This is a small film of snatched moments from late-night screenings of Italian documentary archives, in the courtyard of Castello Risolo at the Cinema del Reale festival in Puglia last week.
I like the old music and the whispering people, and the little girl who ran down the aisle and scampered out again. The films crackled on with brief silences in between, and people wandered in and out of the castle to see what was on, sitting for a while with a plastic cup of wine to watch dramatically-narrated early documentaries such as ‘Paese Senz’Acqua’ from 1949, which showed a brass band welcoming the installation of the first tap in a Salento village.
On Friday night I tip-toed in at about 1 O’clock in the morning, in the middle of a black and white film about midsummer traditions in Vigilia. I only know that it was about midsummer traditions in Vigilia because I read it afterwards in the programme. The narration was slow and poetic and with my scrappy Italian I was just listening to the language like a series of sounds, and watching the images of bonfires and dances and blessings in the river. It was beautiful to sit and watch alone in utter bewilderment, in the night air, while the films carried on and the dwindling audience came and went, and then finally I left and went to bed, and the films flickered on into the night.
1 response so far ↓
1 Tom // Aug 2, 2008 at 8:35 am
Wow, that’s how cinema-going should be.
The last thing i saw on the big screen was ‘The Happening’ at the the Juliet cinema in Turku, Finland. There were three girls in front of us talking, texting and lobbing pistachio shells through the whole thing. Thankfully, the film was terrible anyway so they weren’t really able to spoil it.
Leave a Comment