Giovanna Giuliani

  • Mario Martone – L’odore del sangue AKA The Scent of Blood (2004)

    Mario Martone2001-2010ArthouseDramaItaly

    A couple of bourgeois intellectuals, Carlo and Silvia are married for twenty years. But they wearily live their relationship separately; while she lives in their original flat in Rome, he lives with a young lover, Lù from time to time in his house in the country while writing a book. He does not keep his relationship hidden from his wife and even accepts that Silvia may have lovers, among them in particular a young and violent neo-fascist. But this relationship rekindles Carlo’s jealousy and he becomes obsessed by knowing everything about her affairs and jealousy makes him blind. The film navigates between eroticism, decadence and perversion, in an obscure game with no wins or winners.Read More »

  • Jean-Marie Straub – Le streghe, femmes entre elles (2009)

    Arthouse2001-2010FranceJean-Marie Straub

    Le Streghe, Femmes entre elles (The Witches, Women among Themselves).2008. France/Italy. Written and directed by Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Dialogues with Leucò, by Cesare Pavese. With Giovanna Giuliani, Giovanna Daddi. 35mm. In Italian. 21 min.

    The enchantress Circe recounts to Leucò her attempts to bewitch and bed Odysseus. She talks about men and women, the human and the divine, and the brave hero who chooses to become neither pig nor God. In her adamantine repose, Circe also hints at the monotony of her own immortal fate, and contrasts it with the vibrating currents of life she so dearly craves and envies in Odysseus, with his longing for home, childhood, and love. These women-demigods are frank and sensitive at the same time, like the men of Raoul Walsh’s films, where the communities of male and female are deathly separate, and massive to each other. Walsh made a western, The Tall Men, in 1955. This 2008 Straub-film is its reverse shot. (Joshua Siegel – MoMA)Read More »

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