AKA: Amore e Rabbia, Vangelo ‘70
Country and Year: Italy (1969)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Lizzani, Marco Bellocchio
Starring: Nino Castelnuovo, Christine Gueho, Ninetto Davoli, Tom Baker

Review By: David Austin
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars (average)

Love and Anger is an example of a genre rarely seen these days – the arthouse anthology film. The arthouse anthology once roamed far and wide, like its similarly shaggy cousin, the buffalo, but is now largely extinct. The idea was to gather interesting directors and have them shoot short films, paying lip-service to some unifying theme. Many prominent arthouse directors were involved, including Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Louis Malle, contributing to films like Boccaccio ’70, Spirits of the Dead, Love in the City, Aria, and New York Stories.

Almost inevitably, avant-garde directors took the short-film format as an opportunity to indulge their desire to create increasingly experimental cinema. The resulting anthologies were curiosities – usually interesting but rarely very good, inconsistent but with patches of brilliance (for example, Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” in Spirits of the Dead).

L&A is very much in that tradition. Unfortunately, the segments that make up L&A rarely capture the imagination or take full advantage of the film medium, and no one piece really stands out as excellent. Watching the individual segments, I came to the inescapable conclusion that only Carlo Lizzani, the progenitor of the project, put his entire effort and talent into his segment, which is at least engaging. (Click Here To Read More…)