Word: viscontis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...French films have a flair for love, the Italian cinema has a zest for decadence. Most major Italian directors have their own highly personal vision of spiritual and psychological deterioration, whether it be as flamboyant as Fellini's, as operatic as Visconti's or as brooding as Antonioni's. Now Salvatore Samperi, 25, continues the tradition with Grazie Zia, a bit of caustic surrealism that dazzles with the energy of youth while it is disappointing with excesses of inexperience...
...recalls, "amongst dresses and dressmakers." At nine, he was taken to see Wagner's Walküre-and got lost onstage after the performance. In a sense, he has been swallowed up in scenery ever since his one-man student production at the University of Florence led Luchino Visconti to sign him for a bit part in Crime and Punishment. Zeffirelli then talked his way into assistant directorships with the maestros of postwar Italian cinema: Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini...
...level, editing and use of subjective techniques, from point-of-view shots to the optical changes defined by the variations in different lenses, defeat any attempt at total simulation of reality--even in the best work of the best documentary film-makers, and those early works of Rosselini and Visconti which attempted to subordinate stylization to realism...
Algiers is in the great tradition of the first neo-realist masterpieces, Rosselini's Open City and Visconti's La Terra Trema. But where those two films dealt entirely with killing and oppression of the weak by Fascists and reactionary capitalists, the killing of innocent people in Algiers is committed mostly by the NLF, Pontecorvo's heroes. In accepting the slaughter of hundreds of citizens, guilty only in their complacent acceptance of a derelict social structure, Pontecorvo emphasizes the validity of necessary social upheaval, regardless of its price. Each death becomes not a crime of the NLF but the tragic...
Leaps & Loops. When it comes to the men, "those European judges aren't going to know who to look hard at," says Gary Visconti, 22, the defending champion at Philadelphia. First, Visconti himself was bumped into second place by Tim Wood, 19, a fellow Detroiter who barely made the U.S. national team last year. For this year's competition, Wood dropped out of school, spent seven hours a day practicing the compulsory "school figures" (loops, brackets, circle eights) that account for 60% of the score. So precise were his blade marks that he led the field when...