‘Sometimes / one confuses the pettiness of the world / with the offences of the world. / Ah! / If there were / knives and scissors, awls, picks and harquebuses, / mortars, sickles and hammers, cannons, cannons, dynamite!’
The first part of a trilogy of films based on the work of Elio Vittorini,
Sicilia! (1999) is adapted from the author’s anti-fascist novel
Conversations in Sicily (1939). After many years away, Silvestro returns from northern Italy to the Sicilian countryside of his childhood to visit his mother. The film, shot in black and white, retains the musicality of Vittorini’s language and is made up of a series of conversations the protagonist has with strangers in a port, fellow passengers on a train, his mother, and a knife-sharpener.
Sicilia! will be shown on a new 35mm print
In
Six Bagatelles Pedro Costa takes unused scenes of
Where Lies your Hidden Smile?, for which he filmed Huillet and Straub while editing
Sicilia!, and combines them in a new edit.
This screening will be followed by a talk by Daniel Fairfax and a conversation moderated by curator and researcher Nicolas Helm-Grovas.
Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main and editor of the online film journal
Senses of Cinema. His study of the transformation of
Cahiers du cinéma and film theory in the wake of 1968 is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press.
Sicilia!, Dirs: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France/Italy, 1999, 35mm, b&w, 66 mins., Italian with English subtitles.
6 Bagatelles.
Six Bagatelles, Dir. Pedro Costa, 2001, Portugal / France, HD on DCP, 18 mins., French with English subtitles.
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