Director: Martin Scorsese
"I like to think of neorealism as the seed from which a beautiful, solid tree has grown, and the branches on that tree represent virtually all the major Italian filmmakers of the postwar era."
—Martin Scorsese in My Voyage to Italy
My Voyage to Italy—part reminiscence, part film essay—is Martin Scorsese's splendid four-hour long valentine to post-World War Two Italian cinema. Concentrating on movies made between Open City (1945) and 8½ (1963), it examines the origins of the neorealist movement, which he calls "the most precious moment in film history," and its influence on Italian cinema. Scorsese focuses on the five most important directors who came out of the movement and have been inspirations both for his own films and in one way or another for nearly all Italian films made after them.Scorsese spends the first half hour of his documentary relating how as a boy he first became acquainted with Italian cinema—by watching subtitled Italian movies shown on television on Friday nights with his family and neighbors, beginning with the first Italian movie he ever saw, the neo-realist Roberto Rossellini's Paisan. He tells how his grandparents, immigrants from Sicily who never even became American citizens, and his family's friends and neighbors in New York's Little Italy, where he grew up, gathered at his home to watch these movies for scenes of their homeland and to hear the Sicilian dialect they spoke themselves being spoken by the actors in the movies. The experience was the first time he really became aware of his own family's origins, and for a young boy already fascinated with the American movies he saw regularly with his father, he found that a new world of cinema had opened to him. Interspersed with excerpts from Italian films are home movies of his own family and neighborhood in the late 1940s. Together they paint a vivid picture of Scorsese's own boyhood, both the real and the imaginary.
