Cinema Paradiso the Film Cinema

Cinema Paradiso

The film Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988) is clearly a paean to the motion picture as an art form, a shared social reality, an entertainment, and a means of personal expression. The film also details a human relationship between the old man who worked as projectionist in the local movie theater and the village boy he teaches about film and about life. The film is presented as a reminiscence, for the boy has become a famous movie director and returns to his hoe town when he hers of the death of the older man. This leads him to recall his childhood and the bond between the man and himself, a bond that is as durable and lasting as the films shown during his childhood. Indeed, this fact serves as a metaphoric link between film and reality, based on the persistence of each through time, even to the point of transcending death. The old man, Alfredo, is now dead, but what he taught the boy lives on in that boy, just as films from forty year ago were made by and feature people now dead, but people who come back to life whenever one of those films is shown again.

An important element in the film is the particular expressive quality of Italian neo-realism. Cinema Paradiso cannot itself be considered neorealist, for it does not deal with the sorts of social realism and social criticism that neorealist cinema did. However, there is a strong neorealist influence in aspects of the film, and more directly there is a sense of love for neorealism as a spur to a generation of filmmakers who learned from it, imitated it, and made it part of their lvies. The influence on these filmmakers came in the same way it dose to the young man in Cinema Paradiso -- they saw the films made by the neorealists as the war ended and Italy began rebuilding. The films document that process and also helped spur it and maintain it long after the need for that rebuilding has passed. The young boy is first exposed to neorealism in the context of the film when he sees Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema. On the screen, the credits state that the film is not played by professional actors but by real people in real places, and for the young boy, seeing these other places and people is exciting. In addition, he can recognize types of people he knows from his own village. The reaction of the Catholic priest to these new and more daring films mirrors the objections raised by many at the time they were first released, for some saw the end of civilization in these works. The link to real people also enhances the metaphoric nature of Cinema Paradiso by clearly linking film with reality and so adding to the meaning interchanged between film and life. In a broader sense, of course, this can be taken as a statement about art, but the immediacy of the film art serves strongly to suggest the way life imitates art and art imitates life, often at one and the same time.

The evocation of life in Cinema Paradiso is not unlike the dedication to showing real life in real situations that infused neorealism. The relationship between the old man and the boy is also perhaps a homage to the Bicycle Thief, and their ride on a bicycle may be a visual indication of just this. The entire film builds on the accretion of small incidents of reality in the lives of the people of the village, but again, the intent is less social realism than local color and an evocation of the past seen through the eyes of someone remembering what it was like through pleasant memories for the most part.

Neorealism, however, is only one of the influences on the boy. Every act in his life is surrounded by film and film references -- when his father is identified as dead, it is Gone with the Wind, for instance. The first film shown is a French movie by Jean Renoir, whose sensibilities are quite different from those of the neorealists. French and Italian comedies are also seen. The greatest tragedy of the boy's young life comes when the movie theater burns and his friend is hurt, and the rebuilding of the theater is a return to life for the boy and the village. Over time, the movies change. The boy becomes a filmmaker by emulating the neorealists, going out into the real world with his camera and recording real people in real situations. Neorealism helped influence the boy as it did a generation of filmmakers.

The neorealist films display a challenge to the establishment of the time and a social consciousness that delves into the reality rather than the image of the nation. For this reason, neorealism encountered hostility from the established forces because these films portrayed Italy in a realistic and critical way that was not the sort of image the establishment wanted for the country, particularly to be presented to the outside world. Some of this opposition is seen in the film in a comic way as the old priest in the village comes to see each film before it is shown to the public so he can "protect" the people by having the projectionist cut out any scene with kissing. The political would tend to offend the government, while any hint of sex might offend the Church. In its own way, this repeated image emphasizes the power of film and indeed suggests ways in which certain community leaders tended to ascribe even greater power to film than it probably has, suggesting that letting even one image of kissing pass through the hands of the censor would corrupt the people and lead to ruin.

The film is truly nostalgic in the way it recalls the past and also in the way it presents its story. The film begins in the present and then recalls the past, and if the style is realistic in the manner of neorealism, it is also colored by memory and so selective in what it feature and what it omits about the childhood of the boy, Toto, about the nature of the community, and about the other world the people could observe in films of all sorts.

A touchstone film for this particular film would be the Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), one of the films shown at the theater in this film and one echoed as the projectionist and the boy also ride a bicycle. The Bicycle Thief was a film that came to represent the height of neorealism. It was also a film that is clearly critical of the social conditions of the time and challenged the authorities as a consequence, but it is much more than a social document or tract. De Sica sees the problem in the psychology of the people as much as in the structure of their society. He shows bureaucrats, police officials, and church people who have no understanding of the main character's dilemma in having lost his bicycle, and he also shows that members of the man's own class are no more sympathetic towards him. De Sica sees a world in which economic solutions are ultimately ineffective in curing what is a meaningless, absurd, human predicament.

The sort of people depicted by De Sica in his film are similar to the villagers in Tornatore's film. The elder Toto finds that while the community has changed greatly since he was a child, many of the same people can still be found there. Seeing them helps him remember his own childhood and also brings back the pain of his love for Elena and how that ended. Cinema Paradiso seems to divide into sections that depict different times in life, and while this is true on the surface, the film really makes the different times in life reflect the totality of one life in a cohesive manner. The young boy is the most directly enamored of film and learns from his relationship with the old projectionist, but this is still the same boy when he is an adolescent and transfers much of his affection to Elena. As an older man himself, he is still that boy who loved the films and still that adolescent who learned to love Elena. The way he goes back through his memories shows that he is the same person, that these memories have never left him, and that he has been shaped by them. We might all separate the times of our life in a somewhat artificial fashion, but we would know that all of those divisions were still part of our one life. The film therefore shows how much change is part of life, and the final change here is emphasized as the Cinema Paradiso is demolished to make way for a parking lot.

Toto visits the old theater after the funeral for Alfredo. He also talks to the last owner of the theater and asks why the theater closed some six years before. The manager tells him it closed because the economy changed and because of television and videos. What this really means is that the theater closed when the audience left, emphasizing the close community relationship involved in film. In the old days, when Toto was a boy, the people would line up for every show. This was the only entertainment they could find, and they were loyal. They did not even mind the way the old priest cut parts out of the film. They did not seem to care a great deal what kinds of film they were to see, so long as there was a film to be seen. When Alfredo manage to project a film out of the window onto a large building and so makes the entire community into a theater, this becomes a visual metaphor for the hold film has over the people and for the way in which the people immerse themselves in the world of film every time they go to the theater. In the new world, they are instead liked to the world by their television set. They do not share an experience in the same way they did when they went to the theater and sat together in the dark. While the manager states the change in a matter of fact manner, the film clearly gives the sense of something vital having been lost.