La Terra Trema is the second film from Italian Neorealist director Luchino Visconti. The film takes place in the poor Sicilian village of Aci Trezze where there is a class war between the rich merchants and the struggling fisherman. The fishermen spend all night out on the open waters in small boats catching fish only to allow their catch to be undersold by the greedy merchants who know they control the economy, giving the fishermen just enough to live off of but not so much that they ever feel they do not need the merchants any longer. Shot on location and using non-professional actors, La Terra Trema is a slow progressive look at humanity and the conditions were forced to live by even to this day.

La Terra Trema (The Earth Will Tremble) is a very long movie, just twenty minutes shy of three hours long, but it’s a film that makes great use of its long run time allowing the story to unfold blow by blow. The film opens up on a seemingly non-eventful early morning scene where the fishing boats are coming ashore with men on the docks yelling back and forth to men on the boats about their catch. It’s important to remember this scene, especially because it’s an early morning scene and we hardly ever, if at all, see the men sleep throughout the film. Despite the dangers out at sea, despite their fruitless efforts for clawing their way into stability, the fishermen know it’s work or starve. That is, except for one man, a soldier who has come home from war named Ntoli Valastros. Ntoli see’s that the fishermen of the village work long and hard and end up with nearly nothing. He convinces the younger men that they should be the ones to sell the fish to the merchants, not the older men who are resigned to their status in the world as beaten. In the end Ntoli decides that it would be better to work for themselves, uses the family home as collateral for a loan, and he and his family begin working for themselves. In human fashion the rest of the community silently agrees with Ntoli, but when it comes to action all they can think about is how angry the merchants will be and finding themselves starving for having played a positive role in the small revolt.

What makes the film so fascinating is that it’s a blueprint for the way that we live now and how our economy works today. We all know that our economy is suffering, the middle class is slowly but surely disappearing, and that our blood and sweat benefit’s the small percentage of the rich who rely on us to do the menial poorly paying jobs that hardly keep us afloat in this world of rising gas prices, housing crisis, and inner city crime brought on by poverty. It’s all here, literally, in black and white. Mind you this film was brought to the screen in 1948 and in that time the face of poverty has expanded from a small fishing village in Italy to the whole of our nation. It’s absolutely crazy how one man’s experimental direction revealed the true nature of humanity and all of the isms that falter our worlds growth, keeping us from being able to spare every man, woman, and child from knowing, hunger, pain, and desperation.

Yet another fascinating aspect of the film is the ending. I won’t reveal that here but twenty minutes before the end comes you already know how it will end, and not because you’ve guessed the ending. It’s a real shocker and a revelation about what kind of state the human psyche is in. You not only know what’s coming but you also accept it much in the same fashion the older fishermen in the village except their position in the world. That alone is simply one of the most triumphant displays of neorealism in cinema to me, how it captures a perfect picture of humanity desperate and cornered by economic woes, status, and solitude amongst numbers.

The film has been restored and re-mastered, still in it’s original black and white presentation. There are a few moments, like towards the back end of the film, that the picture gets a bit jumpy but it looks exceptionally clean for having come from the late forties. The audio, which is presented in mono, sounds great. On the back of the case it says its in Italian with English subtitles though the film specifically states that everyone in it spoke Sicilian because the poor did not speak Italian. Since I speak neither I’ll have to go with the film in that it is in fact Sicilian and not Italian. In any case it looks fantastic, sounds great, and is a film that I highly suggest seeing at least once. For me, it’s going and staying in my collection for frequent views. Enjoy.