Shot by Carlo Di Palma, from Rome to New York
On the occasion of the Film Society’s theatrical run of a new documentary on the influential DP, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life, we revisit an assortment of rarities and masterworks that display the cinematographic richness of Di Palma’s career.
Vittorio De Sica
1948|
Italy|
89 minutes
One of Carlo Di Palma’s earliest jobs was pulling focus for Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist opus, which follows a struggling Roman laborer who lands an ever-elusive job, only to have his crucial bicycle stolen.
Woody Allen
1986|
USA|
106 minutes
The first film in what would become an eleven-year collaboration between Woody Allen and Carlo Di Palma was this major, Oscar-winning milestone in Allen’s career, a sprawling yet minor-key chronicle of two years in the lives of three sisters.
Woody Allen
1992|
US|
103 minutes
Conceived by Woody Allen and Di Palma with a ragged, jarring, documentary-style approach, this radical confessional surveys the effect of one couple’s breakup on the seemingly stable relationship of another.
Michelangelo Antonioni
1982|
Italy / France|
130 minutes|
Italian with English subtitles
One of Antonioni’s most underrated and personal films, this late-career masterpiece about a missing woman recalls L’avventura but with a new carnal energy and a sharpness of feeling granted by Di Palma’s precise camera movements.
Ettore Scola
1970|
Italy / Spain|
99 minutes|
Italian with English subtitles
In Ettore Scola’s modernistic, comic tale of three-way love, Monica Vitti stars as the fiancée to Marcello Mastroianni’s Communist construction worker, but their relationship becomes complicated with the introduction of Giancarlo Giannini’s hunky pizza chef.
Woody Allen
1987|
US|
88 minutes
Like a Jewish-American variation on Amarcord, Woody Allen’s exquisite work of semi-autobiography is an episodic account of the writer-director’s memories of growing up in the radio-centric ‘30s and ‘40s, shot by Di Palma with an evocative, burnished nostalgia.
Woody Allen
1991|
USA|
85 minutes
Woody Allen’s ode to German expressionism, Kafka, and the music of Kurt Weill lets the actor’s nebbish persona loose in a chiaroscuro maze and allows Di Palma to indulge in one eerily atmospheric image after another.
Bernardo Bertolucci
1981|
Italy|
116 minutes|
Italian with English subtitles
In Bertolucci’s farcical drama set in Parma (beautifully rendered by Di Palma), a cheese factory owner (Ugo Tognazzi) schemes to save his business after his son is kidnapped by terrorists.
Fariborz Kamkari
2016|
Italy|
90 minutes|
English, Italian, French, and Russian with English subtitles
Fariborz Kamkari’s documentary about the life and career of Carlo Di Palma is as much a portrait of the late cinematographer as it is a journey through the last 70 years of world cinema.
Among the most lauded and influential of cinematographers, the late Carlo Di Palma got his start as a camera operator for Vittorio De Sica and Gillo Pontecorvo and made his mark through collaborations with Bernardo Bertolucci, Ettore Scola, and, most crucially, Michelangelo Antonioni. Having inspired a generation of lensers with his work on such seminal sixties films as Red Desert and Blow-Up, he later forged a comparably rich partnership starting in the 1980s with Woody Allen on some of his most beloved films (Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Husbands and Wives). On the occasion of the Film Society’s theatrical run of a new documentary on the influential DP, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life (directed by Fariborz Kamkari and produced by Di Palma’s wife, Adriana Chiesa), we revisit an assortment of rarities and masterworks that display the cinematographic richness of Di Palma’s career.
Acknowledgements: La Cineteca Nazionale; Istituto Luce Cinecittà; Adriana Chiesa Di Palma
See another Carlo Di Palma/Michelangelo Antonioni collaboration at Film Forum as their one-week run of a restored Blow-Up begins July 28.
