Fotoromanzi Fantasy

“With Paisan, I knew that I wanted to be a film director. I thought maybe this was where my future was, not as a journalist. It was with The White Sheik that I knew I was a film director.” – Federico Fellini (from I, Fellini by Charlotte Chandler)

In The White Sheik (Italian title: Lo Sceicco Bianco, 1952), Fellini’s first solo directorial effort (he co-directed Variety Lights with Alberto Lattuada the previous year) he drew upon his experiences as a journalist and script writer to tell a bittersweet story about a provincial newlywed couple vacationing in Rome for their honeymoon. Wanda (Brunella Bovo), the young bride, is a naive romantic, prone to impulsive behavior and passionate fantasies. She is also an avid fan of fotoromanzi (a comic book with photo captions instead of cartoon drawings) and is secretly infatuated with “The White Sheik,” the hero of her favorite series.

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On the Loose in Amsterdam

The Italian film poster for THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE WINDOW (1961), directed by Luciano Emmer.

The controversial problem of immigration in Italy has been a problem for decades, not just with internal migration of workers from the south to the north, but also with the influx of refugees from Africa and other areas around the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, there have been numerous Italian films to address this situation over the years but only a handful of them have received praise and recognition outside their own country. Among them are Pietro Germi’s Il Cammino della Speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950), in which a group of Sicilian workers try to emigrate illegally to France, I Magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), Francesco Rosi’s drama about an out-of-work Italian miner (Renato Salvatore) in Germany, and Lina Wertmuller’s Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine (All Screwed Up, 1974), which focuses on immigrants from southern Italy trying to find work in Milan. To this short list, I would like to add Luciano Emmer’s rarely seen La Ragazza in Vetrina (The Girl in the Picture Window, 1961), a tale about two immigrant miners in Belgium who enjoy a weekend getaway in Amsterdam.

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