About
"The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"
For the first time in twenty-five years, Vittorio De Sica's 1971 masterpiece, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, returns to the screen with a newly restored print and a Dolby Stereo mix.
One of the most acclaimed films of all time, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, was nominated for Best Screenplay, and was further honored with 26 international awards, including the Golden Bear at
the Berlin International Film Festival, and the David di Donatello Award, Italy's equivalent to the Oscar.
Beautifully photographed in dream-like pastels, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis tells the story of a rich, aristocratic family of Italian Jews who cloistered themselves on their large estate, ignoring the growing peril of Fascist anti-semitism. Director Vittorio De Sica based his film on the widely-translated, semi-autobiographical novel by Giorgio Bassani, one of Italy's most prominent contemporary poets and writers. For years De Sica, who had lived through the rise of Fascism in Rome, had hoped to make a film about the period. "I wasn't a Fascist," he said, "but I belong to a country that collaborated with Hitler. I wanted, out of conscience, to make this film."
When Bassani's book was first published in 1962, De Sica read the story and knew he wanted to adapt it for the screen, but it took close to a decade to realize the project. Said De Sica, "I had to read four horrible screenplays before I found the one we could use." The final version was co-written by De Sica's long-time collaborator Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio Bonicelli, Ugo Pirro, and Giorgio Bassani.
The next problem was financing, and on this front De Sica faced two problems. His early films such as "Shoeshine" and "The Bicycle Thief" had placed him at the forefront of the groundbreaking neorealist film movement in Italy, and into the pantheon of the world's greatest directors. However, De Sica's output during the late 1960s was predominantly light, commercial fare. It was assumed that the master had lost his touch. Furthermore, the subject matter -- a poetic story about Jews and Fascism -- did not bring investors flocking.
The man who brought it all together for De Sica was Arthur Cohn, the renowned Swiss producer/financier. Cohn not only raised the money, but gave De Sica carte blanche to make the film.
For the director, making the movie represented an important victory -- what he called "artistic vengeance." Part of De Sica's fall from glory came from an inability to raise money for projects he wanted to make. In a 1972 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, he said, "I made too many films that depended on the will of American financiers. I became dependent on producers who wanted me to make films I won't say I didn't believe in, but that I would rather not have made." Things came to a head during production of the 1970 film "Sunflower." Italian producer Carlo Ponti -- husband of the film's leading lady, Sophia Loren -- insisted that De Sica change the ending of the film to cast Loren's character in a better light. Recounted De Sica, "My
experience with this film was so terrible that I decided to rebel, and my rebellion is The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. I wanted to make a true De Sica film, made just as I wanted it."
With its aristocratic characters and lush pastel cinematography, the film bears little stylistic resemblance to De Sica's early neorealism. But, in the words of one critic, "in its interplay of social forces and individual fates, and especially in its emotional warmth, it is faithful to the crucial aspects of his artistic vision."
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was filmed in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, the setting of the novel. As one of the founders of neorealism -- a style that De Sica once described as "reality through poetry, reality transfigured" -- the director insisted on authentic locations. Creating the period look for the film took eight months of preparation. De Sica also returned to the use of non-professional actors, a practice he had innovated in his earliest films. Only five of the main characters -- Dominique Sanda, Lino
Capolicchio, Helmut Berger, Fabio Testi and Romolo Valli -- were working actors. Others roles
were cast with people pulled from the local community. Members of the Finzi-Contini family were played by aristocrats recruited in the city of Turin.
In casting the French actress Dominique Sanda and the German actor Helmut Berger in the lead roles, De Sica broke an important cinematic rule. In his own words, "I stoutly maintain that a good film must reflect the country of its origin. A French film must be truly French, a Yugoslav film truly Slavic, etc." Nonetheless, he explained, "I needed someone foreign for the heroine, Micol, because she is a difficult, ambiguous personality with an unstated incestuous love of her brother. I couldn't find among my Italians anyone with the face she needed. But Dominique Sanda is marvelous, with her hard, cold face." Sanda, who was under twenty years old when she made the film, had already gained attention for her performance in Bernardo Bertolucci's classic "The Conformist." Her role in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis catapulted her to international stardom. The U.S. press went crazy for her, and she was featured in magazines ranging from Vogue to Playboy.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis returned De Sica to his former stature, and went on to become a worldwide success. The film also brought producer Arthur Cohn the second of his five Oscars. This was no easy accomplishment. Nine international distributors dismissed The Garden of the Finzi-Continis as a "small, ethnic film." But after a wildly positive reception both at its world premiere in Jerusalem, and at a film festival in Hong Kong, and the film's subsequent capture of the Golden Bear in Berlin, a following began to grow. The film opened at the Plaza Theater in New York on December 17, 1971, and generated such strong word-of-mouth that it remained on screen for 14 weeks. It played across the United States for over a year. After its Los Angeles premiere, the American Film Institute championed the film, and lobbied for its Academy Award nomination. Says Cohn, "The Oscar for Best Foreign Film finally launched the film internationally, and was the catalyst for its eventual recognition as one of the great films of all time."
Audiences around the world responded to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Cohn attributes this to De Sica's genius in creating a film about the Holocaust that "does not show people in black and white. Every character in the film -- and most notably Micol -- has a positive and negative side. It allows viewers to identify with the protagonists, and truly get involved with their fate, rather than just seeing them as victims."
The producer recently explained that he decided to produce The Garden of the Finzi-Continis because "I felt strongly that such a very subtle and often poetic film -- quite in contrast to the hundreds of other films which had been made on the Holocaust --
could interest and move a very, very large audience and confront them with what happened in the Second World War. The main aim of the film has always been that we are not allowed to forget what happened so that we are not cursed to live through it again." Ironically, the message of the film is even more resounding and timely today than in 1971.
The English translation of George Bassani's novel, "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,"
is published by Harcourt Brace & Company.
Last Modified 24-October-1996
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