RISO AMARO (Bitter Rice) (108')
by Giuseppe De Santis
cast: Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone, Vittorio Gassman
Italy, 1949
Restored in 4K by Cineteca di Bologna
in collaboration with Cristaldifilm
at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory
Introduced by Giuseppe Ghigi
The image of Silvana Mangano, a rice-weeder and femme fatale with her black stockings, broke right into the collective imagination. De Santis had always had a reputation as an erotic and populist auteur, but in Riso amaro, he sublimates it. His farmhouse is the place of conflict, the total space of social existence: hard work, dancing, desire, exploitation, illegality. The film is the swan song of popular culture, itself steeped in the corrupt and corrupting American myths. The positive theme of labour is subordinated to the laws of the noir and mélo; the honest hero Raf Vallone is outclassed by Mangano’s sultriness and the perverse sensuality of the handsome Gassman. De Santis’ heterogeneous cinema, Gramscian in its own way, produced this neo-Realist epic (unforgotten are the legendary days of filming around Vercelli, in the rice paddies owned by the Agnelli family), becoming excessive and truly popular spectacle. The villain Gassman dies hanging on a butcher’s hook, Mangano, aware of the error of her ways, commits suicide by jumping off the top of a silo. Her lifeless body in the farmyard is immediately covered in handfuls of rice by the other rice-weeders, a gesture of pietas that holds the mythical storytelling resonances which might well summarise De Santis’ cinema and his pedagogical dream, a brilliant fusion of neorealism, Dovzhenko-style epos and a Hollywoodian sense of storytelling as entertainment and star power. (Gianni Volpi)
