Word: tommaso
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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GOGOL'S WIFE by Tommaso Landolfi. 1 83 pages. New Directions...
...medieval bestiaries, the habits of birds, beasts and reptiles proclaimed the glory of God. In this strange and fitful collection of short stories, Italian Author Tommaso Landolfi has created a kind of 20th century bestiary in which the animals speak not to the godhead in man but to the arid reaches of the human heart...
...action begins in the hospital room where Tommaso, wonderfully played by Berhhard Wicki, is dying. Lidia and Giovanni, his only friends, visit him, and the camera watches this touching conversation from the ceiling, thus somehow revealing the tired fragility of the marriage. Tommaso speaks of the dissatisfying charade they all play, and one is prepared to watch the protagonists try to put an end to it. In one of the rare overstatements of the film, Tommaso complains of how the hospital is like a night club, only to have the nurse bring a bottle of champagne for him to share...
...attempting to make it with Tina, Lidia refusing to take any part in the proceedings and eventually going off with a man she's mever met. But she to too honest to kiss him and returns to the party, depressed by a phone call to the hospital which revealed Tommaso's death. Steadily the pace has been building, and in a climactic scene, Lidia, Giovanni, and Tina finally manage to communicate their feelings to someone other than the audience. The decrescendo follows swiftly, and film ending with a walk on the golf course and an embrace in the sand trap...
Futurism got its name from the Italian Poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 issued a flamboyant manifesto calling for a new philosophy of art suitable to the age of the machine. Not Pegasus, he declared, but the racing car, "with its hood draped with exhaust pipes like fire-breathing serpents," should be the new symbol of poetry. "A racing car, rattling along like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." The artist should "sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness...