Saturday, January 23, 2010
Hands Over The City
Hands Over The City is a 1963 film directed by by Francesco Rosi that was reissued on DVD by Criterion a few years ago. It features Rod Steiger as a corrupt city commissioner who is engaged in shady real estate development. This movie was a great surprise to me and feels very contemporaneous in this era of economic gulch that the greed of wall street has incurred on us all. Stylistically, it has the same kind of post-neo realist feel of fifties or sixties Visconti or Antonioni, and reminds me much of another one of my favorites, Bertolucci's Before the Revolution.
But more than a stylistic resemblance and the early sixties zeitgeist of those films, Hands Over The City is worthy to sit on the same bookshelf or festival program with Pontecorvo's Battle Of Algiers or Z by Costa Gavras. This is a bleak look at corruption and those who perpetrate it, but as critic Stuart Klawans points out it is quite an exhilarating piece of film making as well.
Rossi is brilliant in how he tells his tale. There is a prologue where we see the developers scheme and put themselves above city codes to create a scheme where profits are likely to be astronomical. A montage of contemporary urban landscape of Naples accompanies the title and then we see documentary-like sequence of a building collapse in a lower class neighborhood that is unflinching in its approach.
I'm fascinated like probably many Americans are in European politics with their multiple parties and coalition deal making. A book I'm reading now about Konrad Andenhauer, maybe the most important 20th century figure in German politics is filled with machinations and wheeling dealing. The city council in Hands felt a bit similar to postwar Cologne.
According to Klawans' essay for Criterion, Rossi actually featured the real city council of Naples., "playing themselves, in their own chamber, lift up their arms in protest to cry, "Our hands are clean!"—a bit of acting that they must have performed twice, so that Rosi could film it in long shot from the front, and then cut to a closer, more emphatic view from behind."
The way Rosi handles transitions and set ups in scenes in this film contributes to it having a unique documentary like style. He'll take his time to show context. We are shown a minute of a physician /city council member making his rounds with his pediatric patients before a direct connection occurs with the story.
I almost feel like a new term needs to be made up to describe this film, Battle for Algiers and some others. Docudrama doesn't feel right for it at all. Maybe something more like "realistic fusion" or Trusion, perhaps? Whatever it is. The good news is that there are a number of other Rosi films available on DVD that I look forward to investigating as well.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:42 PM
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