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Gringo: Sergio Leone : Something to Do With Death by Christopher Frayling Paperback: 570 pages Publisher: Faber and Faber (6 Mar 2000) Language English Попробум вместе осилить это произведение, а то оно уже пылью покрывается. После обработки совместного перевода и критических замечаний Александр будет выкладывать очередной фрагмент на сайте. Впереди 570 страниц… Preface Brr. Brr. Brr. The phone in the outer office of the Department of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art would not stop ringing. In the room next door, I was trying to run a seminar on Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and 'looking for a logic of culture'. It was February 1982. Brr. Brr. Brr. There was supposed to be someone looking after phone calls in the outer office. She must have gone out to lunch. The seminar was overrunning. Brr. Brr. Brr. Asking one of the postgraduate students to take over for a while, I went out to answer the call. Testily. 'Hello?' 'Is that Professor Frayling? I have Sergio Leone on the line, calling from the Dorchester Hotel.' The voice was American: Leone's assistant and interpreter Brian Freilino, as it turned out. 'Sergio wants to talk to you about his father, Vincenzo. Your book Spaghetti Westerns had some material about him he didn't know about before.' I had left a copy for Leone, at the offices of his production company Rafran, just before Christmas 1981.1 did so somewhat apprehensively, knowing his strong views about the title. Had he read the book then? Apparently yet another long-suffering assistant had read the entire tome aloud to Leone, translating from English into Italian as he went along. 'Would you like to speak?' 'Sure.' 'Salve Professore! Perche non ci incontriamo mentre a Londra?' It couldn't be that afternoon. He was going to look in on George Lucas, who was editing The Return of the Jedi at Elstree. My meeting with Sergio Leone that evening at the Dorchester -I now realize - starting me thinking about this book. It began life as a study of his films, which, after fifteen years of lobbying by his aficionados, were beginning to attract the sort of critical attention they deserved. Then, following Leone's death on 30 April 1989, the book began to turn into the first-ever biography; for some reason, no one in Italy had ever attempted one. And at the same time, it became a history of Italian popular cinema since the 1920s, the sort of cinema that is rarely mentioned in the standard works; and if so, rarely with more than a patronizing glance. Sergio Leone once said 'I was born in a cinema, almost. Both my parents worked there. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.' He first wandered onto a sound stage at Cinecitta in 1941, at the age of twelve, to watch his father shooting a film. And he died watching a film on television, in Rome, at the age of sixty. As we will see, for Leone, the passionate experience of movie-going, the ideas and sensations it unleashed in him, informed all of his work in cinema. Leone was the first modern cineaste to make really popular films: films which never-theless remained personal to him. In the words of philosopher Jean Baudrillard, he was 'the first postmodernist director'. Along the way, I have had conversations with many of Sergio Leone's professional colleagues, his contemporaries and his family, as well as with the man himself. I would like to thank them all: Ken Adam, Alessandro Alessandroni, Luis Beltran, Bernardo Bertolucci, Peter Bogdanovich, Dino De Laurentiis, Tonino Delli Colli, Sergio Donati, Clint Eastwood, Umberto Eco, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Charlton Heston, John Landis, Joaquin Romero Marchent, Elizabeth McGovern, John Milius, Fulvio and Luca Morsella, Franco Nero, Gillo Pontecorvo, Martin Scorsese, Carlo Simi, Tonino Valerii, Luciano Vincenzoni, Wim Wenders and Fred Zinnemann; Carla, Francesca and Raffaella Leone; and the late Sergio Leone. Dario Argento, Andrea Leone and Ennio Morricone were interviewed for my television programme Viva Leone!, broadcast on BBC2 in December 1989: many thanks to David Thomp-son and Nick Freand Jones for all their help, and for providing the transcriptions. The conversations with Mickey Knox and Luciano Vin-cenzoni were recorded by Cenk Kiral, to whom I am grateful for allow-ing me to use the results. Rod Steiger was specially interviewed for this book by Barbra Paskin, who generously gave her time and expertise. A supplementary conversation with Sergio Leone was recorded for a Channel 4 Visions documentary on Italian cinema in May 1984, on which I was consultant: thanks to Rod Stoneman for giving me the complete version. Many others have helped unearth research materials for me. Raw materials: soundtrack specialist Lionel Woodman, film collectors Grant Kelly and the late Robert James Leake, Rene Hogguer of Cine-City in Hilversum, Holland, and the man on that market stall in Whitechapel High Street. Personal materials: the Leone family has been welcoming and always supportive through thick and thin, even though they had no idea what I would be writing about Sergio. Euro Westerns: Lorenzo Codelli and Carlo Gaberscek at the Udine Film Festival; Ed Buscombe, ex-BFI; and Hubert Corbin at Montpellier. Spaghetti materials: Tom Betts and Tim Ferrante, the editors of Westerns all'Italiana, a journal published since 1983 in Anaheim, California. Leone's funeral: Barry Edson. Louise Swan and Adrian Turner helped to arrange interviews with Hollywood people, Francoise Jollant and Francesca Boesch sent printed materials, Jasper Hawker and Julius Cotter scouted locations in Spain. But my greatest debt is to five individuals who, in their very different ways, have played a key role in the gestation of Sergio Leone, Luca Morsella, whom I first met in 1981, provided an entree into Leone's circle in Rome, and has been a mine of useful information ever since, as well as a friend. Cenk Kiral, a Leone enthusiast and computer buff from Istanbul, has bombarded me with electronic information (good, bad and ugly), and kept me in touch with developments in the cyber-world. John Exshaw, a film scholar and filmographer who knows more about Italian popular cinema than anyone else could possibly hope to know, selflessly provided me with detailed advice and moral support at a time when I was flagging. Matthew Evans, my editor at Faber, said to me many years ago, 'Frayling on Leone - I'd certainly read that!' He had to be very patient indeed. Richard Kelly helped me to edit the final draft from the half a million words I originally submitted. I owe them all. Various people assisted with translations: Barbara Bingola, Caterina Fadda, Sara Fanelli, Anna Negri, Lisa Ronconni, Ilaria Snowdon and Silvia Tonini (who helped with Italian materials); Britta Teckentrup (German) and Gabriela Salgado (Spanish). The librarians of the BFI, New York Public Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale were helpful, if sometimes baffled. Gill Plummer and Juliet Thorp processed and re-processed the text, in particularly frenzied circumstances, with good humour and efficiency. And my wife Helen has put up with this project, for almost as long as I have known her. We visited Cinecitta and Rafran on our honeymoon: since then, there have been countless late night viewings of Leone films in several languages. Now that is what I call devotion. XVI Don Quixote and Sancho went to the puppet-show, which was now set up and uncovered; and they found it looked splendid, being lit all round by a multi-tude of wax tapers. On their arrival Master Peter the puppet-showman got inside, as it was he who had to work the puppets in the play. But seeing the cavalcade of Moors on the puppet stage and hearing such an alarm, Don Quixote thought it only right to help the fugitives. So, rising to his feet, he cried aloud: 'Never while I live shall I permit an outrage to be done in my presence on so famous a knight and so bold a lover as Sir Gaiferos! Stop, low-born rabble! Neither follow or molest them or you will do battle with me.' Matching his actions to his words, he unsheathed his sword, and at a single bound planted himself in front of the puppet-show. Then with swift and unparalleled fury he began to rain blows upon the puppet-heathenry, knocking down some, beheading others, maiming one, and destroying another; and, among other thrusts, he delivered one down-stroke that would have sliced off Master Peter's head as easily as if it had been made of marzipan, had he not ducked and crouched and made himself small. 'Stop, your worship!' he kept shouting. 'Reflect, Don Quixote, that these are not real Moors you're upset-ting, demolishing and murdering, but only little pasteboard figures! Look out ... you're ruining my whole livelihood!' Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1614) 'Is the place really as big as that?' asked Karl. 'It's the biggest theatre in the world,' Fanny said. 'I haven't seen it yet myself, I admit, but some of the other girls here, who have been in Oklahoma already, say there are almost no limits to it.' 'But there aren't many people here,' said Karl, pointing down at the boys and the little family. 'That's true,' said Fanny. 'But consider that we pick up people in all the towns, that our recruiting outfit here is always on the road, and that there are ever so many of these outfits.' 'Why, has the theatre not opened yet?' asked Karl. Oh yes,' said Fanny, 'it's an old theatre, but it is always being enlarged.' 'I'm surprised', said Karl, 'that more people don't flock to join it.' Yes,' said Fanny. 'It is extraordinary.' Franz Kafka, Amerika (1927) Once Upon a Time in Rome The American cinema as it was then was composed of a gallery of actors' faces unparalleled either before or after (at least as I see it), and the plots were simple devices (amorous, character-based, generic) for bringing these faces together in ever changing combinations. Around these conventional stories there was very little flavour of a particular society or period, but that was precisely why what flavour there was struck home without my being able to define what it con-sisted in ... And just as a psychologist is equally interested when his patient lies as when he tells the truth, since either way he reveals something about himself, so I, as a film-goer belonging to another system of mystifications, could learn something both from the very little truth and the great deal of mystification the products of Hollywood offered me. With the result that I bear no rancour towards that fake and fabricated image of life; and although I wouldn't have been able to explain at the time, it seems to me now that I never took it as truth, but just as one of the many artificial images possible. Italo Calvino, A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography (mid-1960s) Action! Once upon a time in Rome - and a very good time it later seemed to be - the nineteen-year-old Sergio Leone wrote his first screenplay, which, like most first attempts at writing for the cinema, was autobiographical: a rite of passage movie, which was also a calling card. The screenplay was called Viale Glorioso, and it told of the adventures of a gang of middle-class youths on the streets of Rome shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. For this firmly all-male gang, their 'universe was the street and the cinema'. Mean-while, in the adult world, the Fascist regime was deciding whether to gear up for Italian involvement in Germany's war. (Mussolini's deci-sion, announced in June 1940, was 'to declare war, but not to make war' - whatever that meant.) 'I first went to the cinema round about 1939, when I was nine or ten,' Leone was to recall half a century later. 'I went with my little comrades. We formed a gang, and we were all like street urchins. When we were at home, we resembled good Dr Jekyll, with all the benefits of a refined education. The moment we got outside, though, we became proper Mr Hydes. Louts, really. And yet we were sons of good families. We lived in the Trastevere district of the city. Within this quarter, there was a distinct area. From the Via Dandelo up to the Gianicolo is one of the steepest hills of Rome, topped by the statue of Garibaldi. We're talking about a good address, where the Jewish bourgeoisie, members of the Papal court and senior professional people lived. Two hundred metres further on, though, was the more downmarket area. The kingdom of the real louts. And we had pitched battles with them. These scuffles happened on the steps of the public staircase, which led to the Viale Glorioso.51 The gang's stamping ground was bordered at one end by the Viale Di Trastevere, just north of the Porta Portese, and at the other by the Giani-colo Park, atop the Gianiculum Hill. Just below the meeting of the Via Dandelo and the Viale Glorioso were 126 steep steps, flanked by cast-iron street lamps set into balustrades. The gang used to gather on these steps and play water games in the granite basin of the nearby fountain of Santa Paola (built for Pope Paul V when he renovated the old aqueduct down the road, and brought water to Trastevere). Above them, in the park, was the equestrian statue of Garibaldi and an avenue of sculptures of the Garibaldini. Below them were the cobbled streets, small shops and arti-sanal dwellings of Trastevere, a district that enjoyed a 'left-bank' atmos-phere and reputation. (This was a legacy of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when intellectuals, Mazzinians, and radical artisans rubbed shoulders with one another, and when the district laid claim to represent the 'traditional' independent Roman character.) Beyond the steps of the Viale Glorioso were large imposing villas and institutional buildings; at their base, a rabbit warren of smaller houses, workshops and garages. Despite the highly charged political atmosphere of 1939, the children from the upmarket side of the steps were preoccupied by street fights, secret societies, friendships, plots against rival gangs, troubles at school, chasing girls and reading American comics. Above all they liked to take up an entire row of twenty seats in the front stalls of a cinema della periferia, a suburban cinema. Thus installed, they would yell cat-calls and generally make nuisances of themselves; especially during the interval between the first and second reels which was (and is) a distinct-ive feature of Italian cinema-going. It was particularly good fun to arrive late and to try to puzzle out the storyline together, while others in the audience were trying to concentrate. As an only child, born fourteen years into his parents' marriage when his father was fifty years old, young Sergio found such companionship particularly nourishing. He was to regret the huge age difference, which made it difficult for him to have a close relationship with his father. By the time he got to know Vincenzo Leone, Vincenzo was a disillusioned senior citizen. The father never lived to see the success of the son, which was, Sergio was to tell his son Andrea, 'one of the greatest regrets of my life'. Sergio Leone recalled himself as a solitary, timid, dreamy sort of child. It was for this reason, he later decided, that in adult life he developed 'a fascination with the theme of friendship'. In the mean-time, his solitary nature encouraged him to present a confident, bluff exterior, masking a much less confident personality within. He also developed a tendency to impress his circle of friends with tall stories. In Viale Glorioso, the gang's anarchic life on the streets contrasted favourably with the pomposity of life during school hours and the restrictions of life at home. It showed, Leone was to say, 'how this quarter was in fact less than glorious. And it was about a Rome which has gone completely.' Above all, it was about a love affair with cinema, hinging on the difference between the richness and coherence of the world on screen, and the confusion and incoherence of the world out-side the picture palace. As Leone recalled, 'We in the gang modelled ourselves on the heroes of the American films we'd seen. We were madly in love with American cinema. We always imitated Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper . .. We always went to see the films that came from Hollywood. Never the Italian telefoni bianci, the white telephone comedies. That form of cinema I was to discover after the war.'2 This identification with American heroes was experienced equally powerfully, and at precisely the same time, by the young Italo Calvino, a close contemporary of Leone's though he grew up in the seaside town of San Remo rather than in Trastevere. Calvino was skilfully to analyse the 'Hollywood firmament' of stars as 'a system entire unto itself, with its own contrasts and its own variables, a human typology. The actors represented models of character and behaviour; there was a hero avail-able for every temperament; for those who aimed to tackle life through action, Clark Gable represented a sort of brutality leavened with boast-ful swagger; Gary Cooper was cold blood filtered through irony; for those who counted on overcoming obstacles with a mixture of humour and savoir faire, there was the aplomb of William Powell and the discretion of Franchot Tone; for the introvert who masters his shyness LEONE there was James Stewart, while Spencer Tracy was the model of the just, open-minded man who knows how to do things with his hands.'3 For Calvino, as for Leone, cinema at this time meant American cinema (albeit dubbed into Italian, as was the law). In the late 1930s, the Alfieri Law had attempted to reduce the importation and distribu-tion of American films, and throughout the decade there had been several efforts to institute a protectionist 'quota' system (one Italian film for every ten foreign films shown; mandatory Italian newsreels) as a boost to home-grown productions. As a result, many more films, publicly or privately financed, were being made in Italy. Production had increased sevenfold since 1923, the year after Mussolini's March on Rome. The technical quality of these films was continually improv-ing, and some of them were making use of the newly opened Cinecitta Studio on the Via Tuscolana, which boasted 144 acres of facilities, including twelve sound stages. Quotas notwithstanding, Hollywood films - even the silent ones which remained in circulation - still tended to dominate Italian popular culture, and not just for middle-class youths on the streets around the Via Dandelo. Federico Fellini's novel and film Amarcord (slang for 'I remember') illustrates the extent of that domination from a vantage of fifty years later. Sergio Leone reckoned it was full of 'exact memories' of life in a provincial town north of Rome in the mid-1930s. Fellini depicts the parades of the young Avanguardisti and the Ballila, marching with the local militiamen and veteran blackshirts, but it is clear that the major cultural event to be celebrated in the town of Amarcord is the arrival of the latest Gary Cooper Western at the Fulgar cinema. Refer-ences to the Hollywood dream factory abound. The mountainous woman in the tobacconist's shop has 'come-to-bed eyes like Kay Francis'; overexcited children discuss Comanche Indians over the fam-ily supper; a new 'Thin Man'-styte raincoat is much admired; and the children masturbate together in a stationary car to ecstatic cries of 'Jean Harlow!', 'Mae West!' and 'The tobacco lady's tits!' In the wedding scene which concludes both book and film, a young woman finally finds 'her Gary Cooper' in the unlikely form of a little carabiniere from southern Italy ('Gary is a cowboy and Matteo is a policeman, but love is always love'). The prevailing impression is that, where Italian collect-ive fantasies were concerned, 'we are the sons and daughters of Americans'.4 The same fantasies were available to the 'Viale Glorioso gang', as Leone was to recall. In 1938 Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper were still all the rage, at least in those films that had been passed by the censorship office of the Ministry of Press and Propaganda. But from 1939 onwards they became decidedly less accessible as the Fascist government insisted that the importing of all foreign films be controlled by the state monop-ly and the major American companies gradually withdrew from the Italian sphere of operation in protest. This was a deprivation that made young movie enthusiasts like Leone feel as if the Fascist regime was striking directly at them. RKO continued to distribute, so Leone was able to see John Ford's Stagecoach at the local cinema della periferia (much cheaper than the first-run houses in the centre of town, and with more audience participation). And thankfully, some of the films Leone remembers enjoying most, such as James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, made it into the theatre without the intervention of the censor's office. Luigi Freddi, director of the film division of the Ministry of Popular Culture, had somehow come to the conclusion that Modern Times was 'a ferocious satire on socialism and communism'. But the regime was by no means wholly opposed to the products of Hollywood. In pondering what sort of Italian cinema his ministry should be promoting, Signor Freddi had expressed no small admiration for the cultural values (not to mention the production values) of the mainstream Hollywood films of the time. 'The American film industry', Freddi wrote in the mid-1930s, 'produces films that are youthful, serene, honest, optimistic, enjoyable, generally of high moral value and most often of a noble meaning.' (Frank Capra was a particular favour-ite, whom Freddi duly invited to Italy to conduct a seminar at the new Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.) Freddi shrewdly reckoned that it would be much better to invest in positive-thinking films, such as Capra's, than to engage in overt propaganda, which would probably be both expensive and counter-productive. His views on this matter were shared by Vittorio Mussolini (editor of the magazine Cinema, as well as occasional producer and scriptwriter) and Vittorio's father Benito, whose preferred genres were light comedy and musicals. Benito Mussolini especially liked 'Stanlio e Olio'.5 So, while Leone may have thumbed his nose at the 'the Italian tele-foni bianca', they were not always so divorced from the Hollywood product he revered. A comedy, released in 1938, called Il Signor Max, is a good example. It tells the story of Gianni (Vittorio de Sica), a humble Roman newspaper vendor who learns all about 'the American way of life' from the illustrated magazines (Esquire, Time) he sells at his roadside kiosk. Eventually, he is tempted to lead a double life, as the affluent and sybaritic 'Signor Max'. He picks up a few choice phrases in English ('How d'you do?', 'Cheerio'), learns to distinguish between superior and inferior brands of whisky, and ostentatiously smokes Samos Export cigarettes in a Roman cocktail bar where the inter-national set hang out. But finally, after various farcical complications, Max decides that he prefers to settle down with a nice nursemaid, and to mix with the little people: people like him and his jolly bus conductor father, who are good-hearted and much better company. Il Signor Max was directed by Mario Camerini, who throughout the 1930s specialized in Capraesque romantic comedies of this kind, wherein timid lower-middle-class characters (usually played by De Sica) gently rocked the boat, before accepting at the fade-out that stability was safest. From the mid-1940s on, Camerini was categorized by his increasingly neo-realist critics as the head of the 'calligraphic' school of film-making, one which emphasized hello scrivere (beautiful or over-decorated handwriting) at the expense of hard content, and which tended to insulate cinema from everyday political realities. Though Leone claimed that he avoided this sort of stuff until after the war, the claim is highly unlikely, for Mario Camerini was his godfather and a close friend of the family. It is more likely that in 1939 the Viale Glorioso gang rejected any films that made overt political points and therefore stood out in bolder contrast to the dubbed American films they loved. They would have had little time for Flavio Calzavara's Piccolo naufraghi, a rare example of a propaganda film pitched at children, dedicated in fact to 'the fighting youth of Italy'. Calzavara's film was reminiscent of William Golding's Lord of the Flies turned on its head, for the edification of Fascist youth organizations. Between that and James Cagney, or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, there was no contest in the eyes of the Viale Glorioso gang: 'We went to see the films that came from Hollywood.' Some of them (especially the serials, and series such as Charlie Chan, which Leone 'adored') bore a distinct family resemblance to the mono-chrome comics that Leone's friends looked at over and over again until they fell to pieces.6 They couldn't read English, but the graphics were much more interesting in any case. The key titles were Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, Mandrake the Magician and The Shadow. The 'official' comics Il Balilla and Jumbo, with their inspiring tales of ancient Rome, and heavy-handed satire on little black sambos, seemed much less interesting. The one Sergio Leone liked best was Lyman Young's Cino and Franco, which featured his favourite theme, friendship, between two young people in a jungle setting. A little later, at the height of the Second World War, American comics, in common with books and graphic art, were much harder to come by, as the regime discouraged them. True, there were Italian-produced copies by then, but they were, according to Leone, invariably 'abominable'. At a glance he could tell that everything from the print quality to the way the message was expressed was just wrong. 'Luckily, there was a thriving black market, where you could buy all that was forbidden. American novels and comics were sold under the counter, or from suitcases. But we didn't read much. By then, we were too busy waiting for the arrival of the real Americans: the soldiers.'7 Sergio Leone was eleven when the war started, and fourteen by the time the Sicily landings took place. Rome in the war years was charac-terized by its chaotic food distribution system and resultant food short-ages, by its black market and unrestricted luxury restaurants, and by its increasingly shrill and hollow propaganda, epitomized by the 'oceanic assemblies' in the square outside the Palazzo Venezia, and the news-agents' stands crammed with copies of Il Duce's speeches and news of Il Duce's orders. Latterly, Rome was racked by Nazi occupation and Allied aerial bombardments of the 'holy city'. For Leone, life in wartime must have made the world represented by American popular culture seem very like a dream of freedom and modernity, and an escape from the straitjacket of reality. In Leone's Viale Glorioso, afternoon visits to the cinema lulled the gang of youths into a sort of daze, which didn't help their homework much but certainly fuelled their daydreams. Meanwhile, bootleg comics were full of images for an Italian adolescent to fantasize about: images of plenty, of a world of promise, of the wide open prairies of America. Umberto Eco reckons that the fascination of a group of Italian intel-lectuals with American 'mass culture' in the 1950s and 1960s had a great deal to do with their experience of comics and popular music during the latter part of the Fascist period, and of the backlog of Hollywood cinema unleashed shortly afterwards. These cultural prod-ucts represented forbidden fruit, the 'other world'; and this made the ideology they represented seem doubly attractive. They were a rejection of official culture, which seemed to have had all the life squeezed out of it. The young Sergio Leone's love affair with Hollywood films and American comics happened within this atmosphere: the projection on to another world of all that was positive about modernity. In the prewar years there was a further form of year-round enter-tainment on offer to children, albeit in the open air of the Gianicolo Park, near the Piazzale Garibaldi.8 On occasional weekends Sergio Leone was taken there by his parents to see the glove puppets known as the burattini, often operated by Neapolitan families of puppeteers. Their name was said to derive from buratto, the coarse cloth used by Southern peasants both for sifting flour and to make the hard-wearing sleeve of the puppets' gloves. This brand of puppet theatre pre-dated the commedia dell'arte, but the stories usually enacted were in a line of descent f ...
Ответов - 9
Gringo: ... rom those of the commedia: the misfortunes of Pulcinella or Arlecchino or Gerolamo at the hands of the wily Brighella, as enacted by hand-waving puppets in masks. To the young Leone, they were magic. Often his parents had to drag him away from repeated viewings of the same performance, or prevent him from slipping off to yet another glove-puppet theatre. 'I remember late one afternoon', Sergio Leone said in 1976, 'as I was returning home to Trastevere, I walked past one of the puppet theatres which was just closing . . . Behind the lowered curtain of the theatre, I could hear raised voices, and the sound of things being thrown about. Looking behind the theatre, I could see the puppeteer and his wife having a scrap. It was a friendly fight, and very Neapolitan. But just after the puppets had been hitting one another with wooden sticks on the stage, here was this couple hitting one another with the wood and cloth puppets, whose "gloves" by now had become all too visible. As I watched this bizarre event, I understood - in my childlike way - that there were things as they appeared, and things that went on behind the things as they appeared. Fiction and reality. The fables of the theatre, and the human theatre which was more serious, tougher, more shabby, and pitiful even. I had just grasped my first lesson in the meaning of the word "spectacle". And it happened before I went to the cinema for the first time.'9 The burattini were just one form of traditional puppet theatre on offer in Rome's public spaces. Since Sergio's father Vincenzo hailed from Naples and could speak the Neapolitan dialect, he had a particu- larly soft spot for them. But there were also occasional visits from the pupi Siciliani of the South. These were rod-puppets, of up to five feet in height, rather than small glove puppets. They were used to perform Sicilian variations on stories of heroism and bloodshed, originally dat-ing back to the era of Charlemagne: the same stories that were collected in the Old French epic The Song of Roland (written shortly after the First Crusade and describing an actual military disaster of AD 778). But these had been updated and made even larger than life in the Renais-sance by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, as Orlando Furioso. Sergio Leone liked to say that Orlando was an excellent example of the ability of Italian culture to absorb outside influences, and turn them into a distinctive form of entertainment. Performances by the pupi Siciliani consisted of one from a repertoire of about 500 plays drawn from incidents in Orlando. Roland (or Orlando) would do battle against the Saracens, with help from his magic sword and his cousin Renaud (Rinaldo). But Rinaldo had mistakenly drunk from the foun-tain of hate, and declared that he, like Orlando, was in love with the fair Angelica. Consequently, there would be a great deal of gore, much clattering, shouting and decapitation, long interludes of courtly love, a complex language of puppet gestures, and (perhaps the most distinctive feature) the stiff-legged 'Orlando walk' which younger members of the audience became adept at imitating. This was the result of the two puppeteers moving two iron rods (one to the head, one to the right hand) to make a rigid five-foot puppet in metal armour traverse the stage. The action took place in front of brightly coloured fairground backdrops, over which the busy puppeteers would lean, yelling, impro-vising, and stamping their feet to create sound effects. Depending on the audience, performances could also consist of noisy, down-to-earth humour, and crude pastiches of 'high culture' from further north, as well as contemporary twists on the age-old stories. If the pupi Siciliani were on form, the audience wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. Such was the magnificent confusion they evoked in Don Quixote. when the thirty-five-year-old Sergio Leone was preparing Fistful of Dollars, he cast his mind back to the performances of the pupi Siciliani he saw as an adolescent in Rome's Pincio Park, south of the Borghese Gardens, where the puppet theatre was surrounded by merry-go-rounds, and statues of the great authors of Italian literature. He recalled: 'When I started my first Western, I had to find a psychological reason in myself - not being a person who ever lived in that....
админ: Я не против это перевести, но со временем совершенный напряг... Как будет время - переведу...
Gringo: Ну эту вещь никогда не поздно перевести. Пять лет пролежала. Некоторые последующие главы уже переведены. Но хочется начинать выкладывать в хронологическом порядке. Есть еще книжка про Пэкинпу, написанная одним итальянским критиком. Думаю, мне ее через несколько месяцев переведут. Мне самому интересно узнать, как итальянцы оценивают его фильмы.
Долматов: Ну вот...раздразнили только.
Django: Интересно было бы почитать про Леоне, но переводить 570 страниц - действительно большой напряг.... Если что, то можно и на английском выложить её где-нибудь в сети.
Долматов: Ёлки, не такой уж это и напряг...Кто весел-тот смеётся, кто хочет-тот добьётся...Не исключено, что студент или студентка, или группа студентов любого факультета ин.языков перевели бы это в качестве практики. и ещё "спасибо" сказали. А если перевод ещё и окажется удачным- в перспективе это поможет их карьере.
Gringo: Небольшой отрывок из главы, посвященной фильму «Однажды на Диком Западе» Осенью 1973 года Генри Фонда описывал свою подготовку к роли на семинаре Американского института кинематографии: «Когда я узнал, что по сценарию впервые буду играть отрицательного героя, я пошел к оптометристу и вставил себе контактные линзы темного цвета, потому что я думал, что мои ангельски-голубые глаза не подойдут для роли злодея. Отрастил усы, примерно как у Джона Бута, убийцы Линкольна, и в таком виде предстал в Риме перед Серджио Леоне. Серджо, который ни слова не говорил по-английски, взглянул на меня и со скоростью пулеметной очереди выдал тираду на итальянском языке, сопровождавшуюся бешеной жестикуляцией. Первое, что я услышал через переводчика было «Усы немедленно сбрить! И где Ваши голубые глаза? Я подписывался на голубые глаза!» Только в сцене расстрела семьи Макбейна Фонда понял и оценил замысел Леоне. Это был уже далеко не первый съемочный день, но до того момента Фонда просто послушно выполнял то, что от него требовал режиссер. Фонда продолжает рассказ: «Итак, удаленное ранчо, счастливая семья готовится сесть за стол, накрытый прямо перед домом. Звук выстрела, и молодая девушка падает замертво. Ее отец бежит к ней и получает пулю в лоб. Старший сын выскакивает из амбара и – БАМ! - он тоже мертв. Один лишь младший сын, девятилетний мальчик, стоит во дворе, посреди этой страшной расправы. Камера дает общий план, и из ближайших зарослей появляются пять зловещих фигур в длинных пыльниках и черных шляпах. В руках у них винтовки, в кобурах торчат револьверы. Медленно они надвигаются на мальчика. Лицо мальчика крупным планом. Снова кадр с приближающимися убийцами. Крупным планом ужас в глазах ребенка. Переход на фигуру главаря в центре. Камера медленно объезжает его. И вот оно – то, что задумал Леоне с самого начала. Лицо главного бандита крупным планом. Зрители столбенеют от неожиданности: «Черт возьми, это же Генри Фонда!»
Сухов: Gringo пишет: Камера дает общий план, и из ближайших зарослей появляются пять зловещих фигур в длинных пыльниках и черных шляпах. В руках у них винтовки, в кобурах торчат револьверы. Медленно они надвигаются на мальчика. Лицо мальчика крупным планом. Снова кадр с приближающимися убийцами. Крупным планом ужас в глазах ребенка. Переход на фигуру главаря в центре. Камера медленно объезжает его. И вот оно – то, что задумал Леоне с самого начала. Лицо главного бандита крупным планом. Зрители столбенеют от неожиданности: «Черт возьми, это же Генри Фонда!» Весьма примечательная сцена! Убийцы с героической внешностью выходят из кустов под звуки торжественной музыки!
Gringo: В Пакистане неизвестные вырезали семью из восьми человек из-за земельного спора. РБК 26.04.2008, Исламабад 17:15:15 В Пакистане группа неизвестных злоумышленников вырезала целую семью из восьми человек из-за неурегулированного земельного спора, сообщила местная полиция. Инцидент произошел сегодня ранним утром в восточной провинции Пенджаб. Нападавшие, вооруженные мачете и стрелковым оружием, зверски расправились с 45-летним фермером, его женой, сыном и невесткой, а также с четырьмя его внуками в возрасте от 4 до 10 лет. Все они были убиты в их собственном доме. По "горячим следам" задержать никого из убийц не удалось, ведется расследование происшествия, передает Associated Press. http://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/20080426171515.shtml
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