What Movies Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and the Divine

The first installment of a two-part interview

Recently, the Utah Monthly had the chance to sit down with Bob Hudson (pictured above at Italy’s largest motion-picture studio), a French professor at BYU, to talk about the French and Italian cinematic traditions. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity, and will appear in two installments. In the first half of the transcript, which is included below, Hudson talks about how he fell in love with film and fills us in on key moments in French and Italian cinema following World War II.

Could you talk a little bit about how you became a scholar and enthusiast of film? 

It kind of comes from where I grew up. As a teen in rural Kentucky, I recall just having this really serious thirst for what Matthew Arnold would call “Big C” culture. We just really didn’t have a lot of access to it. My mom was a new convert to the church, and so her whole library was church books. So as far as developing a testimony, it was great for that, but we didn’t really have great works of literature in the house. My dad loved to read in the Navy but had settled into becoming more of a golfer in his spare time, but he did watch movies with me at night. 

In Kentucky, my dad managed a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, and we had a video checkout in the front. I liked to go to the store late with him and I liked to hang out in the video section and tinker, and I figured out how to repair VHS tapes when they broke. In the process of working for him in repairing these VHS cassettes, if a movie wasn’t checked out at night, my dad would let me take it home. I had a little VCR in my room and he trusted me to grab movies that were “uplifting” and “wholesome” (but gave me a lot of leeway beyond that). Those movies really filled that cultural void for me. I was able to watch a lot of movies that way.

But it was really in 1995 when I brought home Pulp Fiction that I realized that someone can make a film that is, at the same time, popular and an instant masterpiece. Mesmerized by the non-linear narrative, I stayed up all night that night, piecing that movie together. I understood that Quentin Tarantino had to be referencing stuff even if I didn’t catch what the references were. So, I drove twenty miles to the next town over where there was a bookstore that would order things for you and I ordered the screenplay to that movie, which I still have. I read the whole thing and kind of made notes in it, and that opened the door to other films. I took a deep dive into Scorsese at that time, Goodfellas, Casino, and also got really into the Coen brothers, Fargo, The Big Lebowski. So it was really this exposure to a great moment in Hollywood filmmaking—the 1990s—that got me hooked on film. 

Could you also talk briefly about the other hats you wear? If I’m not mistaken, most of your publications are in the field of French Renaissance studies, you’re something of a country music expert, and you’re also a former college football player; is there a link between all of these identities? 

Those are all also products of where I was raised. We lived about eighty miles from Nashville and that was the big city for us for cultural outings, concerts, and the like. My dad was a big fan of classic country––George Jones, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, Don Williams––and even if I gravitated towards punk rock as a teen, the “twang” of Nashville always rang in my ear. We’d even walk past the bars and clubs of Lower Broadway, too young to get in, and listen to country acts on the way to punk shows at 328 Performance Hall or the Exit/In. On my mission to Paris, I also got into Breton and Celtic music. Nashville also has Vanderbilt, which is a major hub for French poetry studies, as I discovered after my mission. My graduate work at UCLA and an amazing mentor is to thank for my pivot to Renaissance studies. As for football, my dad was a player and I absolutely love the game. I was twice all-state in Kentucky and played a season at Murray State after my mission, until an injury cut that short. But, yeah, film, poetry, country music, and football are the things that make me tick. 

Could you give a brief overview of Italian neorealism and then talk about the role that religion, maybe Catholicism in particular, played in it? Is there a film that is a particularly good example of the religious/theological elements of that movement? 

In regard to Italian neorealism, it’s really interesting that even before sound came to cinema, Italy was already a major player in the silent epic tradition. But the Italian film industry really started to develop in the 1930s when they built Cinecittà. Vittorio Mussolini, son of the dictator, was really overseeing these efforts to make Italy a major player in film. So he creates a school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), in Rome, right across from Cinecittà. There they’d train and develop these young filmmakers and film writers who would create Italian neorealism. Once fascism fails, you have all of these filmmakers who are trained, who have seen the horrors of war, who see the poverty, who see the corruption of the black market in Italy following the war, and decide the best way to to protest against poverty, the best way to protest against corruption, the best way to protest against all the atrocities they’ve seen, is to make films about it, to make the world aware. And so Italian neorealism is showing the reality of what Italy has gone through during the war period—especially the World War II period. 

As for a film that really exemplifies this movement, the first one would have to be Rossellini’s film Rome Open City, which was filmed in the rubble of World War II. Some people thought it was too soon to film in Rome after the war period. And he said “We have to film now. People have to see this rubble.” Cinecittà was not there; it’d been bombed out. They didn’t have access to film stock, so he had to buy his film stock on the black market. He really had to piecemeal together his equipment to make this movie. 

The result is a film about complicity. You have this Catholic priest, Don Pietro, who really is something of a father figure for young boys in the neighborhood. And then you also have a character in the film who is a communist and who is marrying one of the young boys’ mothers. He works with his communist friend writing an underground paper, trying to speak out against what the Fascists and the Nazis are doing during the open city period of Rome. So the film develops to a point where the priest and the communist have to be complicit with each other. They are ideologically at odds but they are fighting against a greater evil and learning to work together to undermine what the Gestapo and Mussolini’s shock troops are doing.

Spoiler for those who are reading and haven’t seen the film: Their work costs the two heroes, both the priest and the communist resistance fighter, their lives. But these men are able to instill values in these young boys. As the young boys walk down from the hill where the firing squad carried out that execution of the priest, a long shot overlooks Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and you see the future and hope of the city where people that are more leftist and perhaps even irreligious learned that they can work together with more conservative Catholics for a better Italy. So that’s Rossellini’s big message. It’s the message of hope, of shared humanity, even though it’s a film that is also about defeat.

A couple of other masterpieces of neorealism are De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and De Santis’s Bitter Rice. Those would be my personal top three. Rossellini’s Paisà is great, too.

Could you talk about Federico Fellini and specifically about La Strada? What is his relationship to Italian neorealism?

He’s coming out of neorealism. He actually got his start with some of the neorealists, including Rossellini and Lattuada, working on their scripts and sets. But what Fellini is more interested in than anything is performance. He came from a popular street puppet tradition. So, performance, dreamscapes, that’s his type of thing. And so his filmmaking really is a different approach to the problems that persist in Italy through the 50s. But you bring up La Strada, which I think is his greatest film. It stars American film star Anthony Quinn as this strong man who takes on as a sort of assistant or apprentice this young woman with an intellectual disability. You find out through the backstory that this street performer, Zampanò, played by Anthony Quinn, has already purchased this new apprentice Gelsomina’s older sister, Rosa. And you never find out what happened to her. It’s never revealed, but it shows the depravity and deprivation of this family that this widow would basically sell two of her special needs children to this circus performer because he offers her money. 

But to go into the plot of the story, you have this street performer, strongman, sword swallower, part time farce and gag performer, who trains this young woman, somewhat brutally, and kind of treats her badly over the entirety of the film. She does learn how to do what she needs to do. But she falls for him. There’s a little bit of what we might call Stockholm syndrome there, where she falls for him, even though he’s not good to her and he’s constantly neglecting her and abusing her. But you do have this moment when she meets another circus performer. They join another circus, and there’s this character who’s a tightrope walker and he’s called Il Matto, or the fool. The first time we see Il Matto he has wings on his back during a Catholic procession. He’s presented as an angel, and he pulls Gelsomina aside one night and tells her, “Look, your life has value too.” He picks up a stone that becomes sort of this talisman for Gelsomina for her to endure the abuse that she’s going to continue to go through. But, he makes the point that if even this stone has a reason in the universe, then everything has a reason, including her. And it’s this moment of awakening for Gelsomina where she realizes that Zampanò would not have purchased her if she didn’t have value to him. 

As things go in the film, another spoiler, Zampanò ends up killing Il Matto and it propels Gelsomina into this state of despondency. She becomes catatonic, and he ends up abandoning her. But the film ends with him crossing paths with her through this song that she had learned while they were together, and hearing someone else singing it several years later and having revealed to him how she had lived and how she had died. And he has this moment of remorse. Then we see him in this ultimate scene as a beaten down, former strongman who’s now just sort of a sad, older man with no friends; he’s an alcoholic, he tries to pick a fight in the bar, and everybody just kind of laughs at him and dismisses him, and this man whose now just alone and solitary goes back to where the film begins, the beach. It’s the end of the road. And has this moment where, for the first time in his life, he contemplates the heavens. He looks upward and he cries, and he has this moment that’s just a real moment of brutal repentance where he recognizes his smalless and the error of his ways and finally looks to God. 

And so there is this sort of unconventional Christianity, this imperfect spirituality in this film. But there is redemption for both main characters. There’s redemption for Gelsomina to realize that her life matters. And there’s redemption for Zampanò, this brute. And, over the film, you basically get the most simple of all of us and the most brutish of all of us and come to realize that even those people are subject to Christ’s divine love and are redeemable, worthy of redemption. And that’s what Fellini is really getting at in that movie. It’s about redemption. It’s about repentance. It’s about understanding that each individual matters in this universe that God has created. 

I think you’ve mentioned that Hiroshima, Mon Amour is your favorite film—why? What does that film have to say about things like trauma, memory and healing?

It’s one of my favorite films, for sure. It would be my desert-island film because I’ve watched it probably fifty or sixty times and I always get something new out of it. It’s the greatest film that Alain Resnais made. He had previously made a film, Night in Fog, that a lot of us watched in school almost as an educational documentary. Ten to fifteen years after the end of World War II and the liberation, he returns to the concentration camps and makes this film where he’s revisiting these places of horror where human beings were stored and starved and eventually killed. He juxtaposes this in-color visit of the concentration camps with all these black-and-white archival photos that he found of people starving, of piles of dead human corpses, of piles of hair that were removed from Jewish women, teeth that were removed because they had gold fillings in them. Combs, eyeglasses. His idea was, let’s not forget the horrors of war. Let’s make sure that everybody realizes what happened in these concentration camps and that what the Nazis had done in World War II is not only atrocious, but unthinkable, and it’s something we simply can’t forget. So he had this idea of preserving memory. And it’s effective.

Well, he tries to do the same thing in 1959, in Hiroshima. He travels to Hiroshima, he films the Museum of Peace, but he has this impasse and crisis and realizes there’s nothing left to film in Hiroshima. How are you going to remember something when it was all obliterated by the bomb? He has to rethink things. So he decides he has to approach this differently, and he ends up writing one of the greatest cinematic essays on memory ever written. He brings in the New Novelist Marguerite Duras to help him with the screenplay about a French woman who, because of her relationship with a Nazi soldier during the German occupation, has been found guilty of national disgrace. She escapes her hometown of Nevers, which is a really interesting name choice because Duras, who understood English, recognized the connection between the city name “Nevers” and the word “never.” This idea that “I will never forget this. I will never go back to this place.” Anyway, this woman, fifteen years later, goes to Hiroshima. She’s an actress now, going back to shoot a film, and while there she has an affair with this Japanese man whose family was killed in the bombing. 

They’re kind of having this romantic tryst where she talks about having seen Hiroshima and having visited that museum several times and how great the museum is. She stands in for Resnais at that point. Whereas you have this Japanese character, from Hiroshima, who says, “No, you didn’t see Hiroshima, there’s nothing left of Hiroshima to see” and essentially that the bits and pieces that you can get of Hiroshima and the bits and pieces that she can get of her past have to come involuntarily. And it’s this idea, that memory is involuntary and that trauma breeds repressed memories. 

These two characters really help each other through this repressed memory of the war and even stand at the end, metonymically, as representations of the two cities for each other. So now, any time he hears of Nevers for the rest of his life, obviously she’s the one that he is going to think of. And vice versa, any time she hears Hiroshima, she’s going to have this memory of this moment where she worked through this trauma. I just think it’s a beautiful film for that reason.