Anna Magnani was an Italian actress who became known for her explosive and authentic acting. There is no ignoring her power on screen. I had never watched one of her films, but after viewing Mamma Roma, I have a newfound appreciation for Anna as an actress and a woman. She is a strong actor and stays true to herself. Her performance has been described as “an overwhelming eruption” (Pitassio 374). Her performance is definitely melodramatic, yet convincing.

In Mamma Roma, I could see the eruption coming from Magnani. Her laughter took over her whole body and her sadness creeped into the corners of her face. She feels like a real person when you watch her. In our reading, performance is defined as “the bodily expression conveyed in a film” and performance style as “the consistency of this expression” (Pitassio 376). This strongly relates to Magnani because she uses her whole body to express her emotions and it is more than just her face.

She is also a very authentic person. We learned about this in class and we talked about how she didn’t care about her appearance but about her integrity. I find this aspect of Magnani very respectable. She focused on her craft rather than her fame. Our reading explained authenticity as “the outcome of a personally experienced reality”(Pitassoo 380). She must have experienced hardship in her real life in order to convey it as well as she did. She used her reality in her acting so that she was never really acting at all.

In our other reading, by Tony Mitchell, Anna Magani is described as the world’s greatest actress. Mitchell explains that Magnani was exactly what postwar Italian cinema needed: “not starts, but people of the streets” (Mitchell 5). In class, we learned that people considered Anna Magnani as the most beautiful ugly woman ever seen. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but she was real. She was a real woman. She gave their films a sense of realism because it was believable that she was truly the character that she was playing.

I want to take a moment to talk about Mamma Roma as well. While I did enjoy Anna Magnani’s acting, I spent a lot of my time watching the film confused. I don’t know if this is because of the cultural/language barrier, but I didn’t understand the wedding scene at the beginning as well as who that man was that was following her for some time. I went back and read the movie description, and only then did I understand that Mamma Roma had been a prostitute. I found that the film didn’t explain a lot of the characters’ backgrounds, which left me confused. I also had a bad feeling that her son, Ettore, would die. However, the ending was so strange to me. Carmine threatens to expose who she really is to Ettore, but then Ettore dies before that can even happen. And for some reason, they all believe Ettore was in jail? Maybe I need to rewatch it? You tell me.