As 1973 winds down, Franco is still governing Spain with an iron hand. Opposition parties are forbidden; labor movements are repressed; and Basque nationalists are mercilessly hunted down. The caudillo is aging, though, and the continuity of the régime is in question. One man has the trust of Franco, enough authority and experience to assume the leadership, and an impeccable track record as to dealing with enemies of the State: admiral Carrero Blanco. For the embattled clandestine Basque organization ETA, Carrero Blanco must be brought down. Daring plans are made, requiring a meticulous execution. (IMDb)

	
Ogro (1979) Gillo Pontecorvo - 1080p.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 45mn
Size: 	6.62 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1440x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	8 983 Kbps
BPP: 	0.220
Audio
#1:  	Italian 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 768 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/F5C15D2BAEF577B/Ogro_(1979)_Gillo_Pontecorvo_-_1080p.mkv

Language(s):Italian, Spanish
Subtitles:English

Many thanks to Marcio For this copy

The post Gillo Pontecorvo – Ogro (1979) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This short is set in the early 1950s in a small textile factory in central Italy (Prato). Giovanna and her fellow female workers decide to enact a protest against the direction of the factory’s dismissal plan, by occupying the factory and continuing to work until the proprietor cancels the dismissals. None of these women can really afford to lose their jobs, as it is the only income in the family. All workers receive moral and material support from their families, apart from Giovanna, who bravely endures her husband’s disapproval. Almost all the women hold out for thirty-five days in spite of the proprietor’s attempts to break their resistance. At first he blocks the road to the factory, then he cuts off electric power to increase their isolation; finally, he tries to convince them to accept the dismissal of at least a smaller number of them. But the women overcome these obstacles, determined to resist… (IMDB)

449MB | 36m 59s | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/7B89611A6A2824A/Gillo_Pontecorvo-Giovanna_(1955).avi https://nitro.download/view/D0996D16F687E42/Gillo_Pontecorvo-Giovanna_(1955).en.srt

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Gillo Pontecorvo – Giovanna (1955) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The most electrifyingly timely movie playing in New York was made in 1965. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is famous, but for some time it’s been available only in washed-out prints with poorly translated, white-on-white subtitles. The newly translated and subtitled 35-millimeter print at Film Forum is presumably the version that was privately screened in August for military personnel by the Pentagon as a field guide to fighting terrorism. Former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski volunteered this blurb: “If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers.” I wonder if these politicos are aware that Pontecorvo’s epic was once used by the Black Panthers as a training film? In fact, not much in the current Iraq situation is historically comparable to the late-fifties Algerian struggle for independence dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, but its anatomy of terror remains unsurpassed—and, woefully, ever fresh.

The movie’s original U.S. distributor inserted the disclaimer: “Not one foot of newsreel or documentary film has been used.” That disclaimer might still be helpful to first-time viewers. The Battle of Algiers has often been compared to Potemkin as an example of incendiary, documentary-style political filmmaking. But Eisenstein’s classic was a flurry of highly theatrical techniques; there was a formality to the revolutionary chaos he unleashed, with carefully patterned crowds surging on cue. Pontecorvo’s approach is much looser and more caught-in-the-moment, although everything is carefully choreographed. What perhaps accounts for the extraordinary realism is a combination of Pontecorvo’s chief neorealist influences, Rossellini’s Open City and Paisan (the movie that inspired Pontecorvo to become a filmmaker), and his own wartime experience as an anti-Fascist partisan who commanded the Milan Resistance in 1943. The Battle of Algiers is a movie made by a director who knows (in both senses) whereof he shoots.

Co-written by Franco Solinas, who would later write Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege, the film was originally intended as a piece of agitprop for the cause of anti-colonialism. (De Gaulle pronounced Algeria an independent country in 1962, so the struggle was still fresh for audiences.) Subsidized by the Algerian government, the movie began as a sketchy screenplay written in a French prison by Saadi Yacef, the rebel leader of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Upon his release, Yacef approached three filmmakers: Luchino Visconti, Francesco Rosi, and Pontecorvo (demonstrating that, whatever else might be said about them, some revolutionaries have good taste in movie directors). Yacef not only became the film’s producer but also stars in it as El-hadi Jaffar, the military leader of the FLN. The existential ramifications of this casting are breathtaking: When we witness the bombings of civilians in the cafés and dance halls of Algiers’s European Quarter, or the hit-and-run assassinations of French policemen, we are seeing re-creations of what Yacef himself perpetrated. When Jaffar is trapped and about to be blown up by French paratroopers in the casbah, Yacef is acting out his own arrest. What must have been going through his head on the set?

The other rebel protagonist is Ali La Pointe, played by Brahim Haggiag, an illiterate peasant chosen by Pontecorvo for his riveting, prole-hero features. Ali—his eyes, to be exact—is the fervid center of the movie. A petty thief, he is radicalized in prison by the executions he witnesses, and recruited by the FLN upon his release. (To test his mettle, and to make sure he’s not a spy, Jaffar orders him to assassinate a French cop.) Ali is not a character, exactly; he’s the embodiment of downtrodden Muslims clamoring for liberation. Pontecorvo has a great eye for faces that carry within themselves a depth charge, and in Ali he gives us an unforgettable mask of suffering and rage. There is destiny in that acetylene glower of his; it tells us that time is on his side.

His adversary is Colonel Mathieu, played by Jean Martin—the film’s only professional actor—and modeled on General Massu, the military commander of Algeria. (Ironically, Martin, primarily a stage actor, had once been blacklisted in France for signing a manifesto against the Algerian war.) If Ali is fire, Mathieu is dry ice. He represents military efficiency at its most draconian: His lecture to his paratroopers about how to decapitate the FLN is an object lesson in the calculus of anti-terrorist warfare. When a press conference is staged with a captured FLN leader, and his words begin to stir sympathy in the room, Mathieu shuts down the show. He may represent Pontecorvo’s paradigm of colonialist thuggery, but as is so often true with movie villains, he gets the best lines. This man, who fought as a hero on the side of the Resistance and served during France’s recent defeat in Indochina, is given his due—if only to reinforce a deeper point. When Mathieu tells the reporters that they must accept the consequences of war if they want France to win, he is exposing the ugly truth behind all policing; people in power prefer not to know about the dirty work—the torture—that keeps them there.

Pontecorvo makes it clear that terrorists must also face their own moral reckoning. The strongest scene in the movie comes when three FLN women drop their veils and assume a Western look in order to infiltrate the European Quarter and plant explosives in two cafés and an Air France ticket office. We see tired businessmen at a bar, passengers waiting to board buses, teenagers dancing, and, most pointedly, a baby licking an ice cream cone—all soon to be blown to bits. Is Pontecorvo saying that these people are tragic casualties of a necessary war? Perhaps. But in the end, the horror unleashed in The Battle of Algiers cannot be fitted into neat partisan formulations, which is perhaps why so many disparate groups, from the Panthers to the Pentagon, have tried to claim the film for their own agenda. What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway—the sense that allsides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion. – Peter Rainer, The New York Times

3.45GB | 2h 01mn | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/78AEE67F1184471/Gillo_Pontecorvo_-_(1966)_The_Battle_of_Algiers.mkv

Language(s):French, Italian, English, Arabic
Subtitles:English

The post Gillo Pontecorvo – La battaglia di Algeri AKA The Battle of Algiers (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot:
The professional mercenary Sir William Walker instigates a slave revolt on the Caribbean island of Queimada in order to help improve the British sugar trade. Years later he is sent again to deal with the same rebels that he built up because they have seized too much power that now threatens British sugar interests.

1.93GB | 2 h 8 min | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/356FC518111E010/Queimada_(aka_Burn!)_-_Hybrid_Edit.mkv

Language:English/Italian
Subtitles: Partial English

The post Gillo Pontecorvo – Queimada (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

As 1973 winds down, Franco is still governing Spain with an iron hand. Opposition parties are forbidden; labor movements are repressed; and Basque nationalists are mercilessly hunted down. The caudillo [dictator] is aging, though, and the continuity of the régime is in question. One man has the trust of Franco, enough authority and experience to assume the leadership, and an impeccable track record as to dealing with enemies of the State: Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. For the embattled, clandestine Basque organization ETA, Carrero Blanco must be brought down. Daring plans are made, requiring a meticulous execution…
— Eduardo Casais, IMDb

Pontecorvo’s fifth and last feature film is based on the 1974 book by Julen Agirre (pen name of Eva Forest), Operación Ogro: Cómo y por qué ejecutamos a Carrero Blanco (Operation Ogre: How and Why We Have Executed Carrero Blanco), a series of interviews with ETA members involved in the assassination. Carrero Blanco was apparently nicknamed “El Ogro” due in part to his bushy eyebrows.

***

Pontecorvo’s last feature, Ogro (1979), is perhaps the key film in his opus. Ogro was planned as a straight, chronological depiction of the Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) terrorist assassination of Franchist minister Carrero Blanco in 1973 Spain. But Pontecorvo felt obligated to change the narrative of the film to question terrorism after the kidnapping and murder of former Italian premier Aldo Moro by Communist terrorists in 1978. Pontecorvo has admitted that Ogro was actually made with a guilty conscience due to concurrent events in Italy. He attempted to salvage the film by including characterizations that question the legitimacy of terrorism. But these additions make Ogro a film that contradicts itself. The film’s heroic depiction of a terrorist act is enveloped by flashbacks and a coda in which a Basque ETA terrorist on his hospital deathbed admits his fears about meeting his maker in light of the violent life he led. His comrades attempt to comfort him by praising his courage to act on his convictions. But in the final scenes they distance themselves from their hard-line comrade’s belief in violence as a legitimate political tool. The scene is a fitting finale for Pontecorvo’s entire opus, which runs from the enthusiasm of his appearance as a resistance fighter in Outcry, to his vivid depiction of armed struggle in The Battle of Algiers, to the fatalism of Burn!, and finally the retreat from terrorism with the guilty conscience of Ogro.

— Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism

Carrero Blanco’s Dodge Dart, after being blown five stories high and landing on a balcony on the far side of a Jesuit college

Clneaste: Did you encounter any particular problems in getting Ogro produced?

Glllo Pontecorvo: Yes. In 1976, shortly after we started working on the project, the Americans (United Artists) who were to have produced it got scared. Franco was dead, but the political regime was still half Francoist, and United Artists was afraid that the Spanish government would block the distribution of their other films in Spain. So we stopped for a year and a half. During that time there was a democratic movement in Spain, and the government changed. Since the danger of repercussions was lessened, we were able to renew the project. Following this, however, there was another interruption, apparently because the theme we had selected was too difficult and not very commercial. After four or five months of searching, we finally came up with two producers — an Italian, Franco Cristaldi (and his associate, Nicola Carraro); and a Spaniard, Jose Samano.

Clneaste: The Moro affair occurred during this period. Did it encourage you to make changes in your scenario?

Pontecorvo: Yes. It was during the kidnapping of Moro that we wrote the final version of the script, after hesitating between continuing or dropping the project altogether. The film probably shows the effects of many of these perplexities. We perhaps overstated the fundamental difference, as we see it, between armed struggle under a democratic regime and armed struggle under a dictatorial regime…

…disallowing the speaking of Basque in school is a determining element in the story. Of the four protagonists involved in the assassination, to whom I have spoken at length, two of them told me that the deepest, longest-lasting impression left upon their memories was of being punished with a ruler. One of them, in fact, spoke about it for over two hours. Consequently, this scene synthesizes the mode of fascist repression against all forms of expression of national identity.

— Interview by Corinne Luca for Cineaste

The sinkhole left by the explosion

Q- Everyone asks, why have you directed so few movies?

A- It’s true I make one film every eight or nine years. I am like an impotent man, who can make love only to a woman who is completely right for him. I can only make a movie in which I am totally in love. If you had the list of films I’ve refused – The Mission, Bethune, etc. – you’d have a telephone book.

When I do a film, they pay me very well. I live modestly, and I can live ten years in Rome on what I am paid for a film. My wife agrees to live with me modestly, but to be very free. We are very close. She teaches music aesthetics at a conservatory, and, if I ever changed professions, I’d push to be a composer. I like music more than movies.

I play piano very badly, but enough to write a score. I wrote the music for all my documentaries, and for Kapo and The Battle of Algiers. In my opinion, a film is a synthesis of form and content, but a synthesis based on a counterpoint of sound and image. It’s not always that the visual image is more important than the sound image. In writing my next film, I’ve changed four scenes because of the music.

Q- Few in America have seen your 1979 feature, Ogro, or The Tunnel.

A- It’s the contemporary story of the Basque fight for independence. I don’t consider it a good film. I was telling a story of an act of terrorism against Franco as the same time I was strongly against the 1978 terrorist death of Aldo Moro. You can feel it in the film, that I am contradictory.

Because of European stars Gian Maria Volonte and Angelina Molina, Ogro made money in Italy and I won the prize in Italy that year for Best Direction. Critics were divided. In Spain, right-wing people threw things at the screen, so they had to stop showing it.

— Interview by Gerald Peary

The lovely Ana Torrent

Pontecorvo’s Special Effects man, Emilio Ruiz del Río — a model-maker, painter, and designer — was considered the world master of glass painting and one of the great geniuses in the use of miniatures.

1.26GB | 01:40:16 | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/6BA1CE7D44654FA/Operacion_Ogro_(Gillo_Pontecorvo,_1979).avi
https://nitro.download/view/E6163C8FF554C8F/Operacion_Ogro_(Gillo_Pontecorvo,_1979).eng.srt

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Gillo Pontecorvo – Operación Ogro [Spanish version] (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.