Luchino Visconti – La terra trema AKA The Earth Trembles (1948)

Quote:
With La Terra trema, Luchino Visconti shows an extraordinary concern and sympathy with the plight of ordinary Sicilian fisher folk. Coming from a privileged aristocratic background, Visconti was so appalled by what the fascists had done to his country that he took up with left-wing politics and Marxist ideology. Whilst this political awareness does make its way into La Terra trema, what is far more striking is Visconti’s genuine compassion for the people he is filming. He conveys their sense of pride and nobility, as well as their extreme hardship and inability to make a better lot for themselves. Perhaps it is the fact that Visconti came from such a totally different world that allows him to engage so forcefully with his subject, to draw out every scintilla of poignancy, not as a complacent distant voyeur, but as someone who is profoundly moved by what he is seeing around him.

And it has to be said that Visconti’s technique is very effective. Whilst the camera work is unashamedly arty, with some breathtakingly beautiful location shots, it also conveys the mood of the film’s protagonists with immense depth and raw simplicity. The characters we see are so engaging that it is hard not to feel their joy when things go well and then their sense of despair when it all starts to go wrong. Like much of Italian neo-realism of this period, the film is hugely effective at engaging the spectator and conveying genuine emotion. Rather like a great piece of opera, watching and hearing this film is an emotionally exhausting experience, one that will taint your waking consciousness for a long time.

Visconti originally conceived La Terra trema to be the first in a series of three films concerned with poor working class people in Italy. When this first instalment failed disastrously at the box office (probably because the film’s protagonists spoke not in Italian but in a local Sicilian dialect), the director was forced to give up making the following two films, one about miners, the other about land farmers. Visconti would return to the neo-realist form with Rocco and his Brothers in 1961, a film which bears striking similarities with La Terra trema , notably in its uncompromisingly bleak portrayal of a poor Italian family struggling to stay together despite some pretty vicious circumstances.

Whilst Rocco is an easier film to watch, mainly because it is a more polished work with some great professional actors, it lacks the naked truth that La Terra trema conveys so brilliantly. For its wonderfully effective portrayal of the suffering and aspirations of ordinary men and women, La Terra trema is in a class of its own, a stunning visual poem, charged with a haunting pathos and a searing humanity.

Luchino Visconti - (1948) The Earth Trembles.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 40 min
Size: 	2.96 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 436 kb/s
BPP: 	0.230
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/9BA3AA048A1276E/Luchino_Visconti_-_(1948)_The_Earth_Trembles.mkv

Language(s):Sicilian, Italian
Subtitles:English