Film: La Terra Trema
Director: Luchino Visconti
Country: Italy
Released: September 1948
Runtime: 165 minutes
Genre: Neorealism
Studio: Universalia
Influenced: Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci
Luchino Visconti left Italy for France in the 1930s, where he ended up working as an assistant to Jean Renoir, including his critically-acclaimed 1936 film Une Partie de Campagne, and became a communist (in part a reaction to his privileged upbringing). The films of Renoir, Eisenstein and King Vidor were all influences on the genre of Italian neorealism that emerged after WWII and had a lasting impact on global cinema. Visconti was a pioneer of the genre with his 1943 movie Ossessione and this film, La Terra Trema (The Earth Shakes), set in a fishing village in Sicily.
As the opening prologue titles say, La Terra Trema's story is one that has been repeated in every country throughout the ages, essentially the theme of how "uomini sfruttano altri uomini" (people exploit other people). Setting out elements of his neorealist philosophy in the opening titles, Visconti points to the story's naturalist setting, among the houses, streets and boats of Acitrezza, and emphasises the use of non-professional actors from the village. Neorealism sought
a more democratic spirit, telling stories of the lives of ordinary
people with little or no moralising, and often in regional dialects (La Terra Trema had to be screened with subtitles in Italian regions outside Sicily).
Let's be honest – watching this film is no walk in the park. I studied it at university as part of my Italian film module, but even with added context and appreciation for the director's aims, it was still no easy task to sit through its nearly 3 hour runtime. Pauline Kael called it the "best boring movie ever made". Its structure is perfect symmetrical with a prologue, three acts and then an epilogue, and the setting is highly immersive. We see the fishermen shouting and arguing while repairing the nets and selling the fish. "Dodici ore di fatica nelle osse" (12 hours of exhaustion in the bones) says a fisherman as he returns home. It's a tough life. But there are moments of beauty too. There's an incredible scene of men fishing at night with lamps to attract their catch, while one of the men sings in a plaintive voice. And moments of light relief too, like when the little boy says "count on me too!" and makes all the men on the boat laugh.
Visconti's solemn script, based on Giovanni Verga's classic novel I Malavoglia, sometimes uses biblical language, like when the main agitator among the fisherman, eldest son of the Valastro family 'Ntoni, protests at the low prices offered by the wholesalers for his catch, calling them "Judas' scales" before throwing them into the sea. The fishermen are jailed but quickly released as the wholesalers realise it's in their interest to have the poor villagers out fishing. The Valastros break from the norm and mortgage their house to pay for their own boat (allowing them to own the means of production, in the language of Marx) and after the initial sense of joy and celebration, the second act portrays the difficulties and costs the fisherman face when in charge of their own business.
The third act shows how this stress starts to corrode the bonds that tie the family together, and everything starts to fall apart. It's an interesting directorial choice by Visconti to have an old man loudly singing a song near the end of the film while Mara talks with her boyfriend about their prospects of ever marrying. That intrusion and the way the film is constantly stuck in the same setting hints at the sense of oppression that women like Mara would have felt at the time. In the epilogue, 'Ntoni and his family are cruelly mocked for having to return to the wholesalers for work, with their tail between their legs. The last bit of narration in the film again references the "mare amaro" (bitter sea), the source of both the fishermen's livelihood and pain, as Visconti's epic vision of the forever exploited poor draws to a close.
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