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Bookmark this pageLa Terra Trema (1947)
Director: Luchino Visconti
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Visconti's second feature (five years after Ossessione in 1942) was an improvised drama produced by the Communist Party, filmed with and among Sicilian fishermen in the village of Aci-Trezza. An overwhelmingly stark chronicle of a family which strives but fails to break out of the poverty trap - they try to cut out the middlemen by embarking in what one might call 'free enterprise', with disastrous results - La Terra Trema‚ stands as a masterpiece of neo-realism, a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and means. Yet, despite this, it's no less 'operatic' than the director's later decadent melodramas: it surges with great tides of emotion. The film is distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'. (Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, it may be noted, served as assistant directors.) Visconti only finished the film by selling some of his mother's jewellery and an apartment in Rome. Yet, true to his breeding, he brought home one of the boys from the film and installed him as his butler.Author: TCh
User reviews of this film
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- Michael O'Farrell said...
- Posted on May 10 2009 04:31 To watch La Terra Trema is to bear witness to one of the great films of the 20th century. Filmed in deep focus black and white with a cast of non -professionals , all actual townspeople from the sicilian fishing village where the movie was filmed, director Luchino Visconti casts a wide net over the viewer, immersing one in this epic tale of poverty, greed and the disintegration of a family of fishermen. The cruelty of life is given a powerful portrayal in this lengthy, two and a half hour chronicle that clearly favors the plight of the poor and oppressed fishermen verses the venal wholesalers who are determined to keep the fishermen in their place. La Terra Trema is by turns austere, blunt, operatic and poetic. Visconti's vision of life is all encompassing and for all the misery shown on the screen, incredibly beautiful in its depiction of humanity in all its guises.
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