Word: martino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...night from the depths of time is in the late Summer of 1944, when the narrator Cecelia (Micol Guidelli) was a little girl in a flower print dress, and the Germany were slowly retreating through the fields of Tuscany under the onslaught of the Allies. The town of San Martino has been marked for mining by the Germans--each house crucified with a fatal slash of green paint--and the inhabitants have been ordered to gather in the Cathedral while their tiny community is to be blown up. A group of men, women, and children, under the leadership...
...full of vividly powerful but understand scenes that capture perfectly the heightened sense of ordinary life that the characters are leading. The 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...
...villagers of San Martino, the feast of San Lorenzo is the night when wishes come true. This night, Aug. 10, 1944, there is much to wish for and little hope of satisfaction. The German army is in retreat, dragging its dead across northern Italy. Gangs of Blackshirts, faithful to their Duce, are sweeping the countryside with kamikaze ferocity. The American G.I.s, tough-guy redeemers, may arrive tomorrow or never. So a score of the villagers leave San Martino to escape the carnage-and find what? What these ordinary people find in themselves surprises them: the fierce, fulfilling strength of solidarity...
Since their first feature film in 1962, the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have explored the themes and feelings of the Italian left. But their work is no forced march of socialist stereotypes. Like the characters in the Tavianis' Allonsanfan and Padre Padrone, the people of San Martino never surrender their luxuriant individuality. One young woman with a large birthmark on her cheek and a mischievous smile in her eyes tells a virginal girlfriend: "You don't know what it's like to be ugly and still feel beautiful." An angel-faced teen-age boy, whose ardor...
...part, Martino discounted worries about the split in the department between musicologists and composers. "I don't foresee any kinds of problems at all," he said...