1860 (film)
Encyclopedia
1860 is an Italian
Cinema of Italy
The history of Italian cinema began just a few months after the Lumière brothers had patented their Cinematographe, when Pope Leo XIII was filmed for a few seconds in the act of blessing the camera.-Early years:...

 film directed by Alessandro Blasetti
Alessandro Blasetti
Alessandro Blasetti was an Italian film director who influenced Italian neorealism with the film Quattro passi fra le nuvole...

, released in 1934. The movie presages Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors...

 in that it was shot wholly on location. Also, most contemporaneous historical epics used a star to focus on grand historical characters (as stated by Richard Pena
Richard Peña
Richard Peña is the American film program director of the prestigious Film Society of Lincoln Center noted for his organization of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films series and Scanners .-Early life:Interested in film at a very young age, when Richard was just 12 years old, he was...

 of the Film Society of Lincoln Center
Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Film Society of Lincoln Center based in New York City, United States, is one of the world's most prominent film presentation organizations. Founded in 1969 by three Lincoln Center executives - William F. May, Martin E. Segal and Schuyler G...

 at the beginning of the film). This film focuses on a character whom nobody knows or will ever know; a patriot riding to get the assistance of Giuseppe Garibaldi
Giuseppe Garibaldi
Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian military and political figure. In his twenties, he joined the Carbonari Italian patriot revolutionaries, and fled Italy after a failed insurrection. Garibaldi took part in the War of the Farrapos and the Uruguayan Civil War leading the Italian Legion, and...

. This film (in its heralding of neorealism) illustrates how the average man plays a part in grand histories. The film also uses non-actors (a key element of Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors...

) and a rarity for its time and era.

Cast

The film includes many non-actors, Gianfranco Giachetti (brother of Fosco Giachetti
Fosco Giachetti
Fosco Giachetti was an Italian actor.He was the brother of the actor Gianfranco Giachetti.Fosco Giachetti was the protagonist of Lo squadrone bianco , directed by Augusto Genina...

), Maria Denis, and Mario Ferrari. It was the last film of Ugo Gracci. A list of the non-actors includes Giuseppe Gulino, Aida Bellia and many others.

Plot

The story is the harried attempt of a Sicilian
Sicily
Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...

 partisan (as part of the risorgimento) to reach Garibaldi's headquarters in Northern Italy, and to petition the revered revolutionary to rescue part of his besieged land. Along the way, the peasant hero encounters many colorful Italians, differing in class and age, and holding political opinions of every type.

The film ends on the battlefield, making Italian unification a success, despite brutal losses.

Scholarly and other interpretation

Gabriella Romani, in an Italica article from 2002 (Part of the JSTOR
JSTOR
JSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...

 arts and sciences complex), writes:

Certainly the film drew upon the soviet films of Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...

 and the Macchiaioli
Macchiaioli
The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour...

painters, but just as important may be, the "Risorgimento female iconography was produced by nineteenth-century patriotic painters and writers."
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