Journey to Italy
"Journey to Italy" performed badly at the box office and was largely a critical failure. It had a profound influence, however, on New Wave filmmakers working in the 1950s and 1960s. As described six decades later by film critic John Patterson: "French critics at the "Cahiers du Cinéma" – the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol – all saw it as the moment when poetic cinema grew up and became indisputably modern. "Journey to Italy" is thus one wellspring of the French New Wave. A film convulsed by themes of sterility, petrification, pregnancy and eternity, it finds its echo in such death-haunted "Nouvelle Vague" masterpieces as Chabrol's "Le Boucher" and Truffaut's "La Chambre Verte"." Filmmaker Martin Scorsese talks about the film and his impressions of it in his own film "My Voyage to Italy" (1999).