Whether contrasted with Morricone’s avant-garde or hastily dismissed by the harshest critics, Nino Rota remains an unrivaled luminary of Italian cinema. From Treno popolare to his masterworks for Fellini, his lyricism and popular spirit continue to shine beyond trends and time.
Which two suns is Dante referring to in Canto XVI of Purgatorio? Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, obviously! For about fifteen years (Rota passed away in 1979), these two film score composers lived under the same sky to bring renown to Italian cinema, which occasionally lent them to Hollywood for unforgettable feats and scores. In his verses, Dante was referring to the theory of the two suns – papal authority and imperial authority – which to him held equal dignity while governing different spheres of human action. Yet the analogy can be pushed even further: the musical DNA of our two Suns was, in practice, as antithetical as the Papacy and the Empire were in the Middle Ages. As deeply rooted as Rota was in the tradition of Italian opera and popular song, with an irrepressible passion for circus music that he would later develop for the films of Federico Fellini, Morricone was drawn to a soundscape that was perhaps more challenging, in which noise integrated with music to produce an irresistible sonic baroque.
A journey into the creative world of Nino Rota, told through rare archival materials and the voices of leading figures in cinema and music, including Park Chan-wook, Alexandre Desplat, and Vince Mendoza. The documentary paints the portrait of a visionary and deeply influential...
I will venture a distinction I might come to regret: Rota created the ideal score for the film, yet it remained a film score; Morricone made the score a protagonist of the film, not just musically, but as an active narrative element. And if we look back to those years – the decades between the 1950s and the 1970s – we also recall the other planets in the empyrean of Italian cinematic music: Armando Trovajoli, Piero Piccioni, Giovanni Fusco, Riz Ortolani, Piero Umiliani, Mario Nascimbene. Goffredo Fofi, rest his soul, in a recently published booklet managed to unleash remarkably ferocious words against Nino Rota (“To me, the collective obsession with Fellini’s carnival and Nino Rota’s little tunes has always seemed illegitimate and hypocritical. The obsessive, comforting recourse to Nino Rota has sickened me; I can’t stand his little marches anymore”). As for us, we set Rota’s very first soundtrack onto the turntable – composed for a 1933 film, Treno popolare, a delightful early forerunner of neorealism by a young Matarazzo still untouched by his future relentless melodramas – and from the very first notes, we forgive the rough impatience of our beloved critic.
