Hacker Cinema
La Strada
La strada
1954 · Film · 115 min
Directed by Federico Fellini
When Gelsomina, a naïve young woman, is purchased from her impoverished mother by brutish circus strongman Zampanò to be his wife and partner, she loyally endures her husband's coldness and abuse as they travel the Italian countryside performing together. Soon Zampanò must deal with his jealousy and conflicted feelings about Gelsomina when she finds a kindred spirit in Il Matto, the carefree circus fool, and contemplates leaving Zampanò.
5 positive2 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
Somehow I swirled around for a minute or so and didn't see anything I would want to watch.
"This gallery features a collection of the 50,000 most popular* movies according to TMDB"
Yeah, there's the problem. I went to the TMDB site and tried sorting by popularity, rating … all I got was a whole bunch of recent films that look like all the reasons the film industry is crashing (you know, the kind of stuff you would see in a Red Box when they were still a thing).
If you really don't know what to watch you could do a lot worse than checking off films on this list (the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die):
https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List
(And you have already seen a number of them I expect.)
Elitist? Maybe. But if you can actually get through the list (I've been at it, casually, for several years now) you'll feel like you have acquired a film school degree.
I think it's fine to watch "8 ½" and hate it — at least you'll know that you hate it now. But it would be sad if you never saw "La Strada" because you thought all of Fellini's films were impenetrable.
"Marty", "Stella Dallas", "The Hustler" — just a few great American films that came to mind that I would have otherwise missed…
But if the latest Guardian of the Pirate's of the Marvel Universe movie are your cup of tea you probably have no problem finding something to watch anyway and can pass on "The List".
> But usually the dialog is the exact same so it’s not noticed
That's not the case for the films I'm describing. Here's the start of La Strada:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jSewbxyHYM
Quinn isn't even speaking Italian during the shooting:
As was the common practice for Italian films at the time, shooting was done without sound; dialogue was added later along with music and sound effects. As a consequence, cast members generally spoke in their native language during filming: Quinn and Basehart in English, Masina and the others in Italian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Strada#Sound
It's even more clear in this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7fmvA_KG6U
Agree. From the older films listed, Stella Dallas is sweet, The Bicycle Thieves is engaging, La Strada will make you fall in love with Fellini's wife....
I have not seen cited in the comment section my favorite Fellini's movie: "La Strada". Anthony Quinn at the end of the movie shook me in ways that only Marcello Mastroianni (by the way, someone give me a call when they find a modern movie start with one third of Mastroianni's charming ways: there won't be any need for notifications on) was able to do in "La Notte". Fellini is very Italian in a sometimes decadent, sometimes lustful way. A great director, but not Italy's best (that's Michelangelo Antonioni).
None of Felini’s mid-career or late work really does anything for me, but “La Strada” is a film I think about at least once a month, years after seeing it. The characters are so archetypal and tragic, it feels like an adaptation of some lost piece of ancient theater.
Schizotypal / Schizoid and avoidant are currently much less studied than Asperger's Syndrome (which is becoming glamorous), depression, psychopathy, schizofrenia or bipolar. How do you know ? There are reasons to believe avoidant/schizotypal/schizoid can be related to childhood trauma. More than 0.01% have some kind of childhood trauma, and they mostly go undetected.
Zampano from the movie "La Strada" just screams "Schizotypal", but if you put the two in a search engine - it hasn't occurred to anyone.
P.S.
Since I've heard about Aeris being killed by Sepiroth before, I went ahead and watched it on YouTube, and I wasn't impressed. It must have been because I didn't play the game. If that scene affected you at all (if it looked like anything but cheesy crap animated with expressionless plastic dolls) it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way. You can watch a clip of "La Strada" or "Midnight Cowboy" or "Unforgiven" or "Casablanca" out of context and at least get a sense of the emotional dynamics of the characters. That's the strength of movies. The strength of games is the immersion and feeling of personal involvement with the characters, personal involvement driven by your own actions, choices, and sacrifices. I may have felt like Ratso Rizzo was my friend, but I never picked up a john to get money for a bus ticket for us to leave town together. I may have shared Rick Blaine's feelings as he put Victor and Ilsa on the plane to Lisbon, but I didn't decide to do that. It just happened to me.
Games will always be second-rate next to movies when it comes to presenting scripted drama, but they don't have to feel that way. Aeris and Sepiroth is proof of that, I guess. Gameplay allows games to affect us in ways that movies can't and enables different and stronger emotional contexts for experiencing games as art. The art of games is in the gameplay. Detaching from gameplay is just a crutch, like filming a stage production, copying another art form because we don't understand the new one well enough yet.
Apart from those already mentioned by others, some challenging classics:
Zorba the Greek Ikiru (Living), by Akira Kurosawa Babette's Feast La Strada La double vie de Véronique Lawrence of Arabia It's a Wonderful Life Jakob the Liar Citizen Kane Deliverance Dogville
Worth noting that none of these are "feel-good" american movies. They're "kick you in the balls and get you busy living" movies. I much prefer those to simple feel-good movies. If you want feel-good, just go watch some reruns of Friends (I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing; I do it quite often; but those are not the best inspirational movies by a long shot).