Cinema in the open in Barga Vecchia

The Woodstock cineforum group have been organising screenings of their favourite films for the past few months at the Barga Jazz Club. The club has now shut for the season (their last concert is here) but the Woodstock group have simply moved their operations outside and continued with their project of showing some of the most influential films of the 20th century.

This evening they were showing MassimoTroisi in his “Ricomincio de Tre” on an outside screen set up in the courtyard of the Conservatorio di S.Elisabetta. It is interesting to note that the film had Italian subtitles so that the audience could follow the dialogue in the film which is all in a strong dialect from Naples.

Troisi wrote, directed and played his first film, Ricomincio da tre (“I Start Over from Three”) in 1983. He achieved wide success and critical praise, imposing himself as one of the most talented new Italian directors of 1980s. This film is about a Neapolitan who moves to Florence. “Emigrant?” everyone asks him. “No, tourist. Everywhere we Neapolitans go, people ask if we are emigrants. Neapolitans travel also.” The man in this comedy, and also its director, is Massimo Troisi who seems like a combination of Chico Marx, Toto, and Woody Allen on dexedrine. He is as apt a comedian as a performer and his inspired nonsense can send an attuned audience (I suspect his comedy doesn’t travel well) into convulsions of laugher. Here is a man who doesn’t want to start a new life from zero or from scratch but from three. source

 

“O criaturo ‘o chiammammo Ugo…”
“Come tuo padre?”
“Sì, ma mica pe’ mmio padre, che me ‘mporta a me?… Sulo pe nun ‘o fa venì scustumato…”
“Perchè, Massimiliano?”
“Massimiliano vene scustumato… Se il bambino si vuol muovere, la mamma a che che lo chiama il bambino sì è già allontanato…Mentre Ugo non ha il tempo di fare un passo… Al massimo lo chiamiamo Ciro… Così non viene così represso…”