L'amore in Citta [DVD]

Alberto Moravia, in a 1986 interview to a French magazine, said something like " Civilization is male. The man is perfectly integrated. The woman is historically marginal. Women have one foot in the society and one foot out. Even today, in Italy, women are only semi-integrated."

Women trying to survive in an oppressive, male dominated world. This is what most of the short films in the 1953's "L'Amore in Citta" are about. The title might lead people to think that the stories are about love...

They are not. They are mainly about pain, poverty, desperation.

The film consists of six short dramatised documentaries. The actresses are not professional and they played themselves. The first story is about
prostitution, the second one is about suicide...The third story is a light one, about ballroom dance. The fourth story is about marriage agencies and the next story is about a woman ( played by herself ) who
walks in the streets with her little son, without money to feed the child...The last story is very different from the other ones: It is a sequence of beautiful women walking in the streets and men looking at the women or even
following them in the streets.

The quality of the black and white images is poor but watchable. I don't think it is a matter of restoration. It is just that they used poor quality film stock to shoot the stories. We are talking about Italy in the early 50s, still emerging from the devastation of the war.

But, in this case, it doesn't really matter because the stories are strong and show a world that most people don't really know about.

The dvd is more than worth having but don't expect love stories or beautiful colour photography. What you will see is dramatic, many times intense, washed out film showing how things could be difficult things for women because of love or the lack of a piece of bread...

The film captures aspects of 1950s excellent. It's a true time travel! If you like Fellini's works you won't be disappointed in this film.

Long missing link in the Fellini and Antonioni canon. Fellini's "Matrimonial Agency" is in the neo-realistic style but has some very surreal moments. The news reporter set up would be further developed a few years later in "La Dolce Vita."