Word: italian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Padre, Padrone. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's entrancing film about the loam-to-letters life of a bestselling Sardinian author from humble peasant origins provides the most convincing evidence since Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" of the resilient vitality in Italian cinema, the recent excesses of Fellini, Antonioni, et al. notwithstanding. The Taviani brothers' first film to receive international attention, it features a host of mind-gripping sequences destined to set apart "Padre, Padrone" as one of the most important films to cross the Atlantic in the late 1970s. To name only two: the unforgettable series of shots capturing...
WHILE CERTAIN RISKS attend any attempt to read into a single sequence the essence of a feature-length film, one particular scene in Padre, Padrone (Italian for My Father, My Master) goes a long way towards capturing the purpose and theme of this film that dazzled the critics at last year's Cannes Film Festival. A portrait-type shot encompasses the entire family of a Sardinian peasant, Efisio Ledda (Omero Antonutti), seated in the waiting room of a local bank. Compelled to sell his recently inherited farmland in the face of low olive prices and a disastrous winter, the paterfamilias...
...their way to a local fair. Gavino's self-education begins with his mastery of the accordion and proceeds apace, although he does comply with his father's orders by going off to the mainland to join the army. In the army he learns to read and write in Italian and acquires the desired training as a radio technician...
Unlike many of his colleagues working for more flamboyant directors in the Italian film industry, cinematographer Masini avoids using flashy camera angles and other distracting legerdemain with the lens. Masini instead unobtrusively records the countryside, focusing on the lush greenery of a Sardinian forest or the evanescent ambers of a pasture at dawn. And at several points in the film, Masini is content to allow events to speak for themselves, permitting the actors to move in and out of the picture while the camera remains fixed in one place. In this way the cinematographer quietly succeeds in imbuing the visual...
...harder for the little guy to make it on his own these days," Incagnoli says. "After all, how many Italian shoemakers do you see around anymore...