Correspondents' Correspondence Wertmuller at Home
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
Correspondents Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Wertmuller at Home Rome—Italian movie director Lina...
...reception...
...Perhaps the posthumous assessment of Visconti's stature will have a sobering efect on the over-emotional critics on both sides of the Atlantic.—Silvio F. Senigallia...
...On the other hand, Wertmuller's analysis of why her films have become such hits in the United States seems confused and confusing...
...She said that to compare her to Michelangelo, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Dante, and Picasso was "sheer folly...
...Others venture the opinon that Socialist Wertmuller's success was advanced by the "Marxist thinking'' of the American movie writers...
...While so doing they were roundly booed by the other delegates, including Jane Fonda...
...In a recent interview in the Rome daily Messagero, she showed both a sense of humor and a sense of proportion...
...Susan Sontag, who obviously does not admire Lina Wertmuller's work, proceeded to suggest that the women delegates write a film scenario showing Wertmuller how reactionary her views really are...
...Wertmuller, who along with Liliana Cavani is one of Italy's corps of two female directors, enjoys a good reputation in her own country...
...She also noted that Dante had a hooked nose, while hers had been corrected by surgery...
...Turtle-neck sweaters and homosexual leanings, Ullman reportedly shouted, do not make a revolutionary movie...
...After the bouquets of New York and the Italian Socialist party, to whose Central Committee she was appointed upon returning home, Wertmuller got a stiff dose of brickbats at a "Cinema and Women" conference held in Belgrade early last month...
...Front page obituaries have reminded the show business world of the unique role the doyen of Italian cinema played for 34 years...
...Some maintain it was just another americanata, another instance of that extravagant American enthusiasm which Europeans greet with a shrug of the shoulders and an ironic smile...
...She does not explain, however, why The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy and Swept Away, films that deal with typically Italian themes and characters and make much use of regional dialects, captured so completely the fancy of American critics and of what she calls "the citizen of the Middle West...
...After reading this nonsense in the New York papers, she recalled, she was so embarrassed that she felt like packing her bags and escaping through the window in the middle of the night...
...According to the weekly Tempo, Miss Ullman accused Italian filmmakers in general, and Wertmuller in particular, of conformism and ideological incompetence...
...One Rome journalist has even referred to a "cyclopic lapsus of America's post-Nixon culture...
...Cavani's and Wertmuller's defense consisted of accusing each other of antifeminism...
...Italian critics may not share the severe opinion of John Francis Lane, the British film reviewer of the Rome Daily American, that she is a mediocrity and an "American invention," yet neither do they feel that Seven Beauties and All Screwed Up are masterpieces...
...In Belgrade, however, she was the target of a scathing attack by Swedish actress Liv Ullman...
...But she is never mentioned in the same breath with Chaplin, Eisenstein or Bergman...
...In fact, the critics here are puzzled by and somewhat sardonic about Wertmuller's overwhelming U.S...
...Wertmuller at Home Rome—Italian movie director Lina Wertmuller is slowly recovering from the shock of her American triumph—savoring the sweet aftertaste of success without letting the hyperbolic praise of the New York critics go to her head...
...For the moment at least, the uproar caused by Wertmuller's American success and Belgrade discomfiture has quieted down, pushed into the background by the death of Luchino Visconti...
...She stresses their emphasis on "dramatic problematics rather than liberating laughter" and her constant concern with "the need to protect the individual from the pressure of the masses," whatever that means...
...She advocates the creation of a government department for the improvement of women's conditions and, in Italian Leftist circles, is considered a standard-bearer of feminism...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 8
