Tuesday
Nov192019
Centennial: Gillo Pontecorvo
Tuesday, November 19, 2019 at 9:00AM 100 year ago today in Pisa, Italy, the director Gillo Pontecorvo was born.
He only made five narrative features in his career, which is surely one of the reasons that he's overshadowed in cultural memory by the far more prolific mid 20th century Italian giants Vittorio de Sica and Federico Fellini. Still Pontecorvo's two best known films were both nominated for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards, the concentration camp drama Kapò (1960) and the resistance/war drama The Battle of Algiers (1966). The latter, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in its year, is still revered as a masterpiece. Have you seen either of these classics?
Reader Comments (6)
Both films are wonderful. I saw Kapo' after Emmanuelle Riva received her Oscar nomination for Amour. It truly hurt when Jennifer Lawrence won the award. Still, I think that Pontecorvo's non-Oscar nominated feature THE WIDE BLUE ROAD is a greater film than Kapo'. It had the misfortune of coming out when Fellini was sweeping up all the awards (La Strada and Nights of Cabiria were back to back Foreign Film winners in 1957-1958,the period when THE WIDE BLUE ROAD was released). And, of course, both of those films are extraordinarily worthy. THE WIDE BLUE ROAD deserves much more attention than it gets. It was a fantastic political movie that was far ahead of its time in terms of its focus on the pressure that the common man feels when crushed between the competing demands of capitalism and communism. This political factor probably explains why the film was never released in the States until many decades later. Definitely worth revisiting!
One of Pontecorvo's other features is on my wish-list of films that Criterion should be restoring: BURN! is one of Marlon Brando's lesser known films and the racial politics that are at its core made it difficult to market during the 1960s. The truncated version that circulated in the States is the only version that was available for the home market. I wish that we could get the director's cut and the Italian soundtrack and a whole slew of supplements that would do justice to this great director. Thank you for showcasing him today!
I saw Kapo a few years ago and man, it blew me away as it was better than I thought it would be as I'm going to see another film of Pontecorvo coming to TCM soon I think in Burn!.
The only film of his I've seen so far is The Battle of Algiers. It's an amazing film. The fiction footage is so authentic, it's sometimes been used in documentaries about Algeria's battle for independence. And it's a thrilling, fair account of that terrible war.
The film also occupies an unique place in Oscar history: it's the only film to receive nominations more than two years apart (Best Foreign Language Film 1966, Best Directing and Best Original Screenplay 1968).
I've never seen Kapo, but it's famous for being the victim of the worst pan of all time, written by future director Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinema. The title: "De l'abjection".
"The Battle for Algiers" looks disturbingly modern.
Battle of Algiers is simply one of the most astonishing achievements in film history. Burn! is severely underrated. In his autobiography, Marlon Brando went out of his way to praise it and felt it was one his achievements he was most proud of. I was totally unimpressed with Kapo. It could have been made in Hollywood (an impression fortified by the presence of a (dubbed) Susan Strasberg.