Word: cecilia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Mathi as Grünewald. It seems to range backward and forward in time, a web of discreet allusions that seldom rise to open quotation. Thus in drawing Cecily Heron, the youngest daughter of Sir Thomas More, Holbein selected the pose of another woman with the same first name, Cecilia Gallerani, the model for Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine. If one could not deduce from his work that Holbein's was one of the best minds of the northern Renaissance, the names of his friends would suggest it: he was on terms of familiar equality with such...
...coexisting guardedly. Symbolic of the filmmakers' attitude is the scene in the beginning of the film when Cecelia, sitting in church, stares at the horribly gruesome fresco of the torments of hell on the wall--in response to the crosseyed anguish of one of the damned, Cecilia crosses her own eyes in delight...
...entire group as they huddle around a tree listening for their village to blow up, think thoughts that range from the sublime ("And so our rosy San Martino fades away"--Galvano) to the ridiculous ("Oh God, let the houses blow up, I've never had so much fun" Cecilia), but the directors give them all equal weight. A woman, having broken off to join a group of Sicilan-American soldiers she believes are in the area, is killed by the enemy. As she dies, she imagines the young German soldier bending over her to be a member...
...runs into a childhood friend with a yelp of joy, only to riddle him with bullets: a girl embraces a long lost cousin in black shirt, but her husband pushes her aside with a rifle; both sides tending to their wounded, inadvertently borrow each other's water bottles, and Cecilia's eyes, widening in fright, transform the sorry spectacle into a fantastic combat of gladiators...
This essentially true tale of a village's resistance is told by the present-day Cecilia to her own child on another night of shooting stars. It may seem the grisliest of bedtime stories, an unholy mixture of Disney and The Disasters of War. But it allows this event to be seen through the wide clear eyes of a child, and to exist both in the recent historical past and in the storybook realm of once-upon-a-time...