My Voyage to Italy DVD

Lavishly illustrated with clips, this wonderful 4-hour documentary sees Scorsese looking at the films he loves. His passionate love for Italian cinema is contagious, says Alexander Ballinger.

Everybody knows about Martin Scorsese the movie director, but as he approaches his three score years and ten it’s a good time to take stock of his parallel career as a gifted documentarian - especially when the subject matter is as dear to his heart as Italian Cinema.

My Voyage to Italy lasts 246 minutes and, guided by Scorsese’s expert navigation and passionate commentary, charts a leisurely course through Italian cinema. Starting with the director’s early exposure to Alessandro Blasetti’s super-spectacles and neo-realistic classics Paisà (1946), Rome, Open City (1943) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) it deftly weaves through Italian cinema’s subsequent two decades discussing the lives and movies of some of its greatest directors, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni.  

Along the way Scorsese – aided by dexterous editor Thelma Schoonmacher – investigates the aforementioned classics and unravels compelling mini-essays on La Terra Trema (1947), Germany Year Zero (1948), L’Amore (1948), Stromboli (1949), The Flowers of St. Francis (Francesco Giulare di Dio, 1950), Europa ’51 (1952), Shoeshine (1946), Umberto D (1952), Gold of Naples (1954), Senso (1954), Ossessione (1943), I Vitelloni (1953), La Dolce Vita (1960), Voyage to Italy (1953), L’Avventura (1960), L’Eclisse (1962) and 8½ (1963). Indeed these parts are so generously illustrated with film clips that watching these movies (most of which are currently available on DVD) is virtually a necessity before embarking on My Voyage.  

My Voyage is an exemplary introduction to Italian cinema but it is far more than just that. It is as much about how the Italian movies watched on the Scorseses' tiny television set in 1950s New York reconnected a community of Sicilian immigrants with their mother country. It offers insight after insight into the style of Italian cinema – from Senso’s nuanced lighting to Paolo Stoppa’s sublime comic timing in Gold of Naples and in so doing reveals how these films shaped the style and attitude of one of today’s pre-eminent movie- directors, preservationists and historians. 

Watching Voyage is a sensuous experience, it knocks most hagiographic ‘movie’ documentaries into a cocked hat and is part social history, part autobiography but above all about one man’s profound and contagious love of Italian Cinema. Viva il cine Italiano!

Alexander Ballinger on 26th August 2011
Author of 33 reviews