‘La Terra Trema’ or — Visconti Fiddles About With The Locals?
Believe it or not but I tend not to masturbate during movies. Firstly, it makes the cinema staff uncomfortable but mostly it’s because I don’t watch films for erotic stimulation. No matter how sexually charged a movie might be I view any thrill on screen as part of the sensation of the cinematic experience and that’s, for me, completely separate from physical arousal. I’m hopefully too caught up in the movie to be contemplating auto-eroticism.
Apart from last night when Visconti’s ‘La Terra Trema’ (1948) almost made me cave big-time and start vigorously pleasuring myself not because of any sexually potent imagery on screen (there’s none, unless watching Sicilian fishermen salt anchovies is your thing) but purely out of sheer and utter boredom (sometimes the greatest aphrodisiac is unmitigated tedium). Fortunately, like the Italian partisans, I resisted (there’s no way I was going to pleasure myself during a film called ‘The Earth Trembles’ as the pathetic irony would be too much to bear) but only just because trust me, ‘La Terra Trema’ is tough going and I offer up this personal and revolting piece of information, gentle reader, simply as a warning that this movie might also drive you to various forms of disgusting distraction simply to get through it.
After the war Italy’s Communist party gave Luchino ‘The Red Duke’ Visconti some money to make a propaganda film based on Giovanni Verga’s 1881 novel ‘The House By The Medlar Tree’. It would be a docu-fiction shot in Aci Trezza, a small Sicilian fishing town, and working to strict neorealist principles there would be no professional actors or custom-made sets. The locals would, in effect, play themselves, speak their own dialect and go fishing. Visconti would capture all this natural behaviour and bring the struggle of the poor to the masses.
The story focuses on the Valestros family and their young son ‘Ntoni’s attempts to bypass the exploitative wholesalers, who pay bare minimum for the fishermen’s catches, and form a fishing collective. When no one joins him ‘Notoni convinces his family to go it alone by mortgaging their house so they can buy their own boat and salt their own fish, thus giving them complete independence from the system. But when their boat is irreparably damaged during a storm it leaves the Valestros with no form of income and the inevitability of losing their home. The other islanders refuse to help. This is the price for challenging the social order.
So everything points towards a slice of realism with genuine locals caught on camera going about their (albeit highly contrived and pre-planned) business. So why does it feel like Visconti’s attempting to make an opera and turn an entire town into his own personal theatrical stage? And why does it feel so clunky? You’d almost think these impoverished, isolated fishermen had no professional acting experience at all!
It could be the neorealist approach of using non-professionals as actors that’s an issue. The locals were told the story and then asked how they would respond to such events. Their responses were then incorporated into the script itself meaning there was almost no improvising. They were then placed and framed with incredible precision until Visconti achieved the effect he desired. The problem is all this fiddling about with amateurs is screamingly obvious to observe resulting in a film that feels less directed and more obsessively micromanaged which simply emphasizes the artificiality of it all. This is compounded by Visconti’s camera moves which are so technically slick and impressive that they destroy any “realism” he might have been going for meaning the entire film could’ve been shot in CGI and it wouldn’t have made much difference to the authenticity they were trying to achieve.
So it feels as though Visconti is forcing his own vision onto a people almost as though he is fighting reality than trying to capture it. Contrast ‘La Terra Trema’ with F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty’s ‘Tabu: A Story of The South Seas’ (1931), again a tale set on an island utilising the local people as the actors, to see the distinction. The difference is that Flaherty and Murnau step back and allow the island and its people to lead events resulting in a film where everything feels integrated, where the story emanates organically (or, at least, appears to) from what is being witnessed. Watching ‘La Terra Trema’ you can almost hear Visconti grunting as he wrestles an unmoldable reality to his design and wondering why the clay is spraying everywhere.
What’s most interesting about ‘La Terra Trema’ are its assistant directors who were Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, the two of them almost representing opposing aspects of Visconti himself — Rosi the realist; Zeffirelli for the theatrical. Indeed, it would be Rosi who would take up the realist approach with his own films but with greater effect and dynamism, as well as knowing exactly how, and when, to use non-professional actors and as Visconti’s films started becoming vacuums of emotional suffocation so Rosi’s felt like hand grenades in mid-explosion.
‘La Terra Trema’ is a deeply frustrating film and not just because of the anchovies, poverty and almost three hour run-time. It’s also because scattered throughout the tedium are moments are startling brilliance. The black and white cinematography is often simply stunning, especially the shot of the women on the bluffs waiting for the men to return from the sea. It’s almost Dreyer-esque. And then, most annoyingly of all, forty minutes before the end ‘La Terra Trema’ suddenly gets really good! After two hours of trudging through this dreary morass everything picks up, although I think this could be more the realisation and the relief that the film is almost over than anything else.
Apparently the Communists weren’t too happy with the finished product, possibly because Visconti had given them a fatalistic poetic opera of the poor rather than some propaganda that could help win elections. Francesco Rosi would stay in the South, making the more interesting films whilst Visconti would be gradually draw Northwards by the strains of Mahler and opulent curtains.
‘La Terra Trema’ is a slog but it’s also an undeniably important moment in Italian neorealist cinema… as well as, potentially, a three wank movie.
