Italy
Kieron Tyler
Ennio Morricone: In ColourKieron TylerThe recent release of Berberian Sound Studio raised the level of interest in Italian film soundtracks. From the moment Ennio Morricone’s compositions for the spaghetti westerns of the Sixties attracted attention, it became obvious that Italy operated to a different metronome than the other filmmaking nations. Morricone will always be a prime interest, not least because he has made so much music, in a bewildering array of styles. This exceptionally good value, neatly packaged clam-shell box collects eight of his soundtracks from 1969-1979 over four discs. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by passing contact with temptation. For Garrone’s far more sympathetic family, that’s the prospect of fame on Big Brother. Here, a child of Palermo scrap-dealer Nico Ciraulos (Toni Servillo) is killed during a botched Mafia hit.Cipri doesn’t bother trying to make us grieve, which the family don’t either after they realise that as Mafia victims they’re Read more ...
theartsdesk
By day, Friar Alessandro Brustenghi lives and works in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi. In his spare time, he works as a carpenter. But he also has a new career as, in the words of his producer Mike Hedges, “the next Italian tenor”. The fruits of his entry into Abbey Road’s recording studio is Voice from Assisi. You can listen here on theartsdesk to the entire album, exclusively until midnight on Thursday.Voice from Assisi consists of traditional and modern sacred songs, from Schubert’s Ave Maria and “Sancta Maria” from Cavalleria Rusticana and a recently discovered Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The onset of puberty is difficult, and especially so for girls in art house films. Marta is 12 and has been away from Italy for 10 years. In the days after returning with her mother and sister, she contends with being prepared for her first communion and her changing body. Quietly, as if not there, Marta observes the hypocrisy of adults. Dog-tired from working in a bakery, her mother is forced into the background.As Marta, Yle Vianello is terrific, a watchful presence who tries hard to do the right thing but is frustrated, who keeps a distance but is forced to interact. She bakes a cake for Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Even though their names are bound together in the portmanteau title, the directors of the four short films that make up RoGoPaG - Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti - don't go for any sort of narrative tie-ins. The only thing that links the films are the Sixties themes: nuclear annihilation, the shifting role of women and the rise of consumer capitalism. The largely unsatisfying results would only recommend themselves to the dedicated arthouse fan or movie historian were it not for Pasolini's inspired contribution, La Ricotta.The generosity of vision in Pasolini's La Ricotta Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores. In Berberian Sound Studio writer-director Peter Strickland takes this phenomenon as a mere starting point, following his self-financed debut Katalin Varga with Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Way up in the mountains of northern Italy sits a small spa town called Porretta Terme. For many visitors it is the resort’s healing waters that brings them here. Yet for others it is the healing music – once a year the Porretta Soul Music Festival is held across the second to last weekend in July. Here veterans of American soul music take the stage, often performing their only European show of the year (and, sometimes, many years). I’d heard rumours of Porretta for several years – it has existed since 1988 – and having missed elusive genius Swamp Dogg at last year’s festival meant I went Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The tone of these two new Pier Paolo Pasolini's re-releases couldn't be more different. The Hawks and the Sparrows stars the Italian prince of laughter Totò and one of Pasolini's most popular Calabrian peasant-actors (and lovers) Ninetto Davoli, and ambles gently through the Italian countryside in a surreal and inventive and Last of the Summer Wine-ish way. Pigsty, on the other hand, is the kind of Pasolini film where, when two boys meet, you have no idea if they're going to fight each other, fuck each other or eat each other. Mostly, they eat each other - and anything else that they can lay Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The curtain rises onto a wall that totally blocks the view. A long silence... then, without warning, the wall collapses – to cheers of delight from the audience. For the rest of the evening, the dancers have to pick their way over rubble strewn across the middle ground that restricts free movement to strips of open space at the front and rear of the stage. It's a powerful metaphor for a society constrained by its past as well as its present; and Sicily is littered with the remains of civilisations that have disappeared leaving behind buildings stricken by earthquakes, swallowed by lava Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It stymies any tourist to sum up for others what they saw abroad. Still more challenging, to create (or recreate) for theatre as a choreographer something more than superficial, more than clichéd about Italy, Japan, Los Angeles, Istanbul, these most clichéd of cultures. The opening of the monumental, enticing series of 10 of the late Pina Bausch’s “World Cities” season in London - a posthumous celebration of her talent - launched last night with the first of her views, Viktor, a production about Rome, postcards of Rome sent in Eighties Italy by a German choreographer.Choreographers’ output Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Rossini's La Cenerentola is not an opera that I'd normally recommend to anyone with even half a brain. It takes the simple if mildly nauseating little tale of Cinderella, pads it out with parental abuse and drawn out cliffhangers, and ends in a pass-the-sick-bag denouement of "Goodness Triumphant". Yet, in an act worthy of the fairy godmother herself, Glyndebourne has transformed the piece into something unmissable. As ever with this classy East Sussex institution, the thing that raises proceedings above the level of panto is the extraordinary casting. The first delights that we're Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”There’s something about da Mosto that makes TV producers come over all unnecessary. In their view there is no one more ruggedly handsome and intrinsically Italian than he. Thus, in Shakespeare in Italy, if he wasn’t captured driving his red Alfa Romeo down country Read more ...