Italy

In this magnificently inscrutable late-sixties masterpiece, Marco Ferreri, one of European cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteurs, takes us through the looking glass to one seemingly routine night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer, played, in a tour de force performance, by New Wave icon Michel Piccoli. In his claustrophobic mod home, he pampers his pill-popping wife, seduces his maid, and uncovers a gun that may have once been owned by John Dillinger—and then things get even stranger. A surreal political missive about social malaise, Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto) finds absurdity in the mundane. It is a singular experience, both illogical and grandly existential.Read More »

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A paranoid police procedural, a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power, and a candidate for the greatest predated Patriot Act movie ever, Elio Petri’s stunning thriller makes no attempt to hide the culprit behind the film’s grisly murder: It wants you to know that Gian Maria Volonté’s dapper killer is responsible for the beautiful corpse splayed out on those black silk bedsheets. The shocks here are (a) that the spaghetti-Western stalwart isn’t wearing a cowboy hat for once, and (b) that Volonté is not just the criminal, he’s also the homicide detective heading up the investigation. Deliberately hiding some clues while planting others in plain sight—bloody footprints, a strand of his tie purposefully inserted under her fingernails—the rising-up-the-precinct-ladder cop plays a game of cat-versus-other-dumber-cats, all while ordering copious wiretaps and amassing blackmail fodder against radical agitators. Is he toying with his fellow officers to demonstrate his sociopathic superiority? Or is he trying to take down a rotten system from the inside, debunking the notion that any citizen is above suspicion?Read More »

The swansong of the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (La dolce vita, 8½), The Voice of the Moon emerged without fanfare: it played the Cannes Film Festival out of competition after its Italian premiere and failed to secure distribution in North America and the UK. This new restoration from the original negative seeks to right that wrong and provide the film with a second chance…Read More »

An extremely rare film by Roberto Rossellini, his third feature, made under the Fascist control of Italy. Basically rejected after the War because of the Fascist content of the film, “Rossellini produces a work which focuses upon the Italian expeditionary forces on the Eastern Front and upon a Catholic chaplain representative of Italy’s religious majority…the principal character’s humanity and sacrifice seem to prefigure the good-natured priest of Rome, Open City who works with leftist Resistance leaders…Rossellini underlines the common humanity in Fascist and Bolshevik alike” (Peter Bonadella, Italian Cinema from Neo-Realism to Present).Read More »

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« Transparences : voir à travers, pouvoir entrevoir le “cinéma” sur pied, ou porté. Œil et main deviennent mouvement, griffes et projection. Sur la décomposition du matériau nitrate, ses transformations (d’un fragment de guerre ayant appartenu à Luca Comerio, tourné par lui en 1916 sur le mont Adamello). Aspect physique en continuelle mutation. Restent les supports déchirés de la pellicule : perforations, collages, fluorescences, couleurs éteintes, jusqu’au total effacement de l’image originale contenue sur le photogramme. Effacement de l’image de la guerre ; parenté entre le nitrate et la poudre à canon. Métamorphoses du cinéma “qui défile” en cinéma de la matière collante, gommeuse, explosive. Dernier état du cinéma : devenir bombe explosive incendiaire de la mémoire. »Read More »

The Film:
The Flowers of St. Francis is Roberto Rossellini’s answer to the despair
of the Italian neorealism he had previously been credited with initiating;
through a disconnected series of events in the story of the popular saint,
it affirms Christian beliefs at their most pure. The original Italian title
‘Francesco, giullare di Dio’ translates as “Francis, the Jester of God.”
It is even more inspirational than Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According
to St. Matthew mainly because of the natural behavior of the characters.
. . . Glenn Erickson,Read More »

Synopsis:
Fabio’s work consists in helping ex prisoners to find their way in the outside world, but his quite life changes after he meets Mr Sparti, now he has to fight his own ghosts.Read More »

Synopsis:
In London a tricky problem is presented to Edward [Luc Merenda], who has just recovered from a serious car accident. He can’t remember who he is. This is especially troublesome for him as people from his past start turning up and demanding that he “gives back the money” he owes them. He learns that his passport claiming he is Peter Smith is a fake and his real name is in fact Edward. The trail leads him to Italy where his wife Sara [Senta Berger] still unaware that he’s still alive has started putting together the shatters of her life since he went missing in London some years ago.Read More »

Synopsis
‘A wealthy shipbuilding family falls apart in the wake of labor unrest and economic crisis. Lorenzo is the son who returns home from college and falls in love with his mother, hates his father even more, and makes love to an older family friend Roberta. […] The family sinks into further disarray as the labor strike continues and the family fortune is depleted.’
– Dan PavlidesRead More »