LA TERRA TREMA Movie Review

Episoda Del Mare
The Earth Will Tremble

Luchino Visconti's portrait of an impoverished family in a Sicilian fishing village is a stately and magnificent achievement. As was the case in other Italian works of the neorealist period, Visconti used a non-professional cast. Yet the film's visual style is a long way from the off-the-cuff look of the Rossellini and De Sica films; Visconti's operatic visual scheme consists of long takes and slow, sweeping, hypnotic camera movements intended to draw the viewer into what is essentially an alien landscape. Visconti went all the way with his realistic approach by having his actors speak in a Sicilian dialect that was unintelligible throughout much of Italy, resulting in the movie being later dubbed into Italian. Further, a narration was added and the movie was extensively cut, effectively demolishing its entire structure. Not surprisingly, the movie was a boxoffice disaster, and wasn't commercially released in the U.S. until more than 20 years after its completion. The director was discouraged enough to abandon movies for a time, but eventually, he was vindicated; the restored, original La Terra Trema can at last be rediscovered as the master-work it is. (It was conceived as part of a trilogy of films: one on the sea, one on the mines, and one on the countryside. As a result of La Terra Trema's commercial failure, only this first part, the subtitle of which is Episode of the Sea, was filmed.)

NEXT STOP … Ossessione, Rocco and His Brothers, Christ Stopped at Eboli

1948 161m/B IT Antonio Pietrangeli; D: Luchino Visconti. VHS FCT