Emma Bunton: 3rd Nursing Essay

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 62nd

Academy Awards, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso is much more than a film

about films intertwining sentimentality with comedy, and nostalgia with pragmatism,

Cinema Paradiso is the love letter every cinephile wishes they could write about their

one and only true love – motion pictures – and read over and over again. It’s Tornatore’s

unconventional screenplay and directing style that tug at our emotions from beginning to

end. “To highlight Tornatore’s nostalgia for the central role films once played in Italian

popular culture, as well as his protagonist’s nostalgia for his lost innocence as a young

apprentice to Alfredo, most of the film unfolds as a series of flashbacks that begin when

Salvatore receives a call in Rome from his mother in Sicily to inform him of Alfredo’s

death. ” Through these series of flashbacks Tornatore invites us and begins to show us 1

that this great sense of nostalgia that Salvatore starts to experience from his bed in Rome

after he’s learned of Alfredo’s passing, who was like a father figure to him, was also

experienced (for different reasons) and shared by many of the characters whose love for

cinema brought them together 566 miles away, in his home village Giancaldo, in Sicily. It

is this notion of nostalgia that pulls us the viewers in deeper and deeper into Giancaldo

like quicksand; this is what I will focus on.

Tornatore brilliantly begins this trip down memory lane for the viewers right

where he’s about to pull them in, present day Giancaldo. A beautiful shot of the ocean

“Masters of Neorealism,” by Peter Bondanella, 2009, A History of Italian Cinema, p. 539. Copyright 1 2009 by Peter Bondanella

zooms out to establish the distance that separates Salvatore from Giancaldo, figuratively,

from these memories he’s about to relive, and literally, from his family. The shot is pulled

in through a window into what appears to be his mother’s kitchen where she is seating

with her daughter, Salvatore’s sister. This is the moment that the phone call is placed,

here the sister tells their mom that there’s no use in trying to reach him since he won’t

remember (in the subsequent scenes we find out he hasn’t been to Giancaldo in 30 years

– a fact that adds a greater sense of emotion to Salvatore’s reminiscing). To which she

tells her daughter that he’ll remember, that she knows him better than she does. That if he

finds out later that they didn’t inform him he’ll become upset. On our first glimpse into

the past we meet a young Salvatore as an altar boy, on his knees, falling asleep during

mass. The priest, Father Adelfio, happens to be the cinema’s censurer. Here we make our

first connection to cinema in Giancaldo, and cinema with Salvatore. After mass Father

Adelfio makes his way to the cinema to censor yet another film. Even though he was told

he couldn’t come along Salvatore follows the priest into the theater. Here, Tornatore sets

up another beautiful sequence where he zooms into Salvatore as he peeks in through a set

of curtains to watch the film that the priest is about to censor, which happens to be titled

Verso La Vita, in English, Towards Life. Tornatore is subliminally informing the viewer

that we’re now headed towards all that encompasses life in Giancaldo, and that this

begins with cinema. As the film progresses we learn about the nostalgia that others in

Giancaldo experience. Salvatore’s mother, Maria, for example is still hopeful that her

husband, the children’s father, will one day soon return from the war. We know some

time has transpired since the ending of the war the moment Salvatore asks her at the

dinner table one night that if the war is over why hasn’t his father returned? To which she

replies, that he’ll return one of these days. Salvatore says he doesn’t remember him, and

asks about the location of Russia (perhaps where his father was posted). She tells him it

takes years to get there and years to return (here Tornatore uses the distance between

moments in characters and life not through imagery as the zoom out shot from the ocean

but through dialogue). And often he builds on these moments by cutting to scenes from

the older films shown at the cinema to enhance the overall emotion. Right after Salvatore

has the conversation about his father with his mother at the table Tornatore cuts to a John

Wayne scene in the cinema where a male character asks a female character to wait for

him at the ranch, to which she replies, “Wait for a dead man?”

The further along into Giancaldo the deeper Tornatore taps into our emotions

through the rest of the characters. We feel for Alfredo once we learn he’s been a

projectionist since the age of 10 and that he never got to finish grammar school. We get to

comprehend why it is that he makes the decisions that he does that alter Salvatore’s life

into becoming a successful director. We feel for Maria and the children when Salvatore

comes across the news flash added to one of the films where he finds out about the

happenings of the military men in Russia; which leads us to finding out that her partner,

their father, has passed. But it is in Ciccio from Naples, the character that wins the lottery

and his decision to return to the village even though he could’ve returned to Naples or

gone to live elsewhere that we come to grasp Tornatore’s raw sentiment of homesickness;

of yearning to return to a place or someone that made us feel alive at one or many points

in our lives. It’s safe to assume that like his characters Tornatore too may have had places

and people which he may have yearned for, but nothing made most of them and him more

alive than the films that got them all through life in Sicily.

Bibliography

Cinema Paradiso Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, 17 Nov. 1988

Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. New York, Bloomsbury Academic,

2014.

Ebert, Roger. “Cinema Paradiso Movie Review & Film Summary (1990) | Roger Ebert.” Www.Rogerebert.Com, 16 Mar. 1990, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/cinema- paradiso-1990.

Bradshaw, Peter. “Cinema Paradiso – Review | Peter Bradshaw.” The Guardian, 12 Dec. 2013, www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/12/cinema-paradiso-review.

Canby, Vincent. “Review/Film; ‘Cinema Paradiso,’ Memories of Movies in a Movie.” The New York Times, 2 Feb. 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/02/02/movies/ review-film-cinema-paradiso-memories-of-movies-in-a-movie.html.