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.

Romantic melodrama set in 18th century plague-ridden Italy. Elvire (Brigitte Fossey) enters a loveless marriage with the elderly Piacchi (Fernando Rey) and finds herself becoming attracted to their adopted son Nicolo, who reminds her of a man who once sacrificed his life for her.

1.15GB | 1h 34m | 672×400 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/F3B023CDA09C979/Un_amour_interdit.avi

Language(s):French
Subtitles:None

The post Jean-Pierre Dougnac – Un amour interdit aka A Strange Passion (1984) 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.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani first garnered critical attention with this adaptation of Gavino Ledda’s autobiography, winning both the Golden Palm and the Critics Prize at Cannes in 1977. Gavino’s father pulls him out of elementary school at the age of 6 to force him into the life of a Sardinian shepherd, often severely beating him. Yet Gavino’s illiteracy spurs him on to eventually earn a university degree on Sardinian dialects. And it’s his journey from the cruel, solitary, animal world of shepherding under the yoke of his tyrant Padre, to that of a writer and a linguist that forms the body of this tale. But more, it’s a showcase for the talents of the Taviani brothers, whose style keeps us distant from their subject, like a child watching an ant colony.There’s a moment in Padre Padrone (“Father Master” for those who want to be clued in to the film’s political rumblings from the get-go) that typifies the best and worst it has to offer. Gavino, having had a violent argument with his father, decides to leave home to keep the peace, but must retrieve a valise that’s under the bed his father is currently sitting on. This brings the top of his head conveniently close to Padre, whose hand absently moves to pat him on the noggin, but instead raises in a fascistic fist of rage. The ambivalence of the gesture is pointed, and well taken. But to make the point, the Tavianis have abstracted their characters past all recognition. There is no time in the film when a scene is not a carefully controlled abstraction. Now the characters are all gestures and tableaux, swallowed by pastoral landscapes, markers in its historical sweep rather than flesh-and-blood people. While this might appeal to an audience’s sense of intellectual cool, it also deprives them of the richer joys of being allowed under a character’s skin. (-Jim Gay – Editorial Reviews – Amazon.com)

Padre Padrone 576p.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 53 min
Size: 	2.25 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x576 
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 648 kb/s
BPP: 	0.200
Audio
#1:  	Italian 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/1F645CC4FF94FB3/Padre_Padrone_576p.mkv

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Paolo Taviani & Vittorio Taviani – Padre padrone (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.