Spirits of the Dead (1968)

Salvo Randone: Priest (segment "Toby Dammit")

Photos 

Quotes 

• Father Spagna - Priest (segment "Toby Dammit") : This film will be in color. Harsh colors, rough costumes to reconcile the holy landscape with the prairie. Sort of Piero della Francesca and Fred Zinneman. An interesting formula. You'll adapt to it very well. Just let your heart speak.

  Toby Dammit (segment "Toby Dammit") : Their producers promised me a Ferrari - latest model. Where is it?

• Father Spagna - Priest (segment "Toby Dammit") : It's the first Catholic Western. Christ's return to the bleak, desolate prairie. And is this not the secret desire of all men? A new incarnation of Christ. Our Savior appearing this time in concrete, tangible form. Christ already lives in us, but to show him in a violently mundane context - It may seem a desperate gamble. Blasphemy, almost, I agree. But I know an artist such as you, whether a believer or not, will understand that structuralist cinema can recapture sublime poetry through primal images that are spare - eloquent in their poverty - syntagmatic, as my friend Roland Barthes would say. Something between Dreyer and Pasolini with just a hint of John Ford, of course.