Tag Archives: Italian cinema

RIP Alberto Grimaldi (1925 – 2021)

Alberto Grimaldi was an Italian film producer known for producing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Last Tango in Paris, but more importantly for us, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini.

That Sodom film you don’t need to see to form an opinion about. It’s better just to read about it and let it lead you to the manuscript by Sade on which it was based.

That book has the lines:

“How many times, damn it, have I not desired that one could attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world”.

But I digress.

RIP Lucia Bosè (1931 – 2020)

Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

Lucia Bosè was an Italian actress with a long and fruitful career.

I choose to remember her by a documentary film she did not act in.

In Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), an identified photo of her is on the cover of a fictional book with the title Mars.

The cover of that book is unveiled at 9:42. The audience follows the book around the library as it makes its way to the shelves.

RIP Flavio Bucci (1947 – 2020)

Flavio Bucci was an Italian actor known in my canon for his tiny part in the metafilm Closed Circuit (1978).

I wrote about that film here.

In that film Flavio Bucci sports thick glasses and plays the part of a nerdy sociologist who takes notes of the audience’s reactions during the screening of the film.

Afterwards he is interrogated by the police. Has he seen anything which can solve the murder of a man in the audience by a gun man IN the film?

You can see Mr. Bucci from 27:20 onwards.

Mr. Bucci also played in the sex comedy Gegè Bellavita (1978) which can be found in full on YouTube.

RIP Anita Ekberg (1931 – 2015)

Anita was more than Sylvia of the Trevi Fountain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_99e25pmd5c

She was also Sister Gertrude, the Killer Nun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muWJxdOBqbI

Here are the deaths in 2014 and the ones who have died in 2015.

On the subject of death: I’m still recovering from the Charlie Hebdo murders. I feel that the world will never be the same again, much more than I felt that about 9/11.

RIP Giulio Questi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqb4Mie7768

RIP Giulio Questi, 90, Italian director and screenwriter, known for Django Kill and La morte ha fatto l’uovo (Death Laid an Egg).

The enigmatic clip above is from La morte ha fatto l’uovo (1968) starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin. It appears to be a piece of YouTube bricolage. Perhaps the music in the clip is from the film, music by Bruno Maderna?

I’ve previously mentioned Death Laid an Egg.

Update: the full movie in English:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2tTw0tS86I

Update:

The full soundtrack is online:

The soundtrack is indeed composed, arranged and conducted Bruno Maderna and it appears to be the best thing of the film. However, the high modernism of Maderna in combination with this piece of genre cinema makes the film a perfect example of nobrow artsploitation and had I not been three years old when this film came out, I would have surely wanted to see it.

Thematically, the film reminds me of Pasolini’s Pigsty. That’s probably because in both films a victim is fed as animal food, in Pigsty (“eaten by pigs in the sty”) as pig food, in Death Laid an Egg (“the farm chickens feed on Marco’s ground corpse”) as chicken food. Which reminds me of Soylent Green, the film in which, after euthanasia, dead humans are made into crackers  and fed to living humans.