Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema (Indiana University, Bloomington,April 14-16)

Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema

The second annual Simposio sul Cinema Italiano Moderno e Contemporaneo (Symposium on Modern and Contemporary Italian Cinema) will take place April 13-16, 2011, at Indiana University in Bloomington. The event, organized by IU's Department of French and Italian, will feature several films, documentaries, and shorts as well as numerous presentations. Scholars and film fans from across the country and around the world will discuss many aspects of modern and contemporary Italian production.

Amnesia and Remembrance (Boston, January 30, 2011)

A commemoration of Italian Holocaust Remembrance Day will feature the critically acclaimed 2003 Italian film "Facing Windows," starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno e Massimo Girotti. Before the film, Professor Nancy Harrowitz (Boston University) will present a lecture entitled, "Making the Past the Present," and Professor Virginia Picchietti (Univeristy of Scranton) will speak on 'Memory of Italian Shoah and Ferzan Ozpetek's "Open Windows."'
The film will be shown at 12:45 and followed by a round table discussion with Virginia Picchietti, Nancy Harrowitz and John Bernstein.

January 30, 2011
11-3:15

Boston University, George Sherman Union Conference Auditorium
775 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

Sponsorred by Boston University and the Consulate General of Italy in Boston, in collaboration with the American Jewish Committee and the Consulate Heneral of Israeel to New England.

Torino Film Festival (Turin, 11/26/10-12/4/10)

* website
* dossier Repubblica.it

La Vespa e il Cinema (Pontedera, 11/5/10-1/15/11)

La Vespa e il Cinema
Pontedera (PI), Piaggio Museum, Nov. 5, 2010 - Jan. 15, 2011

International Rome Film Festival 2010

* website

The Complete Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Harvard Film Archive (September 3 to September 27)

Celebrated the world over as one of the central figures of the postwar Italian cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) is recognized in his native land as arguably the most important Italian artist and intellectual of the twentieth century. A gifted writer and penetrating thinker, Pasolini was already renowned as a poet, novelist, critic and screenwriter before he directed his first film, Accattone, in 1960. Pasolini remained prodigiously industrious as a writer and political activist throughout his career, even as his films brought him greater celebrity – and notoriety – during the last fifteen years of his life, often overshadowing other facets of his remarkably diverse accomplishments. An outspoken but unorthodox leftist, Pasolini attracted controversy from all sides of the political spectrum, with his often sexually explicit and willingly perverse films drawing the frequent ire of Italian censors. With his penchant for political critique and stylistic reinvention, Pasolini is in some ways the Italian counterpart to Jean-Luc Godard. Despite his obvious glee in shocking the bourgeoisie, Pasolini was also a thoughtful, even philosophical, filmmaker who bridged the gap between the post-neorealist group led by Fellini and Antonioni and the generation of Young Turks that included Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio.

Pasolini’s cinema is perhaps best remembered today for its unbridled sexual imagination and its often shocking depictions of violence and unorthodox sexuality. Equally important to his oeuvre, however, is Pasolini’s adamant rejection of the contemporary world. A profound nostalgia for a pre-modern way of life is expressed across Pasolini’s films, in which the magical and the pagan supersede rationality and religion, and an anarchic, polymorphous eroticism replaces what Pasolini regarded as the sharply alienated and alienating state of modern existence. Pasolini refined an extraordinary visual style to express this worldview, favoring static frontal shots evocative of pre- and early Renaissance painting. Most of all, however, Pasolini prized a mode of radical stylistic impurity, using Bach and Vivaldi, for example, as the unlikely yet profoundly fitting soundtrack to his visions of life in the Roman slums. This daring juxtaposition of “high” and “low,” a poetic version of the Marxist dialectic, remained one of Pasolini’s most influential stylistic touches.

During his career a major source of Pasolini’s notoriety was his open homosexuality, a then-rare position that he actually had little choice in establishing. In 1949, while living and teaching as a regional poet in northeast Italy, Pasolini was outed and promptly charged with corrupting a minor, resulting in the loss of both his teaching post and his membership in the Italian Communist Party. The subsequent scandal prompted Pasolini to flee to Rome and, in retrospect, may have inadvertently hastened his rise to prominence in Italian literature. Today Pasolini’s grisly and still unsolved murder, perhaps at the hands of a teenaged hustler, has permanently linked his homosexuality to his public profile.

Pasolini announced his unique style and approach to narrative with his first three works– Accattone, Mamma Roma and The Gospel According to Matthew – which each offer a reworking of the legacy of postwar Italian neo-realism. In the mid-1960s Pasolini made an abrupt turn by attempting to create his own version of a popular cinema, casting the comic star Totò in a group of films, most notably Hawks and Sparrows, using humor and allegory to critique the changes brought about by Italy’s economic and industrial boom. The tepid response to these unusual comedies inspired Pasolini to proclaim allegiance to “unpopular cinema,” and turn to the melding of myth and scathing political critique that resulted in Oedipus Rex, Medea and Pigsty. Pasolini changed course again with his “Trilogy of Life,” an unprecedentedly accessible series of literary adaptations – The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights – until finally rejecting these films with the savage Salò, the ultimate film maudit, which he finished just days before his premature death. This retrospective covers all of the many phases of Pasolini’s filmmaking by including each of his thirteen features and his most important shorts, as well as a reconstruction of La rabbia, a film long considered lost.

Special thanks: Cineteca di Bologna; Liborio Stellino, Consul General of Italy, Boston.

Teorema
Friday September 3 at 7pm
Sunday September 12 at 7pm
A radically streamlined and elliptically simple film, Teorema remains one of Pasolini’s most mysterious works. The story of a sexually magnetic stranger, played by a mesmerizing Terence Stamp, who methodically disrupts the well-ordered household of a wealthy Milanese industrialist, Teorema’s hidden tensions are brought to the surface with a shocking suddenness that remains as inexplicable as it is inevitable. Meant as a merciless savaging of the bourgeoisie, Teorema features a pair of well-known Italian actors as the subjects of its critique—Massimo Girotti and Silvana Mangano as husband and wife— as foils to the alluring stranger, who may be angel or demon, or something else entirely.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky
Italy 1968, 35mm, color, 98 min. Italian with English subtitles

Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re)
Friday September 3 at 9pm
Pasolini turned to myth in the search for a “primal cinema” that occupied the late stage of his tragically shortened career, choosing Oedipus Rex to delve into perhaps the most primal myth of all. Yet Pasolini explicitly rejected any Freudian trappings of the myth, offering an Oedipus less a man scarred by his forbidden intimacy with his mother than a cautionary emblem of willful ignorance. Pasolini transforms the myth into a critique of innocence, not as an absence of guilt but rather as an avoidance of knowledge. Pasolini Oedipus is not a crusader for truth brought down by fate and hubris but rather a man who blunders into his fate precisely by refusing to confront it. Pasolini’s second film set in antiquity and his first in color, Oedipus Rex explores a noticeably more elaborate art direction and costumes than his previous evocations of a vanished ancient world.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene
Italy 1967, 35mm, color, 104 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Gospel According to Matthew (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo)
Saturday September 4 at 7pm
Pasolini’s disarmingly straightforward version of the life of Christ secured his reputation as a filmmaker, rather than simply a poet dabbling in cinema. Aiming to strip away the sanctimony typical of screen adaptations of the Gospels, Pasolini sought to recover the rough poetry of the original texts, pointedly omitting the “Saint” from his title to secularize Matthew. Pasolini’s Christ emerges as much a political revolutionary as a religious figure, addressing the problems of the poor and undermining the patriarchy of the traditional family. With a visual style heavily influenced by Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), the film contains a number of frontal, static shots that reveal Pasolini’s love for early Renaissance painting and point toward the radical classicism of his late films.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Susanna Pasolini
Italy 1964, 35mm, b/w, 137 min. Italian with English subtitles

Love Meetings (Comizi d’amore)
Saturday September 4 at 9:30pm
The remarkable Love Meetings is nothing less than a cinema-vérité Kinsey Report – with occasional Godardian touches – on Italian sexual mores in the 1960s. Traveling across Italy, Pasolini and his camera interview people on the street, sunbathers at the beach and soccer players on the pitch about their attitudes towards marriage and divorce, homosexuality, prostitution, machismo and gender roles. While a notable consensus agrees that things are changing it remains less clear what, if anything, these changes mean. In one of his few essays on cinema, Michel Foucault wrote admiringly of the film’s ability to capture the complex ambiguity of reactions to the so-called “sexual revolution.”
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Musatti.
Italy 1964, 35mm, b/w, 92 min. Italian with English subtitles

Medea
Sunday September 5 at 7pm
In the figure of Medea, the sorceress seduced and abandoned by the adventurer Jason, Pasolini saw an allegorical emblem, both for the defeat of the irrational by the rational and for the colonization of the ancient world by an expansionist West. In a series of nearly wordless sequences, Pasolini brilliantly conjures the primal realm of magic and sacrifice which Medea naively leaves to follow Jason, only to realize that she has become a steppingstone for his worldly ambitions in a coldly rational milieu of political power plays. Pasolini drew his inspiration for his second adaptation of a Greek myth, not from the canonical theatrical dramatization of Medea, but from anthropological accounts of the history of religion. In her only dramatic onscreen appearance, the opera star Maria Callas is riveting in the title role.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Maria Callas, Laurent Terzieff, Massimo Girotti
Italy 1969, 35mm, color, 110 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Walls of Sana’a (Le mura di Sana)
Monday September 6 at 7pm
Pasolini’s rarely screened documentary short explores the incredible architecture of the almost 3,000 year old Yemenese city of Sana’a. With its direct appeal to the spectator to help save these fragile structures, The Walls of Sana’a is offers a moving testimony to Pasolini’s deep attachment to the ancient world.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy 1971, 35mm, color, 13 min. Italian with English subtitles

Followed by
Notes for an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade africana)
While shooting Medea, a film about the subjugation of the ancient world to an alienating modernity, Pasolini developed the idea to make a companion piece about another Greek myth – the story of Orestes. This story would end more happily, with the archaic making way for a different kind of modernity, built not on exploitation but on communalism. Encouraged by emerging socialist governments in post-colonial Africa, Pasolini hoped to shoot his film there, and so he went to Uganda and Tanzania to scout for locations and actors. That footage became the basis for this film, with Pasolini explaining his ideas on the soundtrack. A perfect example of leftist intellectual auto-critique, the film climaxes with Pasolini discussing his plans with a group of African students in Rome. The discussion hovers somewhere between tragedy and farce as one by one, the students calmly and kindly offer numerous reasonable objections to Pasolini’s idea, all of which he seems to take in stride. The Oresteia project was never made. Little-seen and little-discussed, the film is essential viewing for understanding Pasolini’s political thinking and his attachment to myth.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy 1970, 35mm, color, 63 min. Italian with English subtitles

Accattone
Friday September 10 at 7pm
Pasolini’s magnificent directorial debut, a chronicle of the life of a petty criminal and pimp, reveals the young director’s indebtedness to postwar Italian neo-realism with its episodic narrative, location shooting on city streets and use of nonprofessional actors. Much remarked at the time was Pasolini’s then-startling use of stately music by Bach on the soundtrack to accompany contemporary urban squalor and the static frontal shots that often evoke early Renaissance painting and immediately stamp Accattone with Pasolini’s distinctive style. In his first screen appearance, Franco Citti as the pimp establishes himself as the most important member of Pasolini’s ensemble of actors.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini
Italy 1961, 35mm, b/w, 116 min. Italian with English subtitles

Pigsty (Porcile)
Friday September 10 at 9:15pm
In both Theorem and Pigsty, Pasolini seeks to synthesize the mythic strain that surfaced in Oedipus Rex with the stridently political filmmaking emerging in Europe in the second half of the 1960s and epitomized by Godard’s film. In a nod to the French director, Pasolini reunites the lead couple from La Chinoise, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky, who appear in one of Pigsty’s two parallel plots, this one set in the present, with Léaud as the son of a wealthy businessman whose lack of interest in his fiancée betrays an unorthodox sexual predilection. The other story takes place in an unspecified prehistoric past, where a brutish barbarian scrounges for food in an archaic landscape ravaged by primitive warfare. Pigsty acts as a crucial missing link between the critique of Theorem and the darker depictions of savagery to come.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Pierre Clementi, Anne Wiazemsky
Italy 1969, 35mm, color, 98 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Rage of Pasolini (La Rabbia di Pasolini)
Saturday September 11 at 7pm
In 1962, Pasolini was invited by an Italian newsreel producer to create a feature-length film essay from his company’s library of footage. Inspired by diverse wealth of imagery, Pasolini set out to make a film as “a show of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world.” Assembling images from the Soviet bloc and various anti-colonial movements as complement and contrast to the newsreel footage, Pasolini crafted a remarkable tour de force of politically trenchant commentary on the modern world, climaxing in a moving meditation on the death of Marilyn Monroe. Fearing controversy and box-office failure, the producer ordered Pasolini to cut the original version to less than an hour and then promptly added a right-wing counterpart by the filmmaker Giovanni Guareschi, packaging the two parts as one film. Disowned by Pasolini, this version was indeed a failure. Although Pasolini’s original version remains lost, an ambitious reconstruction was recently completed by Giuseppe Bertolucci and the Cineteca di Bologna using the shot list and a dialogue transcript from the first version, as well as Pasolini’s notes on music for the film.
Directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy 1963/2008, 35mm, b/w and color, 83 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Decameron (Il Decameron)
Saturday September 11 at 9pm
In an attempt to turn away from the more experimental direction of his late 1960s work and create a “popular cinema,” Pasolini turned to the beloved collection of alternately bawdy and tender tales of star-crossed lovers, randy nuns and pedophile pickpockets written by Boccaccio in the fourteenth-century. The result is one of the director’s most accessible films, filled with early Renaissance imagery, plentiful nudity and earthy eroticism. While Boccaccio used a range of different narrators to tell each story of romantic attachments and ribald misadventures, Pasolini replaces this framing device with a series of brief interludes featuring himself as a Giottoesque painter. To Pasolini’s dismay, the film’s international popularity inspired a number of soft-core imitations.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ninetto Davoli
Italy 1971, 35mm, color, 110 min. Italian with English subtitles

La Ricotta
Monday September 13 at 7pm
For his contribution to the omnibus film RoGoPaG – comprised of episodes by himself, Rossellini, Godard and Ugo Gregoretti – Pasolini fashioned an ingenious fable that is both a satire on filmmaking and a tribute to Italian Mannerist painting. Although Orson Welles stars as a director filming the crucifixion, the real protagonist is an unassuming middle-aged man working as an extra to feed his family. The extraordinary meeting of three worlds—high art, moviemaking and all-too-real poverty—leads to a collision with tragicomic consequences, a “collage,” as Pasolini called it, that allows him to effectively critique the distance between ethics and aesthetics.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Orson Welles, Mario Cipriani, Laura Betti
Italy 1963, 35mm, b/w and color, 35 min. Italian with English subtitles

Followed by

Seeking Locations in Palestine for the Film “The Gospel According to Matthew” (Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il film “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo”)
Pasolini had originally planned to shoot The Gospel According to Matthew in the approximate locations referred to in the Bible: Nazareth, Jerusalem, Bethlehem. With this in mind he visited the area—including other parts of Israel, Jordan and Syria—with a newsreel photographer, filming both the landscape and its inhabitants. Edited by The Gospel’s producer for potential funders and distributors, Pasolini added a semi-improvised commentary as the only soundtrack to his footage, including his musings on Jesus and his teachings and on the difficulty of finding suitable locations for his project, while avoiding the subject of Israel and Palestine. An evocative behind-the-scenes glimpse into Pasolini’s creative project, the film serves as testimony to his idiosyncratic views of Jesus as a historical figure and his distinctions between the ancient and modern worlds.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Italy 1965, 35mm, b/w, 52 min. Italian with English subtitles

Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte)
Sunday September 19 at 7pm
In his version of the Middle and Near Eastern tales called the Arabian Nights, Pasolini revels in the sheer joy of storytelling, elaborately intertwining a series of meandering episodes that lend the film a rich narrative complexity. Eliminating the storyteller Scheherazade, Pasolini instead embeds the nested stories within a framing narrative about a poor young man searching for the escaped slave girl who is his lost love. Like The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, the film abounds in nudity and scenes of sexuality, although cast now in a far sunnier mood than those two films, perhaps an expression of Pasolini’s declaration to have “liberated” himself by shooting for the first time in distant non-European disparate locales, from Ethiopia to Nepal, and using a cast combining Pasolini regulars with nonprofessional actors found on location.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Tessa Bouché, Ninetto Davoli
Italy 1974, 35mm, color, 129 min. Italian with English subtitles

Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini)
Monday September 20 at 7pm
Pasolini regarded il Boom – the massive economic and industrial development of postwar Italy and the wave of rapid social change that followed – as a tragic catastrophe, a sweeping away of Italy’s last vestiges of pre-modern culture by replacing them with the depredations of consumer capitalism. Alternately caustic and gently comic, this melancholy film offers a parable of those changes, tracing the odyssey of a father and son through a landscape of degradation and exploitation as they follow a talking crow that delivers a Marxist critique of the situation. A homage to silent comedy, Hawks and Sparrows proved to be Pasolini’s parting shot at contemporary Italy before he turned to his cycle of mythic films.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Benussi
Italy 1966, 35mm, b/w, 86 min. Italian with English subtitles

Mamma Roma
Friday September 24 at 7pm
Monday September 27 at 7pm
Inspired by his work on the screenplay for The Nights of Cabiria, Fellini’s spirited fable about a Chaplinesque prostitute, Pasolini offered his own portrait of a Roman streetwalker, replacing Fellini’s whimsy with a clear-eyed and unflinching look at the lives of the urban poor. In one of her signature roles, the indomitable Anna Magnani captures the stubborn pride and vulnerability of the title character, a woman fiercely protective of her son, who is himself a classic version of the Pasolinian ragazzo, living large on the streets and drifting inevitably toward a life of crime. Pasolini’s juxtaposition of the Fascist-era housing block that is home to mother and son against the nearby ruins of an ancient aqueduct reveals his lifelong attraction to the archaic and his lasting distrust of the modern.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofalo, Silvana Corsini
Italy 1962, 35mm, b/w, 105 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Canterbury Tales
Friday September 24 at 9pm
For his follow-up to The Decameron, Pasolini selected Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the other great fourteenth century collection of stories. If the world of Pasolini’s Decameron is that of the dawning of the Renaissance, the world here is decidedly medieval, with a concomitant emphasis on the vulgar and the grotesque. Although the “Trilogy of Life” was conceived as a celebration of the body, this middle piece marks a palpably darkening mood. Returning to the episodic structure so central to Pasolini’s cinema, the film recounts a series of amorous misadventures with a sharp emphasis placed more on sex than on love, lust or desire. Climaxing with a wildly scatological vision of Hell, The Canterbury Tales is propelled by notably cruel humor, a violence more pointed than The Decameron and an even more raw sexuality.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Laura Betti, Ninetto Davoli, Josephine Chaplin
Italy 1972, 35mm, color, 110 min.

Salò
Sunday September 26 at 7pm
Disillusioned by the sexual revolution, which he felt had only entrenched sexuality in consumerism and bourgeois rationalism, Pasolini disowned his “Trilogy of Life,” the three early 1970s films intended as erotic celebrations of the body, and responded with his most notorious and final film, Salò. Set in northern Italy during the last days of Mussolini’s reign, the film liberally adapts Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, using the tale of amoral libertines who kidnap young victims for a sacrificial orgy to launch a ruthless and wide-ranging attack on modernity as a whole. Setting up equivalences between Sadean sexual license, Italian fascism and consumerist alienation, Salò delivers a trenchant political allegory that tends to be overshadowed by its explicit nudity and images of sexual sadism. The film’s ultimately extreme violence and deviant sexuality have earned it the reputation as arguably the first “artsploitation” movies, a precursor to the likes of Funny Games (1997, 2007) and Irreversible (2002).
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Paolo Bonicelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Franco Merli
Italy 1975, 35mm, color, 116 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
617-495-4700
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa
Tickets are $9 for the General Public, $7 for Non-Harvard Students, Seniors, Harvard Faculty and Staff
Harvard students free
The HFA does not sell advance tickets. Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time at the HFA box office.

Line-up of the 67th Venice Film Festival Announced

* website

Umbria Film Festival (Montone, July 7-11, 2010)

UMBRIA FILM FESTIVAL Alternative voices in european cinema
XIV Edition

1. Umbria Film Festival hosts "Umbriametraggi", a section dedicated to the works of film-makers who where born or are living in Umbria, selected through a specific competition.

Screening schedule

2. Special event: Immigrants

" Immigration has been the underlying theme of Umbria Film Festival already for a long time. Some of the most beautiful and poignant films screened in Montone show immigration as a relentless stream having an impact on the lives of many people, and asking them a high toll in terms of blood and death, but also as a phenomenon marked by triumphant challenges and the continuous search for better living conditions. However, today the word immigrant threatens to arouse irrational fear, hatred and violence, as a consequence of the influence of the so called political entrepreneurs of fear. In order to contrast this trend, the Region of Umbria is committed in the building of a multiethnic society, in the belief that cultural creativity, the development of civilizations and economic prosperity are the result of cooperation among the people, rather then their separation.

Since 2007 the festival has hosted a specific section: Immigrants. Many events are born from the cooperation between the Regional Council for Social Policies and Umbria Film Festival, such as the meetings on "Second generations" (2007) and on "Cre-Active Immigration" (2008). The latter was dedicated to all the cultural phenomena introduced by the "non local" people who have drawn inspiration by their cross-cultural personal experience, and expressed it in the most diverse artistic fields, ranging from literature, to cinema, from theatre, to music. Both meetings have clearly shown that the second generations of immigrants are taking an increasingly important role in the cultural and political life of our country, but nonetheless they have to face the same problems as all the other youngsters trying to build their own future.

Today school is the place where the resources, contradictions and weaknesses of our social system are most evident. In 2008 there were 13688 foreign students in Umbria (11.4% of the total enrolments), according to data provided by the Ministry of Education.

Nowadays, speaking of a multicultural education does not mean pointing out the indubitable statistics of multiethnic classes, nor regurgitating the slogans of democratic tolerance. That only shapes people who are unprepared, at both cultural and material level, to face the hard experiences to which a serious intercultural education should train. A multicultural school neatly reveals all the contradictions of the education system. (...)

The Immigrant section of the 13th Umbria Film Festival starts from this element to deal with pedagogical, cultural, philosophical and literary research, as well as the current political discussions and the proper classroom practices, especially in this delicate phase of transition (burdened by heavy cuts in the financial resources available), facing difficulties despite the individual and collective efforts to overcome them. A cooperation between generations and a joint work is possible only admitting this fact.

The Section programme will see the screening of feature and short films which have distinguished themselves at international level, and the organization of a forum on the theme: “A school for a multiethnic society”. "

3. Forum “A school for a multiethnic society” July, 9 - 4PM Oratorio San Fedele

"Today school is the place where the resources, contradictions and weaknesses of our social system are most evident. The conference programme aims at dealing with pedagogical, cultural, philosophical and literary research, as well as with the current political discussions and proper classroom practices, especially in this delicate phase of transition (burdened by heavy cuts in the financial resources available), facing difficulties despite the individual and collective efforts to overcome them.

Speakers: Antonella Castelnuovo, Giuseppe Nuccetelli, Massimo Palermo, Franco Pittau, Nicola Rossi, Stefania Scaglione, Damiano Stufara, Mariano Tirimagni, Alessandro Maria Vestrelli, Andrea Villarini.

Experiences: Rita Capacci, Paola Palmieri, Fabrizio Zappelli. "

Open Roads 2010 - New Italian Cinema (NYC, June 3 to 10)

at Film Society at Lincoln Center

* article by Liliana Rosano [Oggi 7]

Biografilm Festival 2010 (Bologna, June 9-14)

"Biografilm Festival is the first international event entirely devoted to biographies and life tales. The aim of Biografilm Festival is to find and to show life paths and experiences, big and small stories that influenced and determined the world history.

Biografilm Festival individuated, and followed with a perfect timing, the peculiarity of the biopic genre and its audience, for some reason not explored before in Italy: the cultural quality of the biopic genre is intended as a highly positive value from a communication perspective, in a moment during which there’s a return to values the like of widening, commitment and a general increasing request of quality cultural products. .

Biografilm Festival has detected and answered to an audience that finds in biographies a chance of deepening and reflection about complex and current themes. The festival has anticipated and contributed to enlarge the interest about biographies that has pervaded the recent cinematographic production: over 300 films received by the artistic direction for the 2009 edition witness the vitality of the genre.

Biografilm Festival will showcase, within a wide and articulated program, a selection of recent feature and short films, both fictional and documentaries, cinema and TV productions. The festival promotes, as well, tributes to directors who, with their work, have contributed to the development of the biographic genre, and schedules national and international premieres of brand new films, along with related special events, thematic programs and retrospectives.

Thanks to the cultural profile of the extremely rich program and to the consistency of the inspiring theme, last edition of the Biografilm Festival, brought the attention to the core of human life using all kinds of languages and expressive means and achieved a great critic and audience success.

Each day of the festival is devoted to a specific personality, with a programme of screenings, meetings and special events. "

"The 6th edition, that will take place in Bologna, from 9th to 14th June 2010 at Manifattura delle Arti, celebrates 50 years of the memorabile Italian time of the ’60. Titled “ Italia ’60, il Boom, la dolce vita”, the core of the Festival is the 1960, as symbolic year representing a divining line to discérn the rural Italy- just came out of the war and of dictatorship- from the rest of nation that was approaching to the consumerism, factories, social changement, wellness, beauty and to new politics actions.

An Italy that in the 1960 was totaly to rebuild and to imagine/figure out."

Priests in Cinema: Priests and the Cinematic Image (Rome, from June 3)

Preti al Cinema. I sacerdoti e l'immaginario cinematografico
Lateran University, Rome

* Slideshow [Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo]

Hai visto mai? Festa del documentario (Siena, May 28-30)

* website

Ferzan Ozpetek: A Retrospective (Los Angeles, 5/1/10-6/27/10)

UCLA Film & Television Archive, Cinecittà Luce and the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles present
FERZAN OZPETEK: A RETROSPECTIVE

"In a firmly established but still-blossoming cinematic career, director Ferzan Ozpetek has carved out a unique niche in world cinema. The Turkish-born director has produced his oeuvre to date from a base in Italy, and indeed, has consistently displayed a cinematic vision that privileges characters moving between states of being, whether involving nationality, phases of life or social categories. In this way, his restless imagination has been a perfect foil for the staid monuments of Rome (a frequent backdrop in his work) whose reassuring and impassive façades mask diverse human experiences always under negotiation and construction. Immigrants, the lovelorn, those adrift in alienating jobs or marriages and especially gay people (little acknowledged in Italian cinema) undergo loss and renewal, and glimpse the possibility of transcendence, as Ozpetek's fluid and elegant visual style imbues their experiences with a deep humanism. The Archive is proud to welcome Ferzan Ozpetek in person at the Billy Wilder Theater for this retrospective, including the Los Angeles premiere of his latest film, Loose Cannons (2010)."

Note: June 8 and 12 screenings are free and will take place at the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles.

Vittorio De Sica Program at the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge, MA June 5-14, 2010)

Vittorio De Sica – Neo-Realism, Melodrama, Fantasy
June 5 – June 14 at the Harvard Film Archive

The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center for the Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
617-495-4700
http://hcl.harvard.edu
Tickets are $9 General Admission, $7 Seniors and Students

The Films
Shoeshine (Sciuscia)
Saturday June 5 at 7pm
Sunday June 6 at 9pm
De Sica’s heart-wrenching portrait of two impoverished shoeshine boys uses the ever-present Allied soldiers and bombed ruins as a constant reminder of the still reverberating devastation of war. De Sica and Zavattini’s interest in symbols and, increasingly, fantasy, is legible in the figure of the horse that becomes the boys’ sole source of happiness and, almost simultaneously, despair. Rarely screened today, Shoeshine stands with Bunuel’s Los Olviadados as one the great films about children.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Rinaldo Smordoni, Franco Interlenghi, Anniello Mele
Italy 1946, 35mm, b/w, 93 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Gold of Naples (L’oro di Napoli)
Saturday June 5 at 9pm
In this delightful episodic comedy about Naples, De Sica pays tribute to the city where he spent his childhood. Loosely structured around four short vignettes and featuring some of Italian cinema’s biggest stars – including De Sica as an upper-class gambler - this anthology showcases the lyric beauty of Naples and De Sica’s evident love for its people and places while subtly plumbing the depths of the human heart.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Totò, Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano
Italy 1954, 35mm, b/w, 107 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Children Are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano)
Sunday June 6 at 7pm
A searing portrayal of familial disintegration vividly told from the perspective of a five-year-old abandoned by his mother, De Sica’s proto-neorealist masterpiece foregrounds a thematic concern that recurs throughout his oeuvre – the troubled distance between children and adults as an echo of a dysfunctional society destabilized by fascism and war. As a vital witness to the callousness and ingratitude pervasive throughout society, the young boy’s struggle to ascribe moral values to the world offers both an indictment and an ambiguous vision of hope.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Luciano De Ambrosis, Isa Pola, Emilio Cigoli
Italy 1943, 35mm, b/w, 85 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Monday June 7 at 7pm
The story of a wealthy Jewish family willfully shut off from the rest of the world and in reckless denial of fascism’s hold on the Italian people, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is narrated by Giorgio, a frequent guest of the family and the only one who foresees the impending and unstoppable forces that will shatter their cloistered world. Combining luminous flashbacks with the present, the film’s structure resembles De Sica’s own comeback: the once great director who was written off in the 1960’s re-emerges out of the past with this late, luxuriant masterpiece.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Dominique Sanda, Lino Capolicchio, Helmut Berger
Italy 1970, 35mm, color, 93 min. Italian with English subtitles
Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano)
Friday June 11 at 7pm
Sunday June 13 at 9pm
An off-beat and entrancing entry in De Sica’s neorealist canon, Miracle in Milan is an extraordinary fable that bends towards magic realism to imagine a place where society’s most downtrodden can find purchase and possible escape from misery. Set within a fantastically theatrical shantytown, Miracle in Milan constructs an alternate world from De Sica and Zavattini’s fascination with marginalized perspectives. One of De Sica’s unsung masterpieces, Miracle in Milan’s unusual use of deliberate artifice and spectacle rekindles the Meliesian, magical aura of early cinema.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Emma Gramatica, Francesco Golisano, Paolo Stoppa
Italy 1951, 35mm, 96 min. Italian with English subtitles

Terminal Station (Stazione termini)
Friday June 11 at 9pm
Following a fraught collaboration, producer David O. Selznick – without De Sica’s knowledge or consent – re-edited their film and released his bowdlerized version as Indiscretion of an American Wife. De Sica’s version – his last true neorealist work – stars Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones, as a married American whose attempt to end an affair with an Italian academic occurs in real time in the eponymous station. Delicately portraying the vulnerability of the lovers, Terminal Station sensitively explores the powerful pull of desire and the conflict between personal happiness and familial duty.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift, Gino Cervi
US/Italy 1953, 35mm, b/w, 90 min.

Umberto D.
Saturday June 12 at 7pm
A powerful diary of loneliness and old age written by the palsied hand of slow suffering, Umberto D tells the story of an elderly man struggling for dignity and survival in a society indifferent to the needs of its frailest members. Cruelly marginalized and eventually forced onto the streets, with only his dog for companionship, Umberto is victim to an impersonal, uncaring state and a petty, hardhearted society. With minimal dialogue and a small cast of nonprofessionals, De Sica uses Carlo Battisti’s devastating performance as Umberto, the atmospheric streets of Rome and G.R. Aldo’s brilliantly crepuscular cinematography to etch an emotionally resonant portrait of societal breakdown as a quiet yet terrifyingly absolute disintegration.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari
Italy 1952, 35mm, b/w, 89 min. Italian with English subtitles

After the Fox (Caccia alla volpe)
Saturday June 12 at 9pm
De Sica’s late comedy shines with a witty screenplay co-written by Neil Simon and a playful film-within-a-film structure with a hilarious Peter Sellers at its center. Although seemingly an unlikely project for De Sica, After the Fox returned to his roots in sophisticated comedy, where he is able to cleverly manipulate milieu and story – a band of thieves smuggling gold from Cairo – into a biting satire of a fluttering, superficial world of disguises and postures. With a wickedly funny turn by Victor Mature as an aging, egotistical actor and its affectionate skewering of narcissistic directors – including De Sica himself in a cameo – After the Fox is a biting repart to the decadence of the 1960s Italian film industry.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Victor Mature
Italy 1966, 35mm, color, 103 min.

The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette)
Sunday June 13 at 7pm
De Sica’s best known film and a foundational work of the neorealist movement, The Bicycle Thieves uses nonprofessional actors and incredible location shooting on the streets of a war-ravaged Rome to tell the gripping story of a downtrodden man whose quest to reclaim a stolen bicycle sends him on a spellbinding tour through the city’s working class neighborhoods with his young yet wise son. A heartbreaking work of redemption and hope in the face of overwhelming despair, The Bicycle Thieves is a richly insightful examination of the human condition.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
Italy 1948, 35mm, b/w, 87 min. Italian with English subtitles

Two Women (La Ciociara)
Monday June 14 at 7pm
A heartbreaking story of survival during WWII, a preternaturally beautiful Sophia Loren stars as a young widow returning to her native village, fleeing Rome and the Allied bombings with her teenage daughter. An operatic and devastatingly intense story of family ties and societal hypocrisy, Two Women is one of the greatest film melodramas of all time. When the small town proves no safer than the city, both mother and daughter must reach far deeper into the well of human suffering than seemingly imaginable.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleonora Brown
Italy 1960, 35mm, b/w, 105 min. Italian with English subtitles

Tra Palermo e Brooklyn. Tribute to John Turturro (Turin, 1, 23-26, 2010)

"From 23 to 26 January 2010, the National Cinema Museum presents the festival Tra Palermo e Brooklyn. Tribute to John Turturro at the Cinema Massimo. The retrospective festival dedicated to the actor and director from New York comprises a selection of films in which he acted and which he directed, and is produced in conjunction with the Teatro Stabile and the Dams of Turin University for the theatre performance Fiabe italiane, directed by Turturro, on stage at the Carignano Theatre from 19 to 31 January."

"On Monday 25 January at 8.45 p.m., during the festival Tra Palermo e Brooklyn. Tribute to John Turturro, the National Cinema Museum presents a showing of the film Prove per una tragedia siciliana on Screen Two of the Cinema Massimo in the presence of the actor and director from New York John Turturro."

* A day dedicated to Turturro
Turin, DAMS, January 27

* a post about the spectacle Italian Folktales

* a post about the film

L'Italia che non si vede

L'Italia che non si vede is a project made by ARCI-UCCA, a member of IFFS, International Federation of Film Societies. Every club can choose from the following titles:
- Io, la mia famiglia rom e Woody Allen by Laura Halilovic [trailer; in Italian with English subtitles];
- Civico 0 by Francesco Maselli [inspired by Luigi Pintor's sentence about migrations “…tutto questo andrà e andrà ancora avanti, finchè la terra tremerà di nuovo sotto i nostri ben calzati piedi” and by the novel In nome del barbone by Federico Bonadonna] [interview with Maselli];
- Welcome Bucarest by Claudio Giovannesi [excerpts];
- Il colore delle parole by Marco Simon Puccioni [trailer; article by Fabrizio Corallo];
- L’Aquila bella mè by Pietro Pelliccione and Mauro Rubeo;
- Uso improprio by Luca Gasparini and Alberto Masi,
- Billo. Il Gran Dakhaar by Laura Muscardin;
- Non tacere by Fabio Grimaldi, a film about Don Roberto Sardelli [trailer; radio interview with the filmmaker];
- Thyssenkrupp blues by Monica Repetto [trailer];
- Signori Professori by Maura Delpero;
- Di me cosa ne sai by Valerio Jalongo [trailer];
- Sognavo le nuvole colorate by Mario Balsamo.

Cinema Italian Style 2009 (Hollywood and Santa Monica, 11/10-18/09)

Cinecitta' Luce and The American Cinemateque present
Cinema Italian Style 2009. A Selection of the Best Italian Films of 2009
November 10-18, 2009

27th Torino Film Festival

Programme and trailers

Italian Neorealism (New York, 10/30/09-11/25/09)

Italian Neorealism
New York, Film Society of Lincoln Center - Oct. 30 - Nov. 25, 2009

"Organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Cinecittà Luce, and the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale. This series is presented under the distinguished patronage of the President of the Italian Republic. With the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture – Film Department, and the Italian Consulate General."

Tutto Fellini! (Paris, 10/20/09-1/17/10)

"L’automne à Paris sera fellinien avec l’exposition "Fellini, la Grande Parade", qui s’inscrit dans le cadre de l’événement "Tutto Fellini !", organisé en hommage à Federico Fellini par la Cinémathèque française, l’Institut culturel italien de Paris et le Jeu de Paume, en partenariat avec la Fnac et le comité régional du Tourisme Paris Île-de-France."

Exhibition
Paris, Jeu de Paume - From Oct. 20, 2009 to Jan. 17, 2010

Events at the French Cinémathèque

* Links