Diary of Future Visions
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Diary of Future Visions adjacency of the presence on the screen that, during the festival, must still happen, er), even while knowing that the visions we by Sergio Grmek Germani and the presence in the theater. We will be we will walk through the “program,” hop- long for but that are still unknown are infi- the first to admit (like Stendhal and Truffaut, ing that this diary will be read by real view- nite. Do yo think they can cure this fire? Why do lovers of actresses) that we would gladly ers, that the inalienable plurality of cinema they have to cure her? She wants to leave the welcome to the red carpet Nicole Kidman, (of desires and bodies) will reach the plu- Thursday, September 18. A place not yet mark of her desire on every living creature Sharon Stone, Uma Thurman, and Charlize rality of I mille occhi – of a thousand eyes. crossed by the festival (the Bay of Duino), in the world. If she was a Caesar she’d do it Theron, that we envy the super-fashionable The program may be seen by a concrete that brings to mind our first year by the sea, with a sword. If she were a poet she’d do it festival of Capri Hayden Panettiere and audience in its integrality, hopefully (and at Molo IV, averting then the indifference with words. But she is Lilith; she has to do it Lindsay Lohan. We are convinced that these certainly not terroristically) since we are a that dominates the pseudo-politics of cul- with her body. presences would be thrilled, as they would one-theater festival that plays around only ture to which we must be connected. The Lilith - Jean Seberg in the film written be with a Warholian icon or the visual ency- through offering several alternatives of film of Breda Beban (that we will speak and directed by Robert Rossen, clopedia of Sacha Guitry, to be beside the informational supplements in the video about by means of a “replica” in the theater) from the novel by J.R. Salamanca presences that come to our festival, next to room (where whatever has no alternative in returns to the location where it was filmed, We will not boast by ourselves (a program the images that appear on our screen. And our theater can be seen, as such, and what- Duino. Inspired by lines from Rilke’s Duino that is ever more rich, the many partners certainly not only the 15 minutes of fame ever does, belongs to a second life that we Elegies, like Lav Diaz’s Death in the Land of collaborating with us, a catalog that con- that a nihilist civilization allows each per- hope will be more than just virtual). Encantos. We will see it as a life perform- tains so much, now also in English, etc.) son, but rather with desire for Glory that This program is directed towards living ance, because we would like to see it since all of this is nothing but a script for a Audiberti elected as a destiny that neither eyes, even when they belong to those who expand beyond the cinema. film to be made. The festival will be real- deceives nor is mistaken. are no longer with us, from our cinephile ized in Trieste from the 19th (with a pre- What is there in cinema greater than its friends like Piero Tortolina, to those in the Friday, September 19. To begin a festival event on the 18th) to the 27th of September, power to not let us forget the bodies? We program to whom we are dedicating our one needs, quite literally, the right title. along with a few marginal notes (in Turin will present in this year’s program several of screenings (“Screening for...,” in which we They Won’t Forget, with its melancholic from October 1-3, and in Trieste again for the greatest beacons of this awareness, from hope that the significance of Mass and the warning to memory, is it. It is also the prop- the Wiseman survey, etc.). Even if the pro- Dreyer’s miraculous Ordet, a central locus lightness of a spectacular screening will be er chronological starting point of our jour- gram and its scheduling are the result of of embodied thought, to Rossen’s final mas- united), and to those whom we can only ney with Robert Rossen, the director whose choices that have determined each film and terpieces, The Hustler and Lilith, that this name: directors of true style, like Dino Risi name is in Roberto Rossellini; we would grouping, we would be fools not to have writer considers among the ten most beau- and Joseph Pevney, the presences of like to honor the hundredth anniversary of learned from cinema – the art of bodies – tiful films of all time, just as Genina’s Tre women (whom the preceding had also his birth, in opposition to the disagreeable that the important thing is to encounter storie proibite is, together with the crowns imagined), like Anicée Alvina, Yvonne De selectivity of celebrations. It is this film that other bodies, to reach their eyes that await of Rossellini and Cottafavi, the absolute Carlo, and also (last year) Deborah Kerr, contains the first Rossenian revolt against an image that can change their lives, like apex of Italian cinema, a film that crashes Hazel Court, Eva Dahlbeck, Cyd Charisse. the sacrifice of female bodies, with an with the crystallization desired by Stendhal into the fate of a civilization that sweeps Our contemporaries and the presences of extremely young Lana Turner, victim of a (De l’Amour). We will avoid the conven- away bodies and opposes them with the our desire, through a festival that rejects (serial?) murder whose true culprits remain tional mystification of false popularity, of a désordre of passion: for us it is a film that, totalitarian thought (cf. Vampyr) – accord- unpunished, sacrificing instead the lamb of public presumed to be settled and interest- centered on a catastrophe that sweeps away ing to which, on one hand, there should be the weak on behalf of a homicidal society. ed, naturally, only in what they already bodies, smashes against the weaknesses of the cinema of conventional “production” From Rossen we have chosen, among the know, impervious to all discovery. We will the present-day civilization, what we accept that would exist for today’s viewers, and on films for which he wrote the script, before not reproduce the fake rituals of fashion- without expression in the television news, the hand, retrospectives aimed at special- he started directing, the most pre-auteur, able events and mass media appeal, pre- but not only there – also in our culpable ized enthusiasts and scholars, those that closer even to the magic of the late Rossen cisely because we love so much that cine- neglect of the coexistence of here and else- belong to a “niche” or a “cult,” “fanatics” of than to the tiresome “conquest of the ma is the place of incarnation: for a festival where, in the banality of evil that leads us “candies” and other vacuities. There is none image” (to borrow an expression from desires to revive, through the presence of to constantly accept that, at this very of this in our festival, where everything Cottafavi) of his earlier films. We had to lay the living (and, ordetly, also those that are moment, from somewhere, an untiring appears in the present and nothing is retro- aside two other scripts from our program no more, since, as we have learned from death may be advancing, that the profit spective or presented in a coffin for the (that can be seen upon request, like every- Canetti, Audiberti, and Lang, “death is not a motive may stop the whispering wind. dead. A festival that believes in fidelity to all thing else made by the filmmaker, in the solution”) and the intensity born of the Thus we continue on to a diary of a reality who encounter it (be they cineast or view- video room), Dust Be My Destiny, that we 1 2 would have wanted to add not only for the Two small exhibitions will open, introduc- ing and the closing of the festival, since d’amore, which we thought of projecting marvelous James Wong Howe and the ing Bruno Pincherle and Vittorio Cottafavi, Rivette was among a group of critics who here, but in the end decided to reserve for epochal John Garfield, but also for the who probably never knew each other, even immediately fell in love with Lilith, and in a more appropriate occasion: it is a beauti- enchanting pre-Lilith marriage with the radi- if the two had both met Stendhal. Nor do this masterpiece that soon followed, several ful film to the extent that it is Camerinian, ant Priscilla Lane who returns in successive we know if our fellow Triestine had ever things (the same light, that writing on the and the origin of the source is actually quite Warner Brothers films: and also Edge of seen a film adaptation of Stendhal, which wall that articulates an unconscious) evoke immediate. Darkness, for its Northern European setting we will offer him in this festival. We know, for us Rossen’s supreme masterpiece. With As for Ordet, it is sufficient to refer to that unites Ibsen and the Resistance, however, that he wrote an essay on Alfonso the play within the film, L’Amour fou prel- Rohmer’s text within the catalog, a master- through the vulnerable Polish prostitute Corti, a scientist who studied both the reti- udes the journey that next year we would piece of criticism, also for his personal and Nancy Coleman, and through the esoteric na and the spiral canal of the ear.