Season
Introduction: The Talented Mr Rota
Nino
Rota’s film scores sympathise with what is on screen, but they do not
invite
identification with it; they are close, very close, to the world of the
film,
but not at one with it. Using extracts from many rarities from Rota’s
enormous
filmography, Richard Dyer examines this unique approach to film music,
which is
matched by the combination of irony and affection, directness and
reticence, in
the music itself.
Wed 1 Sept 17:50 NFT1 Tickets £5
Extended Run: The
Leopard
Il Gattopardo
There
are films so richly realised you can live in them: The Leopard is
one
such – and this new digital restoration, recently premiered in Cannes,
makes the
experience yet more intense... Like a 19th-century novel (say, War
and Peace
or Middlemarch), combining magisterial sweep with density of
detail,
it tells of momentous historical events – here the unification of Italy –
through how those events are lived by representative individuals, in
this case
an ageing aristocrat confronting an on-the-make bourgeoisie. Stately
cinematography and meticulously and gorgeously recreated costumes
capture the
look of Italian painting of the period. Rota’s score sounds like a
19th-century
symphony you happen never to have heard and his dances for the
mesmerising final
ballroom scene seamlessly incorporate one by Verdi. In short, if there
had been
cinema in the 19th century, this is what it would have been like.
Italy
1963 Dir Luchino Visconti With Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain
Delon,
Paolo Stoppa, Serge Reggiani 185min EST Digital PG A BFI release
È primavera Spring Is
Here
A
rare chance to see one of the forgotten films of Italian neo-realism.
Beppe is
young, lively and charming, an incorrigible flirt, barefaced stealer of
his best
friend’s girlfriend, unabashed bigamist, seemingly utterly unaware of
the
impropriety of his behaviour. What are we supposed to think of him?
Rota’s music
(drawing on a big hit song of the day) softens Castellani’s cynicism,
rendering
the portrayal all the more subtly disturbing.
Italy
1949 Dir Renato Castellani With Mario Angelotti, Elena Varzi, Donato
Donati
102min EST
Sat 4 Sept 16:10 NFT2, Tue 7 Sept 20:40 NFT2
Obsession
It
took two foreigners to bring out the quintessential Englishness of this
tale of
a man who imprisons and intends to kill his wife’s lover. Dmytryk’s
acrid
directorial touch blends with Rota’s mischievous score to catch that
Christie /
Hitchcock sense of murder as fun: obsessive nastiness and the macabre
are played
out in a witty script, the presence of Naunton Wayne and the decisive
contribution of a cute and clever dog.
UK
1949 Dir Edward Dmytryk. With Robert Newton, Phil Brown, Sally Gray
96min
PG
Thu 2 Sept 20:40 NFT2, Mon 6 Sept 17.30 NFT3, Sat 11 Sept
20:40
NFT2
Anni facili The Easy
Years
A
brilliantly bitter example of the commedia all’italiana, with
Taranto as
a decent man dragged down by
institutional corruption and family venality. As so often in
this genre,
it’s sometimes hard to realise it is funny, but Rota’s score, deftly
turning one
tune into another, full of pointed references, comic orchestral colours
and
subtle underlining of movements, keeps it just, fascinatingly, from
leaving a
nasty taste in the mouth.
Italy
1953 Dir Luigi Zampa With Nino Taranto, Clelia Matania 98min EST
Sat 4 Sept 18:20 NFT2, Sat 11 Sept 16:10 NFT2
I vitelloni
Fellini’s poignant observation of a group of petit bourgeois,
feckless,
stay-at-home young men in a provincial seaside town, kidding themselves
they’ve
grown out of adolescence, is perfectly matched by Nino Rota’s music, by
turns
melancholy, teasing, occasionally exuberant and at the end searingly
melodramatic. A film pitiless yet sympathetic, warm but unflinching, in
its
revelation of the truth behind the façades of the characters.
Italy
1953 Dir Federico Fellini With Franco Interlenghi, Alberto Sordi,
Leopoldo
Trieste 109min EST PG
Sun 5 Sept 18:20 NFT2, Wed 8 Sept 20:40 NFT1
La strada
A
funny waif (Masina) is sold to an abusive man (Quinn) who does a
strongman act
around provincial Italy; an enigmatic tightrope-walker (Basehart), a
kind of
Holy Fool, gives her a sense of self-worth by teaching her to play one
of Rota’s
loveliest and most popular melodies. Quinn is complex beneath the
surliness,
Basehart enchanting, Masina never more Chaplinesque, all of them touched
by
Rota’s transcendently, sublimely melancholy music.
Italy
1954 Dir Federico Fellini With Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard
Basehart
104min EST PG
Sun 12 Sept 20:45 NFT3, Mon 13 Sept 18:20 NFT1
Il bidone The Swindlers
A
trio of petty thieves dress up as priests to con peasants out of their
treasures. Here Fellini’s lively eye for the grotesque and strange
within the
mundane is shot through with an uncharacteristic gritty, cynical
bleakness.
Rota’s music helps the film start out perky and cheery, and then, via a
magnificently infernal party sequence, underlines the way it gradually
runs down
to a stunning finale of despair.
Italy-France 1955 Dir Federico Fellini With Broderick Crawford,
Giulietta
Masina 114min EST 12A
Tue 14 Sept 20:40 NFT2, Fri 17 Sept 18:10 NFT3
Amici per la pelle Friends for
Life
An
astonishingly tender love story between two schoolboys calls forth from
Rota a
more than usually heartfelt score. Drawing delicately on the conventions
of
sentimentality, Rota’s music creates a warmth and glow in the scenes of
affection between the boys that is matched by lighting and performances,
with a
rush of poignancy when they quarrel or when it looks as if one of them
must
leave town
Italy
1955 Dir Franco Rossi With Geronimo Meynier, Andrea Scire, Luigi Tosi
90min
EST
Sat 18 Sept 16:10 NFT2, Wed 22 Sept 18:10 NFT3
Nights
of
Cabiria Le notti di Cabiria
Masina won awards at both Cannes and the Oscars for this, her
finest,
performance as the eternally hopeful, life-loving prostitute Cabiria,
untouched
by cynicism about life and men, no matter how much evidence she
encounters to
the contrary. Her capacity to respond whole-heartedly to music saves
her, be it
a tawdry mambo or a hackneyed Neapolitan love song, all made delightful
in
Rota’s hands.
Italy-France 1956 Dir
Federico
Fellini With Giulietta Masina, François Périer 117min EST PG
Fri 17 Sept 20:40
NFT3, Sun 19
Sept 20:40 NFT1
White Nights Le notti
bianche
Rota’s work with Visconti constitutes a fascinating exploration
of the
possibilities of melodrama. Here the slightest of stories – fey Schell
weeping
over her absent lover on nice, bemused Mastroianni’s shoulder – is given
ambiguously disturbing and tragic overtones by Rota’s strange, and
strangely
intrusive, music. 1940s diva Clara Calamai as a menacing prostitute, a
magical
snowfall and a surprising resolution all add to the film’s astonishing
texture.
Italy-France 1957 Dir Luchino Visconti With Maria Schell,
Marcello
Mastroianni 105min EST
Sat 18 Sept 18:10 NFT1, Wed 22 Sept 20:45 NFT2
Plein soleil Purple Noon
The
first screen outing for Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, with coldly,
narcissistically beautiful Delon perfect for the part. The films opens
with very
loud and dramatic thriller music, but then, having got that generic
expectation
out of the way, settles down to peaceable, implacable, drifting-along
music, as
if no more able to be troubled by Ripley, his deceptions and murders,
and his
fate, than he is himself.
France-Italy 1959 Dir René Clément With Alain Delon, Marie
Laforêt,
Maurice Ronet 119min EST PG
Thu 16 Sept 18:15 NFT2, Mon 27 Sept 20:40 NFT2
Rocco and His Brothers Rocco e i
suoi
fratelli
The
story of a Southern family’s adjustment to life in Milan encapsulates
the huge
migration from South to North in the period and the even greater
historical
movement from rural feudalism to industrial capitalism. Sprawling in its
epic
scope and melodramatic impulses, Rota’s use of musical motifs helps to
clarify
characters and events while also making suggestive emotional connections
between
them.
Italy-France 1960 Dir Luchino Visconti With Alain Delon, Renato
Salvatori, 180min EST 15
Sun 19 Sept 15:00 NFT1, Sat 25 Sept 14:50 NFT2
La Dolce Vita
La
Dolce Vita would be a documentary if it weren’t so extravagant.
Everyone in
it really was someone about the Roman scene, and the situations and
locations
are spot-on as representative of their time. Rota’s score blends hits of
the day
with allusions to Respighi’s Roman music and Brecht / Weill’s ‘Mack the
Knife’
to create a mesmerising score that evokes the soporific and enervated
without
ever itself becoming them.
Italy-France 1960 Dir Federico Fellini With Marcello
Mastroianni, Anouk
Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Anita Ekberg, Alain Cuny 176min EST 15
Mon 20 Sept 19:50 NFT1, Sat 25 Sept 19:40 NFT1
8½ Otto e mezzo
A
film director who looks like Fellini tries to make a film but can’t,
except that
here is the result, Fellini’s roughly eighth-and-a half film (and Rota’s
seventh-and-a-quarter collaboration with him). Light classics and
popular songs
blend with Rota’s circus-based themes, the metaphorical circus of
life
becoming an actual circus in the final wonderful moments of the
film. A
film pretentious to talk about, intoxicating to see and hear.
Italy
1963 Dir Federico Fellini With Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale,
Anouk
Aimée, Barbara Steele 138min EST 15
Sat 18 Sept 20:20 NFT1, Sun 26 Sept 20:20 NFT1
The Taming of the Shrew
Lustrous as an oil painting, with gorgeously extravagant
costumes;
Burton’s Petruchio is unbeatably virile, Michael Hordern was never
funnier nor
Michael York ever lovelier; Rota’s score riffs on Renaissance music and
is so
catchy that even Petruchio and his groom find themselves singing along
to it.
None of this quite mitigates the misogyny of the play, which neither
Zeffi relli
nor, alas, Elizabeth
Taylor, seem to eschew.
Italy–USA 1966 Dir Franco Zeffirelli With Elizabeth Taylor,
Richard
Burton 122min U
Sat 18 Sept 15:50 NFT3, Fri 24 Sept 18:00 NFT3
The Godfather Part II
The
achievement of Coppola’s first Godfather films was to convey the
feelings
of family loyalty and male bonding in all their irresistibility while
also
indicating the historical roots of those feelings and their potentially
appalling consequences. Coppola fought for Rota as composer, someone
able to
capture the intensity and insinuation of yearning even while signalling
its
cultural construction, to reveal the love gone wrong at the heart of
violence.
USA
1974 Dir Francis Ford Coppola With Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Diane
Keaton
200min
Thu 23 Sept 19:00 NFT3, Wed 29 Sept 19:00 NFT1
Amarcord
Never
were Fellini and Rota so dreamy, easy, charming, funny, sweet and sad as
here,
nor as allusive, elusive, complex and sophisticated. Examined, these
memories of
small-town provincial life in the 1930s are an object lesson in the
deconstruction of the reliability of memory and the stability of the
self. Yet
it sails by, sublime, all the cleverness of art cinema without the pain
or
strain.
Italy-France 1973 Dir Federico Fellini With Puppela Maggio,
Magali Noel
123min EST 15
Sun 26 Sept 15:50 NFT2, Thu 30 Sept 20:30 NFT1
With thanks to CSC-Cineteca Nazionale in Rome for their help
with this
season. Richard Dyer’s book Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling is
published by
BFI / Palgrave Macmillan on 10 September
A new
digital restoration of The Leopard (Il
Gattopardo) is released to selected cinemas nationwide by the BFI on
27
August. The Leopard was restored in association with Cineteca di
Bologna, L'Immagine Ritrovata, The Film Foundation, Pathé, Fondation
Jérôme
Seydoux-Pathé, Twentieth Century Fox and Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale. Restoration funding provided by Gucci
and The
Film Foundation. Digital Picture Restoration, Colorworks. Sound
laboratory
services, L'Immagine Ritrovata. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese,
Titanus and
Giuseppe Rotunno.
Booking information The
BFI Southbank is open to all. BFI members are entitled to a discount on
all
tickets. BFI Southbank Box Office tel: 020 7928 3232. Unless otherwise
stated
tickets are £9.00, concs £6.65 Members pay £1.40 less on any ticket.
Website www.bfi.org.uk/southbank
Tickets for ALL FREE
screenings
and events but must be booked in advance by calling the Box Office to
avoid
disappointment
The BFI Filmstore is stocked and staffed by BFI experts
with over
1,200 book titles and 1,000 DVDs to choose from, including hundreds of
acclaimed
books and DVDs produced by the BFI.
The benugo bar &
kitchen
Eat,
drink and be merry in panoramic daylight. benugo’s décor is
contemporary,
brightly lit and playful with a lounge space, bar and dining area. The
place to
network, hang out, unpack a film, savour the best of Modern British or
sip on a
cocktail.
There’s more to discover about film and television through the
BFI. Our
world-renowned archival collections, cinemas, festivals, films,
publications and
learning resources are here to inspire you.
Nino Rota
is considered one of the greatest composers of all time.
From composing the music for The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) to the scores for The
Taming of the Shrew (1967) and La Dolce Vita
(1960),
BFI Southbank presents a selection of his films throughout the
month of
September as well as a Nationwide Release of the newly restored film The
Leopard Il Gattopardo (1963). Nino
Rota was one of the most successful of all film composers: prolific,
esteemed
and honoured. Best known internationally for his work with Federico
Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Luchino Visconti and Franco
Zeffirelli, he scored around 160 films, in France, Britain, the USA
and
USSR, as well as melodramas, comedies and genre films at the heart of
popular
Italian cinema. Steeped in classical music (he was Director of the Bari
Conservatory of Music for most of his life), he drew also on a vast
range of
popular, traditional, jazz and folk styles for his scores. Producers
sought him
because he was quick and reliable. Directors wanted him because he had
an
ability to adapt himself to their sensibilities: brilliant and elusive
for
Fellini in films such as 8½ Otto e mezzo
(1963), serious and intellectual for films like Visconti’s White
Nights Le notti bianche (1957), witty and
sentimental/nostalgic for Renato Castellani in È primavera
Spring Is Here (1949) and so on.His
music is touching, catchy and affecting, and yet it is also restrained,
uncommitted, every emotion always tinged with another. He is able – and
supremely with Fellini and Coppola – to convey a dizzying complexity of
feeling
and point-of-view with nonchalance, charm and no fuss. His music is full
of
affection and tenderness towards the world of the film, bringing us
close, very
close; and yet it remains ironic, rueful, creating a very particular
place from
which to watch and listen. 
