Straub–Huillet

A man returns to visit his native Sicily after living in New York for a long time. He learns about the Sicilian way of life from stylized conversations with an orange picker, his fellow train passengers, his mother, and a knife-sharpener.

Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese's "Dialoghi con Leucò", taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese's novel "La luna e i falò": after WWII the emigrant 'The Bastard' comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find that everyone he knew has died and the war has deeply changed relationships between people.

A shot from a car coursing through Rome in 1972 opens this interpretation of Brecht's unfinished experimental novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. In a second part set in contemporary Rome, a young researcher discusses the economic and political manipulation that drove Caesar to power.

A group of men and women of all generations have been brought together in the course of their travels after World War II, when Italy regained its national unity. Amid the ruins of this post-war period, the men and women who make up this community build a new rapport, both in their professional and daily lives. The group maintains a kind of diary.

The film is a sort of presentation of Franco Fortini's book 'I Cani del Sinai'. Fortini, an Italian Jew, reads excerpts from the book about his alienation from Judaism and from the social relations around him, the rise of Fascism in Italy, the anti-Arab attitude of European culture. The images, mostly a series of Italian landscape shots, provide a backdrop that highlights the meaning of the text.

This movie is the sequel of Straub and Huillet's Dalla nube alla resistenza and like its prequel is inspired by Cesare Pavese's book Dialoghi con Leucò.

The last song of the "Paradise" of the Divine Comedy of Dante. The film is preceded by Corneille-Brecht or Rome, the only object of my resentment, taken from Horace and Othon by Corneille and das Verhoer from Lukulus, a radio play by Brecht.