Word: italian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...large room to the right of the courtyard inspired art historian Millard Meiss, during his brief term as director of the Fogg, to arrange the entire space in a medieval mode, mounting Romanesque capitals on low semi-detached pedestals projecting from the wall. The Fogg's fourteenth century Italian paintings were arranged in the areas between columns and framed by medieval chests set below. Undaunted by tradition, Slive and Freedberg replaced the small medieval works with larger seventeenth century canvases--a group which is better fitted to the room and more representative of the Fogg's strengths. (The early Renaissance...
After making Last Tango in Paris back in 1973, Italian Director Bernardo Bertolucci was prosecuted for obscenity, buffeted by public controversy and caught in a crossfire of critical overkill -pans on one side, panegyrics on the other. But at least he got his movie into the theaters...
...film itself is an even more turbulent saga than the brouhaha surrounding it. Bertolucci uses the lives of two friends born on the same day in 1900 to trace the major social and political upheavals of 50 years of Italian life (a better English rendering of the title, Novecento, might be Twentieth Century). Bertolucci's bias is frankly Marxist. His scenario, set in the rural Po valley, celebrates the rise of the Communist movement among the peasants and its ordeal under decadent landowners and brutal Fascists. Is this waving of the Red flag the real reason for the movie...
Publicly, however, the epic length of 1900 is the major sticking point. Bertolucci took a year to shoot it, and expenditures zoomed from the budgeted $3 million to $8 million. Grimaldi says he protested but did not want to risk offending the Communist sympathies of the film crew and Italian workers in general. Says he: "If I had tried to stop production I would have had a terrible mess -riots, maybe." Bertolucci's first cut, which ran five hours, 30 minutes, was shown at last year's Cannes festival, with extremely mixed reactions. He trimmed another 20 minutes...
Will to Live. Against all such trends, Italian Author Elsa Morante, 65, has turned out a supremely unfashionable book. History: A Novel is a long, slow read. It is almost entirely lacking in sex or suspense; when characters are doomed, Morante sounds a warning well in advance of the event. The novel's main figures-Ida Mancuso, a widowed Roman schoolteacher, and her two sons -are neither witty nor especially bright. Ostensibly the book shows what happens to these three between the years 1940 and 1947, during the ravages of World War II and the uncertainties of its aftermath...