Still, Visconti started as one of the prime movers of Italian neo-realism, and these gritty, immediate films still resonate. He began during WWII with Ossessione (1943), a Northern-Italy adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it was La Terra Trema (1948) that staked a claim no one could ignore. Unlike the studio-made Bicycle Thieves or the Anna Magnani-starring Open City, Visconti's film bet its chips entirely on real people, shooting entirely in the very real Sicilian fishing village of Aci Trezza, and using only its inhabitants - fisherman and their peasant families - as his cast. Over two and a half hours long, La Terra Trema invests our time and eyeballs on the lives of genuine workers, the decaying hovels they inhabit, and the backbreaking labor they must perform just to eat. The individual actors aren't even identified; the ensemble is simply listed as "Sicilian fishermen" in the credits.
As you'd expect, the performances are not confident and skilled; Visconti's cast of amateurs essentially play themselves, do their own real work, and inhabit the disheveled landscape they've lived in their whole lives. What's miraculous is how cool and deft and powerful the acting actually is; as two brothers attempting to confront the capitalist forces that would force them to work themselves to death, real brothers Antonio and Giuseppe Arcidiacono are movie-star stuff, brooding and iconic and rarely appearing uncomfortable about putting their lives on film. It helps that Visconti knows how to wrench emotional substance from the story by way of gesture, camera movement, and something as radical (in 1948) as a long shot staring at the turned back of a crying girl. Visually, the film is a fluent, fluid, densely populated portrait of a fascinating time and place, and Visconti exploits the stark beauty of the Sicilian coast for all it's worth, while certain images - the silhouetted wives of the fishermen standing on the rocks waiting for the men to return safely, the endless flotillas of lantern-helmed boats in the dark dawn waters as the men yell out to each other - have undeniable existential weight.
The tale is a basic enough Marxist parable - the Arcidiacono brothers decide that they've had enough fishing for pennies while the fish processors and wholesalers get rich, and decide to mortgage their ancestral house to begin their own business. For a number of minor and unpredictable reasons the scheme falls flat, and soon enough the family is faced with starvation, eviction, squandered futures, and the clan's complete dissolution. Co-produced by the Italian Communist Party, La Terra Trema is a lacerating indictment of capitalism and its proletariat discontents; you're never very far in Visconti's mise-en-scene from understanding that the fishermen's economic plight is one endured by much of the world's population now and going back centuries. It shares this with many other neo-realist classics, including Bicycle Thieves, and it's odd to note how little the entire postwar movement has been recognized as the political interrogation it was. If you were to measure such things, it would seem that Italian neo-realism's best portrayals of modern poverty and class inequity have had more influence, and genuinely affected more people worldwide, than all Soviet propaganda combined.
La Terra Trema was influential, too, just in filmmaking terms - no one else in the 40s was making on-location docudrama-style sagas using real people this way. Documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty had been doing it since 1920 - but his films claimed to be "real," actual non-fiction. (Which they weren't.) After Visconti, the floodgates opened - suddenly filmmakers were leaving professionalism behind and combing the globe with semi-anthropological agendas, giving us the semi-fictional films of Jean Rouch, Margot Benacerraf's Venezuelan-salt-mine sojourn Araya (1959), Manoel de Oliveira's Rite of Spring (1963) (which has a northern Portuguese village reenact its own annual day-long Passion Play for the cameras), and so on. It's a paradigm that still seems radical - the Iranians, including Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, have made it their own, and Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been recently wowing festival audiences with his own unique approach. Semi-fictionalism is de rigueur nowadays, down to the dredgable "unreality" of reality TV, which threatens to take over all television broadcasting eventually.
It began with Visconti, for better and worse. Beautifully restored for the new DVD edition, La Terra Trema is indelible enough to make you wonder what happened to the Arcidiaconos and the rest of the Aci Trezza natives. According to the town's sparse Wikipedia page, there's a small museum in Aci Trezza dedicated to the Visconti movie, run by one of the aging cast members. Which one? Did they all stay fishermen, and stay poor? Did the film somehow alleviate their problems? For a film that intersects so deeply with reality, the questions are inevitable, and mysteries poignant.
For more information about La Terra Trema, visit Eone.
by Michael Atkinson
