Rapsodia Satanica belongs foursquare to the "diva dolorosa" school of Italian silent cinema, movies of and for and about their vampish leading ladies, in which melodramatic narratives might at any moment be entirely subsumed in welters of veiled languishing. Even by these delirious standards, Nino Oxililia's penultimate feature (before his death in Wwi) is heady stuff.The femme fatale in this case is Lyda Borelli, one of the top stars of the era. When we meet her in the prologue: she's a hunched, huddled crone, wrapping her natural exuberance within layers of black, hobbling around her "Castle of Illusions" shooting longing looks at the young people in love.Then, Mephistopheles appears, emerging from a painting in a marvelous bit of trompe l'oeil. Since the movie is hand-tinted, this red devil's transition from two to three dimensions is all the more compelling: the shimmering panels of color both augment and erase...
- 7/9/2015
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
By Michael Atkinson
A distinctive force in European cinema for over 35 years, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani achieved from their first films an eloquent stylistic bridge between Rossellinian stringency and Fellinian braggadocio. Their movies are often framed like friezes, but the chaos of human whim always muddies the compositions. Appropriately, the Tavianis began as political barnburners, fashioning absurdist parables and sometimes cosmic commedia from Italy's lunatic flirtations with extreme movements. No European filmmaker has ever been as dedicated to their nation's peasant legacy, and no one on the continent since the '70s has made such potent and revealing use of their native landscape. Still, if the Tavianis' penchant for old-fashioned narrative folkiness has grown tedious over the last decade or two, there's still 1982's "The Night of the Shooting Stars," their premier achievement, and arguably the best Italian film of the '80s.
Right off the bat, with its framing...
A distinctive force in European cinema for over 35 years, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani achieved from their first films an eloquent stylistic bridge between Rossellinian stringency and Fellinian braggadocio. Their movies are often framed like friezes, but the chaos of human whim always muddies the compositions. Appropriately, the Tavianis began as political barnburners, fashioning absurdist parables and sometimes cosmic commedia from Italy's lunatic flirtations with extreme movements. No European filmmaker has ever been as dedicated to their nation's peasant legacy, and no one on the continent since the '70s has made such potent and revealing use of their native landscape. Still, if the Tavianis' penchant for old-fashioned narrative folkiness has grown tedious over the last decade or two, there's still 1982's "The Night of the Shooting Stars," their premier achievement, and arguably the best Italian film of the '80s.
Right off the bat, with its framing...
- 4/8/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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