Coming up at the Howard Assembly Room later this week is an event that celebrates the work of legendary composer Nino Rota. The last event in the Howard Assembly Room’s FILMusic season sees accordian player Richard Galliano and saxophonist and clarinet player John Surman team up to reinterpret Rota’s work as expansive jazz suites.

Nino Rota is well known for the soundtracks he created for Italian film director Federico Fellini. One of their most successful collaborations was on the 1954 film La Strada, which is widely regarded as a breakthrough film for Fellini and the winner of the first ever Academy award for a Foreign Language Film.

It is a tragic and strangely affecting story that juxtaposes comical circus routines reminiscent of an earlier ‘silent clowns’ era against the reality of a scruffy post war landscape inhabited by marginalised and downtrodden people. Because of these surreal and fantastical elements in a film that in other ways conforms to the gritty themes of Italian neo-realism, La Strada is often read by critics as a transitional film for Italian cinema.

Gelsomina is a gypsy girl with big eyes and a funny face, who takes the hat around for Zampano, a travelling strongman. Gelsomina (played by Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina) was bought from her poverty-stricken mother by the strongman after he delivered the sinister news that her sister, whom he previously took with him, is now dead. She plays his drumrolls and acts the fool to make the audience laugh, but when the greasepaint comes off we see that Zampano (Anthony Quinn) is surly and mean.

She travels and performs with him posing as his wife, although she is more like a prisoner in his clapped out motorbike-caravan. When they join a travelling circus troupe, a kindly tightrope walker il Matto ‘the fool’ tries to teach the simple yet charming Gelsomina some new tricks, but Zampano’s volcanic temper ensures their stay amongst the group is short and he gets himself arrested in a brawl with il Matto.

‘Dogs look at us wanting to talk but bark instead’ says the tightrope walker of the brutish Zampano and so despite his womanising and heartlessness, Gelsomina sticks by him (whatever happened to her sister is never resolved) until the death of the circus friend finally sends her mad, making her of no further use to him.

From the film’s bleak beginning with Gelsomina standing on an empty beach, to a harrowing ending with Zampano alone on another beach, journeys and processions are symbolic, encounters are significant and human faith, bonds and relationships are examined, but nothing ever suggests that things will get any brighter. Zampano is eternally stuck in his act of using his muscular strength to break chains, while Gelsomina remains lost in wistfulness and abstract longings for love and music.

A wistful tune, just a couple of bars, repeats in subtle way throughout the film’s soundtrack and it reminds Zampano of the absence of someone.  Although he never showed her the tenderness she craved, we come to see that the brawling, smoking and occasionally smouldering strongman unwittingly does love Gelsomina, but if he realises, it is all too late.

Laura Ager

Leeds International Film Festival

Richard Galliano and John Surman play the music of Nino Rota in the Howard Assembly Room on Friday 3 February. More information and booking details can be found here.