‘Voyage to Italy’ and What Old Movies Can Teach Us
This story is part of my weekly “Have you seen …” series where I highlight movies that I think are under-appreciated, misunderstood, or simply worth talking about. New entries are published every Wednesday.
Allow me a preface: if you love Voyage to Italy (or Journey to Italy, which I think is a much worse title), try not to hold this against me — the movie is not exactly a fun watch.
It’s a good movie — hell, it’s a great movie. The BFI says that it’s the 41st best ever, it’s a favorite of directors like Pedro Almodóvar, and, well, it’s in the Criterion Collection for fuck’s sake; what else could you ask for?
All that being said, I think it’s a perfect case study of one of the major idiosyncrasies in how “great” films are classified. The average modern viewer, upon watching the film, would likely cite it as boring and predictable — both accurate descriptors. For those who engage in film to any degree whatsoever, not much in Voyage to Italy will seem especially thrilling to you.
This hasn’t always been the case, though. Upon its release, the film was unsuccessful both commercially and critically. Voyage to Italy’s eschewal by the mainstream led it to a group of cinematic young turks over in France, where its meandering plot and vague depictions of human emotion led budding auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to some major, paradigm-shifting epiphanies regarding what the medium of cinema could look like.
Looked at through that lens, the impacts of Voyage to Italy still ripple throughout filmmaking today. With the movie there is arguably no French New Wave (at least that we would recognize); without the French New Wave, there is no Scorsese, Altman, Lee, Coppola, Cassavetes, and so on.
Giotto di Bondone was a painter in the 13th and 14th centuries active in and around the Florentine art scene of the time. To the modern viewer, his paintings aren’t especially impressive in their realism nor in their expression — not the worst paintings, but hardly the ones you post on Instagram during your study abroad.
His place in history is far from this wishy-washy. For his contemporaries, Giotto was point zero for a new type of painting. Giorgio Vasari, the first modern art critic, summed it up pretty well when he said that Giotto introduced “the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years” — we’re just too far removed to be able to know this intuitively.
Once you know this fact, you can see it: Giotto’s paintings do have more life than those of his predecessors, and his anticipation of techniques that would soon be used by later Renaissance artists is somewhat astounding.
I hope you see where I’m going with this. Like the works of Giotto, the very of DNA of Voyage to Italy can be found throughout much of independent cinema in the decades after its release. Roberto Rossellini made his film intentionally light on plot and dialogue, thus allowing the audience newfound space to wander around the picture, forming assessments and conclusions all their own. It was an act of liberation.
Of course, none of this is new news to the visionaries of the 60s, 70s, and beyond — but something got lost along the way. Somewhere in the 80s, perhaps beginning with the rise of Spielberg and Lucas, the cinema of the vague fell out of fashion and has yet to return. The most popular films today, in the mainstream and otherwise, seem intent on handholding the audience all the way through to the end. Marvel and Disney (are they the same these days? I can never remember) are two obvious offenders, but the effect has trickled pretty far down as well.
There was a moment following the release of Voyage to Italy where it seemed like movies had finally developed a sense of respect for their audience: directors trusted viewers to form their own conclusions and read their scenes as they pleased. That tendancy has, for the most part, been done away with. In its stead, an emphasis on often vapid visual styles and high-concept storytelling has again risen to the forefront. We’ve done away with the film’s meaty boredom and replaced it with entertaining vapors.
I don’t know how much I enjoyed Voyage to Italy, but I know how happy it made me to see it. It’s a film, yes, but it’s also a living guidebook on how what cinema can offer us — a lens through which to view the world, or our possibly ourselves. The more we move away from this model, the less potential the art form has to produce genuinely groundbreaking insights. In order to see what should happen next in movies, sometimes you have to look back on what has already transpired.
