Film Forum

Italy, 1948
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Starring Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini, Peparuolo, Amelia Robert
In Italian with English subtitles.
Approx. 80 min. 35mm.

Conceived as an homage to the range and artistry of Anna Magnani, L’AMORE is a diptych that drags the actress to the brink and watches, mouth agape, as she leaps into the abyss. The first part—“The Human Voice”—adapts a one-act play by Jean Cocteau, which Magnani had performed on stage in 1942, playing a woman whose only connection to her lover runs through the telephone wire. Shot in a French studio over two weeks with money that Rossellini had procured for GERMANY YEAR ZERO, this intensely claustrophobic showcase for Magnani (and her dog, Micia) renders a break-up as a world-historic event—as it always is for those so spurned. The second episode—“The Miracle”—was based on an original idea by Fellini, who also co-stars as a silent vagabond whom Magnani’s talkative goatherd believes to be the incarnation of Saint Joseph. Throwing herself upon the saint’s blissful body, Magnani wakes in a daze, pregnant and ever closer to the divine. If the monks can report sightings of the Madonna, why cannot Magnani follow her holy path? Although “The Miracle” aroused no complaints from the Vatican, it faced extraordinary hostility in the US, where the lay Catholics of the Legion of Decency launched a successful campaign for the New York Board of Regents to rescind the film’s exhibition license on the basis of alleged sacrilege. Distributor Joseph Burstyn appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in his favor, belatedly bringing cinema under the protection of the First Amendment, and sowing the seeds of censorship’s demise. A miracle indeed.

35mm print courtesy Cinecittà.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film