Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin's My Dad is 100 Years Old screened last night, and I attended harboring the hope of exchanging 'sorry''s with some fellow Canadians in line. Instead I fell instantly in love with an Italian woman in front of me, who spent her downtime ruthlessly highlighting an enormous book called La Guerra Fredda.
She was no doubt more interested in the new print of Roberto Rossellini's rarely screened film The Flowers of St. Francis, which was to be shown right after the Maddin short. It was a twin-set of sorts, in that My Dad is 100 Years Old is essentially Isabella Rossellini's tribute to her late dad, who would be turning 100 on May 8th. Maddin directed Rossellini in 2003's The Saddest Music in the World, but for this effort Isabella actually wrote the script, which has her playing the parts of Charlie Chaplin, David O. Selznick, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, her mother--Ingrid Bergman--and herself. Her father is played by a fearsome, rippling male torso, the big belly she remembers scaling as a child.
The directors engage in a spirited, whimsical debate about Roberto Rossellini's filmmaking legacy, with Isabella moderating and the giant belly bumping off all comers. Maddin took the stage before the screening and noted that the film was inspired by Rossellini's concern that her father's films were being forgotten, and he admitted that though a purist like Roberto Rossellini may have dismissed his experimental aesthetic as pretentious and artsy, the two filmmakers actually had a lot in common, including dismal budgets and a lack of concern about "process."
Rossellini was an intensely political filmmaker in both style and substance. Indeed, there are a group of films from early in his career that he almost never talked about because they were clearly part of Italy's WWII fascist propaganda machine. What followed this period are perhaps Rossellini's best-known films, the so-called "War Trilogy": Rome, Open City, Paisan, and Germany, Year Zero. These films, particularly 1945's Rome, Open City, are credited with ushering in film's Neorealism movement, which insisted on a context of the real, rejecting the high artifice that characterized most of the films being produced not just in Italy but around the world. Using non-actors, handheld cameras, natural light and the setting of a devasted Rome, just months after the war's end, Rossellini suggested film's potential for realistic storytelling and unflinching social commentary. Neorealism's techniques have been adopted and adapted over and over by movements like Cinema Verite, Dogma 95, and of course reality television, where their aesthetic shorthand for authenticity gets whacked all out of hand.
Guy Maddin couldn't be further removed from the tenets of Italian Neorealism, but he does like his black and white, and he assembled Rossellini's tender tribute with a relative minimum of fussery, his trademark humor and referential film geek touches intact. Rossellini decides that her father's films are about "the need to know," championing the power of film to transform and lamenting the fact that "after 100 years of filmmaking, ignorance has not been defeated." There's hope, of course, as many of the Tribeca offerings demonstrate: film is still young, and so is the century.