novel in question, who remembers his time in the 1960s as a young man (now played by Jude Law) at the Grand Budapest. It was during this stay that he learned the tale of Mr. Moustafa, who regaled him with the loopy account of how he acquired this property in the 1930s – the story that eventually became the author’s novel. Anderson presents these layers of storytelling and artifice with an impressive clarity throughout, with the metafictional structure unfolding smoothly for the viewer.

The plot of The Grand Budapest Hotel itself is zippy, matched by the rhythmic, playful tempo of Alexandre Desplat’s Oscar-winning score. Anderson revels in his tale’s twists and extreme convolutions – knotty phrases such as “the second copy of the second will” come to make perfect sense in a world divorced from any kind of realism. This sense of play extends to the film’s engagement with various genres, defying a simple classification in favor of a knowing smorgasbord of popular forms. The bildungsroman, the murder mystery, the war film, prison break pictures, even a set piece that echoes slasher movies – all are present in Anderson’s metamorphic work. Yet even as it evolves and shifts beneath the viewer’s feet, the film orbits around Fiennes, whose first collaboration with Anderson (he would later reteam to play a panoply of roles in the director’s 2023 Roald Dahl shorts) brings the scrupulous clerk to life with specificity and vividness. The British thespian demonstrates an instinctual feel for the director’s rat-a-tat dialogue, exemplifying Gustave’s prim-and-proper formality and his deliciously combative sense of superiority (“You wouldn’t know chiaroscuro from chicken giblets”).

Yet in an interview with The Daily Beast, Fiennes describes Gustave as “quite alone,” with his cheeky performance of dutiful service acting as a “persona” to veil his more turbulent emotions. More than just a superlative comic turn, Fiennes imbues in Gustave a tenuous balance between the humorous and the melancholic – a balance that is essential to an understanding of the film’s broader milieu. Despite its tinkering with genre and heightened environments, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a film principally concerned with the looming clouds of war – with the violence and prejudice that emerged at the twilight of one age and the dawn of another, pointedly addressing Zero’s status as an immigrant and the xenophobic sentiments that arose around this fictionalized portrait of World War II.

Such tonal clashes and thematic concerns can be traced back to the source material. In the closing credits, Anderson acknowledges the inspiration of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author of novels such as Letter from an Unknown Woman who left Europe in the 1930s amid rising antisemitism and fascism. During an interview with Anderson, Zweig biographer George Prochnik describes the film’s “fairy tale dimension” signified by the blend of a “confectionary” style and “black” humor as matching the tenor of Zweig’s own writings. Indeed, The Grand Budapest Hotel is such a feast of candy-colored pastel palettes that one is almost startled by the slow incursion of depravity into its narrative. Hints of unexpected discordance are visible early – Anderson loves sudden non sequiturs and digressions – but as the film progresses, the onslaught of decapitations, dead cats, and severed fingers further disturb the frothy mood.

Anderson is a filmmaker often reduced to a set of recognizable aesthetic idiosyncrasies: symmetrical frames employing what David Bordwell describes as “planimetric style,” visual incongruity, mannered dialogue. As such, the director is often accused of being emotionally distant and socio-politically opaque, a formalist hamstrung by that dastardly label of “style over substance.” Though this contention deserves further scrutiny, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a particularly strong refutation, with Anderson’s style and his themes operating harmoniously in tandem. The affectations and lovingly controlled frames – arranged with as much rigor and purpose as Monsieur Gustave’s hotel – serve as counterpoints to Grand Budapest’s more morose sensibilities, with characters whose stylized mannerisms fail to fully obscure lives marred by tragedy.

An emphasis on Grand Budapest’s solemnity and sociopolitical reflections could, perhaps, dampen an audience’s interest, lest they be subjected to a moody and downbeat experience. However, the pleasures of the film’s form and narrative are so immediate and immense – so evidently delectable for the spectator – that those depths of theme and feeling slowly creep up as the film continues, growing in profundity and capaciousness with each return to Anderson’s world. A decade after its initial critical and financial success, The Grand Budapest Hotel remains beloved in part because it is something of a magic trick, fusing its competing tones, genres, and emotional registers with, to return to Zero’s words, the kind of “marvelous grace” that even Monsieur Gustave would envy.

These notes on Race with the Devil were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A new 4K DCP of Race with the Devil will screen in our "Action Vehicles" series on Friday, July 19 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. 

By Josh Martin

In Susan A. Compo’s biography of Warren Oates, the iconic star of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), she recalls a bizarre story from the production of Race with the Devil, Jack Starrett’s 1975 genre-bender. With Oates and co-star Peter Fonda eager to appear in “a sure-fire moneymaker,” the former agreed to lead the project — tacking on the additional request of having producers furnish him a new RV. Preparing to shoot the film in the Texas winter, Oates loaded up the vehicle with friends, including pal Harry Dean Stanton, for a series of drives through the southwestern United States. During these drives, Oates and his companions took heavy doses of psychedelic drugs. Soon, they reported experiencing close encounters with extraterrestrial life — encounters witnessed only by those under the influence. In Compo’s account, Oates associate Dean Jones recalls that “they all saw a UFO'' on the drive to San Antonio, though Bob Watkins, another friend, acknowledged that they “were hallucinating to some extent.” This countercultural debauchery may seem irrelevant to the eventual production of a major motion picture, but it is in these conditions — an anxious, drug-addled state, blending genuine fear of the unknown and jovial absurdity — that the equally paranoid and unusual Race with the Devil came to exist.

Starrett’s film features an elevator pitch that practically jumps off the page. Four years after Fonda and Oates first appeared together in The Hired Hand (1971), the former’s directorial debut, the duo reunited for a road movie-turned-horror picture about two motorcyclists who stumble upon Satanic rituals deep in the heart of Texas. If this concept seems ripe for campy thrills and witchy kitsch, the tone that the filmmakers strive for proves more sinister, a mood that is immediately evident from the opening credits. As the camera tilts up on the dividing lane of a dark, empty highway, storm clouds gather ahead, clustered around a lone tree as discordant music sets the atmosphere of unease. The clouds change in color to a bright, blood red, with the space eventually abstracted, enveloping the spectator in this frightening universe.

Despite the early preview of a menacing mood, Race with the Devil more accurately simulates the steady deterioration of a bad trip. Fonda and Oates star as Roger and Frank, respectively, two friends and speed enthusiasts who are taking their first much-needed vacation in a long time: a January jaunt to Aspen for some winter skiing. Roger and Frank are joined by their wives, Alice (Loretta Swit) and Kelly (Lara Parker), as they pack into Roger’s brand spanking-new $36,000 motorhome, equipped with all manner of bells and whistles. The RV enables the kind of independence and solitude that the men are looking for, with Roger exclaiming, “We don’t need anything from anybody! We are self-contained, babe.” But more crucially, the road trip gives Roger and Frank an opportunity to relax, to bond with one another, sharing sentimental remarks over drinks and racing their bikes in the Texas desert. Seemingly in an attempt to push the opening credits sequence out of our minds, the film plays up the tranquility of this escape – the sense of calm that washes over our lead characters.

Stopped for the night in an empty valley, Roger and Frank’s boozy soiree is rudely interrupted when a tree is lit on fire several hundred feet from them. Their interest piqued, the buddies look through a pair of binoculars to see a strange ritual, featuring men chanting and wearing bizarre robes. The tone of the film does not immediately shift, with Starrett teasing the potential for comedic hijinks in this peculiar discovery. Yet as the ritual continues, the film initiates an accelerated editing rhythm, with the montage becoming more pronounced in tandem with the demonic chanting. But this is no hallucination: the frenzied cutting culminates in the sacrificial murder of a young woman, an act of violence that sends Roger and Frank into a full-blown freakout. Spotted by the cult, they find themselves on the run, the good vibes of their vacation thwarted.

Race with the Devil plays on the fears of the post-countercultural moment, on a diffuse sense of paranoia directed at the dark side of peace, drugs, and free love. The sheriff, when informed of the ritual murder, grumbles that a “bunch of hippies moved into the area… stuffed garbage up their nose and into their arm,” thus making the town an uglier place. Though Fonda’s Frank is skeptical that the murder is “hippie”-related, the film draws on this constellation of interrelated cultural pressure points, engulfing post-Manson mania, ritual violence, and Satanic panic.

Equally essential to this concoction of mid-1970s anxiety is a fear of rurality, of what horrors may lurk deep within the forgotten, neglected corners of America’s vast landscape. Race with the Devil concocts a disturbing ambience around the denizens of these small Texas towns, transmitting the unshakable feeling that everyone is in on the plot, out to punish the city folks for their invasion on this territory. Compo notes that the screenplay, written by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop, was “inspired” by John Boorman’s 1971 classic Deliverance, another tale of friends who get a little more than they bargained for with some nefarious locals on their vacation. And while the slasher is not a sub-genre in play here, Race similarly recalls Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), particularly in the dusty spaces and open Texas fields where our horror takes place.

Amid this swirl of influences and cultural concerns, the film had a somewhat tumultuous production, which Compo’s book carefully recounts. Co-screenwriter Frost was the original director, but 20^th Century Fox became weary of the unpredictable Oates, Fonda, and Bishop’s frequent changes to the dialogue, eventually placing Starrett in the director’s chair as a steadying force. After this change, production settled into a groove, resulting in a profitable endeavor. In one famed anecdote, producer Paul Maslansky solicited the work of “Satanists and black magic experts” as extras, providing a purported verisimilitude to the far-fetched picture. 

While writing on Race with the Devil often draws comparisons to Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968) and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), the particularities of the cult’s Satanic plot here are functionally irrelevant. What Starrett’s film instead offers is a feeling of suspicion — an uncertainty that builds to a surreal sense of entrapment and terror. In this manner, one feels a stronger kinship between Race with the Devil and the uneasy vibes of films like The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1974) or Messiah of Evil (Huyck and Katz, 1973), especially as Starrett’s picture reaches its climax. Though Maslansky believed that the ending “sucked” and co-star Lara Parker lamented its “meanness,” the unsparing, slow-motion conclusion is the perfect validation of the film’s paranoid logic, with all the distressing incidents and unresolved threads coalescing into a nightmarish series of images. Race with the Devil may have its fun — in its intense chase sequences and its buddy film rhythms — but a feeling of inescapable doom lingers once the credits roll.