06/14/2002 Entry:
"My Voyage To Italy - Martin Scorcese (1999)"

I actually only caught a piece of this on Turner Classic Movies, I'll probably see the whole thing when it reruns later this month. I did have a comment about what I saw though. I seen Scorcese's previous historical documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, and I found it to be really interesting and insightful, as well as introducing me to a wide variety of work I wasn't familiar with. Personal Journey was divided up into segments, for instance Mavericks, with short discussions of the work of several directors interspersed with clips. It was a great way to introduce a lot of material in a short amount of time, leaving the viewer to further investigate whatever they liked. However in the 30-45 minute portion of My Voyage To Italy I saw, Scorcese only discussed two movies, and both were by the same director (Bicycle Thief and Umberto D, both by Vittorio De Sica.) Of those two films, he showed long extended clips from each, tracing each film from beginning to end.

I had seen Bicycle Thief, and so in that sense it was kind of nice to have a revisitation. However having never seen Umberto D (I missed its one week run at Music Box a couple months ago) I was disappointed to have the film basically laid out for me in pieces. In a way it makes me not want to watch the rest of the documentary, since I'm worried about having other movies spoiled in bits. I try depserately to go into movies with as clean a slate as possible. I avoid reviews, trailers, interviews - basically almost anything I can before going in. Generally I will read maybe the capsule reviews in The Onion and The Reader, then skim the beginning and end of other pieces to avoid the plot which is generally discussed in the middle. Sometimes that doesn't even work, for instance I recently accidentally learned about the extended darkness scene in ABC Africa, which I would have vastly preferred to leave as a surprise.

So anyways, this revelation of Umberto D was disappointing to me. Having said that, I will add that the scenes I saw from the film were so moving and affecting that they have stayed with me and haunted me for days, raising my interest level in the film to a new level. So who knows, I would have seen the movie anyways and would rather have been surprised by my reaction to it, but this documentary has now caused me to seek it out somehow - hopefully we'll get a nice DVD from the recent reissue. Does that make My Voyage To Italy good or bad? I would have preferred the format he used in Personal Journey, but its hard to deny that the piece of this I saw generated real interest in me to seek out the films being shown - which is really the intent of a documentary like this. So while it was successful, I would have rather seen it done differently.

Replies: 1 Comment

I need to find the time to watch my tape of this. Hopefully my wife will let me at some point. Posted by Scott @ 06/15/2002 03:11 AM CST