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program notes and times
This program was organized in collaboration with Cinecittá International. Special thanks to Antonio Monda, Irene Bignardi and the Italian Cultural Institute of New York for their help in arranging this series.
The son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist and younger brother of world-famous scientist Bruno Pontecorvo, Gillo Pontecorvo studied chemistry before turning to journalism. In 1941, he joined the Communist Party, helped organize a network of anti-Fascist
partisans and served as a leader of the Garibaldi Brigade, using the nom de guerre Barnaba. He was among the leaders of the Milan Resistance from 1943 until Italy surrendered to the Allies. After WWII, while working in Paris as a journalist, he reportedly
happened to see Rossellini's Paisan and was so moved by the experience that he left his job, bought a camera, and began making
documentaries. He apprenticed with Yves Allegret, Mario Monicelli, and others , but has always maintained that "the ideal director should be three-quarters Rossellini and one-quarter Eisenstein."
Gillo Pontecorvo has earned an enduring reputation for non-
doctrinaire fiction films that often have the flavor of documentary, influencing the work of "political" directors from Costa-Gavras to Oliver Stone. An artist of conscience who works the dialectic of exploited and exploiter, rebel and ruler, with remarkable visual and intellectual rigor, Pontecorvo's neorealist-tinged vision dramatizes political complexities without ever falling into simplistic black and white polarities.
GIOVANNA
Pontecorvo's episode of Die Windrose,
produced by Joris Ivens and Calvacanti, 1956; 40m
A feminist film before there was feminism, according to Pontecorvo. A
textile worker wants to join her fellows in occupying their factory in order to protest the terrible conditions in which they are forced to work. Unfortunately, her husband refuses to allow her to participate. She does so in defiance of his authority and, at film's end, as the husbands of her compatriots bring food and offer support, Giovanna's husband is nowhere to be seen.
with
THE WIDE BLUE ROAD /
LA GRANDE STRADA AZZURRA
(1956; 100m)
Taken from a novel by Franco Solinas (screenwriter of Battle of Algiers, Burn), THE WIDE BLUE ROAD is set in Sardinia and tells the story of a fisherman with an independent turn of mind. Realizing he can make more money using explosives to kill fish in quantity, he embarks on the lucrative practice, with not the slightest concern for its effect on his fellow fishermen. When he buys at public auction a boat owned by a fisherman he's helped put out of business, his fellow-villagers write him off. Tragedy strikes, and the outcast comes to realize the cost of isolation in his close-knit fishing community. With Francisco Rabal, Yves Montand and Alida Valli.
Fri Feb 26: 2 pm;
Sun Feb 28: 6:30 pm
KAPO
(1959; 135m)
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1960, KAPO lost to Bergman's The Virgin Spring and didn't find a distributor in the United States for four years. A 14-year-old Jewish girl (Susan Strasberg) and her family are captured by the Nazis, and sent off to a concentration camp. Able to change identities with the help of a sympathetic camp doctor, she eventually becomes a guard, or "kapo." But power corrupts, and Strasberg begins to out-Nazi the Nazis. When her friend Terese (a superb Emmanuelle Riva) commits suicide, Strasberg realizes the monster she has become. Revealing her true identity to a Russian prisoner (Laurent Terzieff) she's fallen in love with, she devises an ill-fated plan to help her fellow inmates and redeem herself.
Sat Feb 27: 3:45 and 9:30 pm;
Tues Mar 2: 2 pm
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS /
LA BATTAGLIA DI ALGERI
(1966; 123m)
Pontecorvo's re-enactment of one of the bloodiest revolts in contemporary history looks like the most uncompromising of documentaries but is in fact a brilliant fiction. Featuring mostly amateur actors and local crowds, shot in grainy black and white, BATTLE could be mistaken for newsreel so powerfully immediate is the camera's up-close-and-personal participation in apparently actual events. With Ali La Pointe, a street hustler who becomes revolutionary leader, and professional French soldier Mathieu as dramatic vehicles, Pontecorvo documents both the brutality of the French and the tragedy of terrorist tactics during the brutal war for Algerian liberation that raged between 1954 and 1957. BATTLE's scenes of execution, torture and bombs exploding in urban areas are harrowing, without sensational manipulation or sentimental euphemism. Banned by the French government until 1971, the film won 11 international awards, including the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Festival.
Fri Feb 26: 6 pm (with intro by Pontecorvo);
Sat Feb 27: 6 pm*
Sun Feb 28: 9:10 pm;
Tues Mar 2: 6:30 pm
Wed Mar 3: 6:30 pm;
Thurs Mar 4: 2 pm
*On February 27, following the 6 pm screening, don't miss "An Open Conversation on THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, " featuring Gillo Pontecorvo and Edward Said, University Professor at Columbia University and respected author of numerous books, including Orientalism, Covering Islam, and Culture and Imperialism.
BURN / QUEIMADA!
(1969; 112m)
In the 16th century, Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) arrives on Queimada--so named because island-wide burning was the only way its native population could be expunged--to plot against the Portuguese government there. The idea is to open the way for a stronger English mercantile presence, and towards that end, Walker
"creates" a revolutionary (rather like making a star of a nobody), encouraging a thirst for freedom in the black Dolores (Evaristo Marquez) and embroiling him in a bank robbery that the secret agent stage-manages into a major slave revolt. Eventually, the government falls and the slaves are freed to become workers on the lucrative sugarcane plantations. Ten years later, a drunken, disillusioned Walker is hired to return to the island to put down Dolores's new revolution against a totally corrupt regime of "merchants." The Machiavellian manipulator must now essentially terminate the now-inconvenient political soul he once inspired and even loves. Determined to work on a strong political film, Brando had contacted Pontecorvo, who delivered a dramatic dissection of the amoral marriage of international government with big business, which cannot, however, withstand incorruptible, indigenous revolutionary faith.
Fri Feb 26: 9:45 pm
Tues Mar 2: 4:15 pm and 9 pm
Wed Mar 3: 2 pm
OPERATION OGRE / THE TUNNEL
OPERAZIONE OGRO
(1979; 115m)
In long flashback, Pontecorvo investigates the kind of terrorism that accomplished the spectacular assassination of Admiral Carrero Blanco, Francisco Franco's hand-picked successor, in 1973. Basque separationists had excavated a tunnel beneath a street Blanco often traveled and loaded it with plastic explosive; so powerful was the blast that the Admiral's car was blown 100 feet upward, onto the roof of a church. In this ambitious effort to
differentiate between terrorism within a democracy and under a dictatorship, Pontecorvo actually
interviewed the men responsible for Blanco's death.
Wed Mar 3: 2 pm and 9 pm
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