Antonioni, Visconti, Fellini—each has directed a masterpiece: L’Avventura, Rocco, I Vitelloni. Each has just produced his worst work. It seems to me unquestionable that the motion pictures named are the central great productions of the Italian film. Ranged about them, all others seem to be lesser, including the works of the same directors. Indeed, the question is not so much one of the pre-eminence within their own country as of whether these are not the greatest achievements to date of this twentieth-century art form. Much depends, I suppose on whether your aesthetic orientation is north European or south European. If it is south, you inevitably come up against these three massive creations, each in its way strongly oriented geographically: Sicily, Lucania-Milan, and Fellini’s invented Rimini of adolescent memory (made up of the beach at Ostia, the streets of Viterbo, and a disused Florentine theatre, the Goldoni). The films are obsessively preoccupied with the sense of place, of physical location.
The present problem is: how have the men who directed these achievements (Fellini in 1953 and, in quick succession, Antonioni in 1959-60 and Visconti in 1960), working often with interchangeable actors, come off so badly in their later productions?
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