Luchino Visconti shot this remarkable neorealist movie with amateur actors, who played their role sublimely. He tells a brutal story of a naked struggle for survival of a family in a village of fishermen in Sicily. The fishermen are confronted with a buyer's monopoly of a bunch of wholesalers, who give them a minimum price for their catches ('the poor always pay'). One fisherman tries to break the monopoly by creating his own business. But, therefore he has to mortgage the ancestral house.
Luchino Visconti's movie is a Malthusian story: only the prosperous can love and marry. His movie is also a Marxist story. It sets the wholesalers (the capitalists) against the fishermen. When the wholesalers pool their money and buy new boats, the fishermen's only choice is to sell their labor force. Now, they don't even own the fish they have caught. The movie has a main message: only solidarity among the laborers can be a basis for a society of free associates.
Luchino Visconti was the assistant director during the shooting of the movie 'Toni' in which Jean Renoir used amateur actors. 'Toni' paints also the fate of (Spanish) journeymen in France. But, there is an essential difference between Jean Renoir's and Luchino Visconti's movie: Toni doesn't transcend the personal level of his characters (their love lives), while in 'La Terra Trema' the lives of the protagonists are embedded in a real general socio-economic environment.
Luchino Visconti shot a most memorable social drama, maintaining throughout the movie a most impressive emotional and typically local atmosphere. A must see.
Luchino Visconti's movie is a Malthusian story: only the prosperous can love and marry. His movie is also a Marxist story. It sets the wholesalers (the capitalists) against the fishermen. When the wholesalers pool their money and buy new boats, the fishermen's only choice is to sell their labor force. Now, they don't even own the fish they have caught. The movie has a main message: only solidarity among the laborers can be a basis for a society of free associates.
Luchino Visconti was the assistant director during the shooting of the movie 'Toni' in which Jean Renoir used amateur actors. 'Toni' paints also the fate of (Spanish) journeymen in France. But, there is an essential difference between Jean Renoir's and Luchino Visconti's movie: Toni doesn't transcend the personal level of his characters (their love lives), while in 'La Terra Trema' the lives of the protagonists are embedded in a real general socio-economic environment.
Luchino Visconti shot a most memorable social drama, maintaining throughout the movie a most impressive emotional and typically local atmosphere. A must see.