Friday | June 29, 2018 7:00 pm

Bellissima

Screening on Film

Directed by Luchino Visconti.
With Anna Magnani, Walter Chiari, Tina Apicella.
Italy, 1951, 35mm, black & white, 114 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

The only Visconti movie where a maternal relationship takes center stage, Bellissima is a disenchanting look at the economics of postwar Italian cinema. Anna Magnani stars as a mother willing to pay any price to secure stardom for her five-year-old daughter—in a business where the actor is more of a commodity than a human being. Despite a muted style, the film establishes two concerns that would define its director’s career: the idea of cinema as a fantasy world and the sanitization of history. Set at Cinecittà’s film studios, it would have been difficult for 1950’s audiences to forget how the “cinema city” was founded by Mussolini as a state propaganda machine.