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To Alfredo and Toto, the cinema is larger than lifeCinema Paradiso

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A celebration of the filmgoing experience and an examination of how priorities change with age, Cinema Paradiso follows the life of Salvatore De Vitto from his start as an enthusiastic young projectionist's apprentice to a middle-aged film producer who must return to his hometown after a thirty-year absence to appreciate and understand the important things in life. 

Extended Review

Almost everyone loves films. Giuseppe Tornatore, the writer/director of Cinema Paradiso, seems to know that, and he is not concerned with the few immovable people in the world who make up the exception to this rule. Cinema Paradiso, the film, and the small, Sicilian theater for which the film is named are filled with people who seem to savor every frame of every film they see, and the films they see seem to be made for everyone.

The attendance at Cinema Paradiso, in the small town of Giancaldo, is never less than standing room only. There are children in the front who take delight in roaring back at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion and lovers who stand in the back and have sex when they think they can get away with it. Town pranksters do their dirty work on the man who always falls asleep, and the snob in the balcony continually spits on the folks below. The Paradiso is more than a motion-picture house; it is a participatory theater where the personalities and eccentricities of the townspeople are played out.

The film follows the life of Salvatore Di Vitto (played alternately by Jacques Perrin as the adult, Salvatore Cascio as the child, and Marco Leonardi as the adolescent), who is first introduced in his silver-haired middle age but who soon returns, through flashback, to his childhood in postwar Sicily. This was a time when, in this particular town, the cinema was a service of the local church. The pastor, Father Adelfio (Leopoldo Trieste), had the final say over what stayed in every film and what did not; those scenes that were cut were, for example, benign acts of Hollywood violence, and any kiss, however genteel, between two adults.

It was during the pastor's private screening that Salvatore, then called "Toto" (Salvatore Cascio), first befriended Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the town's only projectionist. Toto would hide in the lobby, peeking through the doorway, watching each week's film in its entirety, and then sit with Alfredo as he cut up the film to the pastor's demands. In this town of motion-picture fans, no one was more star struck than Toto. He would plead with Alfredo to let him keep the pieces of film that were censored. Alfredo would refuse, telling him that he had to return the complete film to the company, so Toto managed to satisfy himself with whatever tiny trims he could steal, unnoticed.

Salvatore Cascio as "Toto"As Toto, eight-year-old Cascio is irresistibly endearing. Cuteness can often turn sickening, but Cascio also possesses an intelligence that informs his expression and delivery, and he keeps up bravely with the adults who surround him. According to the film's press notes, Tornatore conducted a huge search in casting the role of Toto, and it paid off remarkably well. The role of Alfredo calls for someone who fits the title "screen veteran." The French Noiret is perfect. Like Sean Connery, Yves Montand, and Robert Mitchum, he displays that mixture of roughness, charm, and, above all, wisdom that makes him invaluable in this kind of role.

The film is set in the days before safety film, which is fireproof, and, as Toto became Alfredo's apprentice, he was warned of how quickly and lethally a reel in the projector could catch fire. The warning proves to be a foreshadowing, for Alfredo himself is later caught in a flash fire, blinding him and leaving Toto the only capable projectionist in Giancaldo. The burned Cinema Paradiso is bought and resurrected by a local lottery winner, and Toto is put at the helm in the new projection room. No longer under the blade of the Church, the Nuovo Cinema Paradiso shows its films uncut, and the audience roars in applause at the first sight of a screen kiss.

As Salvatore grows up, he falls in love while filming a young woman, Elena (Agnese Nano), with a home film camera. When Toto was young, Alfredo had told him that as he grew older, more mundane, realistic things than motion pictures would become important. Yet, when the adolescent Salvatore seeks guidance in love, Alfredo spins a fantastic, romantic yarn--not unlike a Hollywood film--that even he does not find relevant. Salvatore, however, finds relevance in it and lives out the story in winning Elena's heart.

Eventually, Salvatore leaves Giancaldo, and Alfredo tells him, in his last bit of advice, never to return and that holding onto the past will keep him from going forward. Salvatore finds a successful career as a filmmaker, and he follows Alfredo's advice for thirty years. When Alfredo dies, Salvatore does return for the funeral and finds that the old man has left him something--a dusty film canister. By great, sad coincidence, the Cinema Paradiso has been marked for destruction during Salvatore's visit. He stands among all the old, familiar faces of the town as they watch the demolition of the crumbling theater.

Salvatore returns to Rome and his private screening room, where he has his projectionist play the reel of film left in the old canister by Alfredo. He is treated to a long montage of all the amorous clips that Alfredo had to remove from the films--scores of lovers embracing, kissing, and tumbling over each other, with an occasional, playful flash of breasts. This final sequence plays like Chuck Workman's brilliant short, Precious Images (1988), in which only a few, carefully selected frames of a film are used to bring all the emotions of that film rushing back. Hundreds of clips from hundreds of films spliced together make for an almost euphoric experience that reminds the viewer why motion pictures exert such a universal appeal.

More than merely a paean to the filmgoing experience, however, Cinema Paradiso is an examination of change. Times change, people change, and so do their priorities. Salvatore's memories of childhood are surrealistically blissful. No townful of people could ever really be this constantly joyous. Yet in these scenes, the audience believes, along with Toto, that going to see films may be the highest purpose for living. The adult Salvatore's complete cycle of change is evident in that, though he appears to be enormously wealthy, he makes no attempt to save the condemned Cinema Paradiso. Though no such thing is ever articulated, the message of the final scenes seems to be that Salvatore has finally internalized Alfredo's advice: He can always indulge in nostalgia, but trying to keep the past alive is fruitless.

Salvatore and ElenaIn Salvatore's teen years, the film loses its narrative focus. Tornatore is most assured in his direction of the first and third acts. He seems to wait out the insecurities of adolescence to get out of Giancaldo, to Salvatore's more sobering years, when he can bring his story full circle. The shimmering exception is the film's one love scene, in which the teenage Salvatore and Elena meet each other in the rain at a makeshift outdoor theater. Rain drenches the young lovers as they make love atop a Sicilian seawall, while behind them heroic images flicker across an impromptu screen. Every element of the scene is so perfectly conceived that the viewer imagines that it must have derived from Tornatore's own experience or that it has long been his most vivid fantasy.

How much importance does Tornatore actually place on motion pictures? Religion permeates the film: Toto was an altar boy, the Church ran the Paradiso during its early existence, and Toto woos Elena in a confession booth. Yet the Church is hardly revered by anyone in the film; the Paradiso is Giancaldo's most religiously attended gathering spot. Perhaps Tornatore's choice of the name "Salvatore" for his main character is a suggestion by the filmmaker that films can serve as a form of salvation.

Woody Allen used a small-town theater in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as the means of escape for his central character, Cecilia, played by Mia Farrow. Cecilia gets involved with both a film character who miraculously steps off the screen to be with her, and the matinee idol who originally portrayed him. In the end, however, the film star has returned to Hollywood without taking her along, as he had promised, and the character has gone back into the film, of which all prints have been destroyed.

Allen's film was, by turns, very amusing and very sad, and he chose the more somber as his final note, suggesting that fantasy is wonderful but, sooner or later, everyone must return to reality. Tornatore, with his one-two punch of the Paradiso's destruction and the final montage, proposes the inverse of Allen's film: While the mundane realities of adulthood eventually become necessary, a person can always turn to fantasy, through motion pictures or childhood memories, for escape.

Awards. Cinema Paradiso won a number of film festival accolades, including the Grand Jury prize at Cannes in 1989, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. To contemporary American audiences, it can be seen as something of a prototype of the modern foreign film, its emphasis on sentiment and nostalgia found in later Oscar winners and nominees Il Postino, The Bicycle Thief, and Life Is Beautiful.

Questions for discussion:

  1. What are your affective responses? At the film's conclusion, what are you feeling for Salvatore, for Alfredo, for the Cinema Paradiso, for the community of Giancaldo, for the medium of cinema in general?
  2. Describe and discuss the film's narrative structure. In what ways does this particular structure affect or enhance the film's meaning?
  3. What does the film suggest ideologically about life, love, family, religion, community, censorship, and/or cinema? How does the film's concluding montage illuminate these messages?
  4. Boggs offers a catalog of interpretive approaches for analyzing the whole film.  Which approach do you think seems most useful in analysis of Cinema Paradiso, and what insights or meanings does it yield?
  5. In what particular ways is Cinema Paradiso an example of reflexive cinema? How does its reflexivity lend to or detract from its meaning?  Contrast it with Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo and Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., which both seem to suggests that fantasy may be wonderful but, sooner or later, everyone must return to reality: which is more truthful in its rendering of the meaning of cinema?
  6. Cinema Paradiso contains brief, subtle homages to both the above films (as well as more than a few others).  List and name as many of the intertextual acknowledgments it offers of cinematic classics as you can.