This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club . . . , presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
Sands Films Cinema Club season of three Italian films of 1963
START TIME IS 8.00 PM
In late nineteenth-century Turin, at a textile mill laborers clock in 14-hour days, increasing risk to life and limb, for little pay, no benefits. Organized by a socialist, a former schoolteacher from Genoa who is fleeing authorities, the workers strike. Professor Sinigaglia is certain the strikers will prevail. He sees righteously; but the Professor is blind without his eyeglasses.
Mario Monicelli’s long, atmospheric chronicle I compagni—The Strikers—benefits from a number of things: his excellent script, co-written by the team of Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli; his outstanding widescreen compositions, especially in powerful long-shots of humanity en masse; gorgeous black-and-white cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno; Marcello Mastroianni’s fiery lead performance.
The Professor thus identifies himself: “I have no home, no family, no friends.” He is at the service of his political ideals. Paradoxically, Monicelli’s film is a fractious epic—like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). It encompasses national divisions: city vs. country, North vs. South, management/ownership vs. workforce. The Professor comes in on a train, as later, from Saluzzo, scabs do; at the end, with a touch of Fellini, a young laborer, on the run like Sinigaglia, who has been caught and jailed, leaves by train. Perhaps he will “organize” elsewhere. Here is a film about national dislocations and relocations, a gradual, cumulative diaspora.
Monicelli aims to create “a Visconti film”; actors Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot remind us of Rocco and His Brothers (1960), with another family’s relocation in search of work. But when the Professor flexes and scratches himself, we think Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961).
Management always confronts labor with the same veiled threat: “Do you know how many unemployed there are?” Translation: “You do not matter. You are nothing.”
Carted around in a wheel chair, the mill owner carries, uses a switch.
This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club . . . , presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
Sands Films Cinema Club season of three Italian films of 1963
START TIME IS 8.00 PM
In late nineteenth-century Turin, at a textile mill laborers clock in 14-hour days, increasing risk to life and limb, for little pay, no benefits. Organized by a socialist, a former schoolteacher from Genoa who is fleeing authorities, the workers strike. Professor Sinigaglia is certain the strikers will prevail. He sees righteously; but the Professor is blind without his eyeglasses.
Mario Monicelli’s long, atmospheric chronicle I compagni—The Strikers—benefits from a number of things: his excellent script, co-written by the team of Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli; his outstanding widescreen compositions, especially in powerful long-shots of humanity en masse; gorgeous black-and-white cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno; Marcello Mastroianni’s fiery lead performance.
The Professor thus identifies himself: “I have no home, no family, no friends.” He is at the service of his political ideals. Paradoxically, Monicelli’s film is a fractious epic—like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). It encompasses national divisions: city vs. country, North vs. South, management/ownership vs. workforce. The Professor comes in on a train, as later, from Saluzzo, scabs do; at the end, with a touch of Fellini, a young laborer, on the run like Sinigaglia, who has been caught and jailed, leaves by train. Perhaps he will “organize” elsewhere. Here is a film about national dislocations and relocations, a gradual, cumulative diaspora.
Monicelli aims to create “a Visconti film”; actors Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot remind us of Rocco and His Brothers (1960), with another family’s relocation in search of work. But when the Professor flexes and scratches himself, we think Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961).
Management always confronts labor with the same veiled threat: “Do you know how many unemployed there are?” Translation: “You do not matter. You are nothing.”
Carted around in a wheel chair, the mill owner carries, uses a switch.