Screen/Society--AMI Showcase--European Cinema Series--"Nostalghia"

Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - 3:00pm to 5:15pm
Screen/Society--AMI Showcase--European Cinema Series--"Nostalghia"

FILM SCREENING:

 

Nostalghia

(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983, 125 min, Soviet Union and Italy, in Russian and Italian w/ English subtitles, B/W and Color, Blu-Ray)

-- Introduced by Prof. Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Dept. of Romance Studies!

“I wanted the film to be about the fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots,” Tarkovsky wrote of Nostalghia, his first production outside the Soviet Union. The story, co-written with frequent Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, traces the alienation of a Soviet poet who, trapped by his fame and an unhappy marriage, travels to Italy to research the life of a long-deceased Russian composer. There he meets Erland Josephson, a local pariah who declares that the world is coming to an end. The writer finds this prophecy curiously more alluring than the possibility of a dead-end future.

Nostalghia is one of Tarkovsky's most enigmatic creations. A film of stark symbols and mesmerizing long takes, its nearly agonizing picture of personal loss is tempered by the painterly beauty of its compositions. Tarkovsky himself professed to be surprised at seeing how these images revealed “an exact reprint of my state of mind” during what was to be a permanent exile. “How could I have imagined,” he later wrote, “that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen space in that film was to become my lot for the rest of my life?”

-- Winner of the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, the prize for best director and the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Tarkovsky also shared a special prize called the Grand Prix du Cinéma de Creation with Robert Bresson. (Soviet authorities prevented the film from winning the Palme d'Or, a fact that hardened Tarkovsky's resolve to never work in the Soviet Union again.)

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).

Bryan Center Griffith Film Theater