BEFORE SCROLLING TO THE WEB PAGE BELOW ABOUT TINTO BRASS, PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THESE NEWS ITEMS, WHICH ARE FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING I’VE EVER HAD TO SAY:

AMY GOODMAN:     A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well. The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time” — time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment” — armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

It gets worse:

NAOMI WOLF:     On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed a brigade — which means three to four thousand warriors — somewhere in America. We do not know where they are deployed though citizens have informally reported to me having seen military vehicles and troops in Georgia and Alabama. We do know that their official mandate according to the first report is “crowd control” as well as action in the event of a mass civilian catastrophe. Initial reports described their technology “module package” as involving Tasers and rubber bullets.... The First Brigade is Bush’s force: they are not answerable to Congress or to the Governors of states: they are answerable to the Commander in Chief. In an Alternet posting, I interviewed Air Force Colonel (retired) David Antoon who noted that the troops must obey the president, even if he asks them to arrest Congress or fire on civilians or attack media outlets. If they do not obey orders, he notes, they face five years in prison.... Antoon himself calls the deployment “ominous.” Troops on our streets makes us something less than a democracy: one definition of a police state is when a leader sends his own military units into civilian streets. Meanwhile the civilian policing of citizens is becoming more brutal. Hundreds of preemptive arrests took place in St Paul, dozens of journalists were arrested.... In St. Paul, funds were sent in advance to pay off the lawsuits against police forces that were guaranteed to arise from the planned abuse of citizens. This sort of thing is happening across the country. The tactic has established a closed circle that has turned citizens’ law enforcement agencies into contractors of a state that is directing acts of increasing severity against US citizens. Now a military brigade is being deployed....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

Click here to see an interview with Naomi Wolf conducted in early October 2008.

For the past five years or so I hve been hearing rumors that Halliburton has been building (and has now finished building) 800 prisons throughout the USA, not yet functioning, but just waiting for the right crisis. I have not found reliable evidence for the specific quantity, readiness, functionality, locations, or details, but you might be interested in taking a look at page 5 of this Halliburton press release dated 26 January 2006: KBR has been awarded a contract announced by the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component. The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contingency contract is to support ICE facilities and has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.... Now, really, what are the chances of “an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States”? And what are the “new programs” that could come under “rapid development”?

FOR THE FULL PRESS RELEASE, CLICK HERE.

NOW, BACK TO THE MAIN PART OF THE WEB PAGE:

Did you happen to record Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it was shown on PBS back in the 1970s?
Do you still have the tapes?
Is there a TIME-LIFE logo at the end?
If so, please write to me. Thank you!

THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS

Winning Accolades but Angering Producers—Continued

In capo al mondo

(To the Ends of the Earth)
(1963)

Revised version: Chi lavora è perduto—in capo al mondo
(Whoever Works Is Lost—To the Ends of the Earth, 1964)

Window card for the pre-release edition	Poster with a revised title. Look carefully, and you’ll see that the title is a paste-over. The little bit of the original “o” that peeks out from behind might not be the final letter of “mondo”; it might be the final letter of a title that was never used: Chi lavora è maledetto.	Lorenzo Nistri’s poster design for In capo al mondo. See below for the printed version. (Reproduced courtesy of the Painted Cinema)
It’s on DVD now in Russia, under the original title of In capo al mondo = To the Ends of the Earth = На вершине мира. Despite the title, it is the censored Chi lavora è perduto version, entirely in black and white. Mysteriously, the sound is terribly out of sync. Available from azuro.ru Мультимедиа. Also available at ozon.ru and at DVDDOM.ru and at odvd.ru and at СмотиДома.ru and at DVD-Video Интернет Магазин and at Интернет-Магазин DVD and at DVD video and at BLUEREY.ru and probably a whole bunch of other places too. As you can see, it’s double-billed with a much more recent Italian feature, Salvatore Piscicelli’s Alla fine della notte (To the End of the Night), with Anna Ammirati, Ennio Fantastichini, and Ricky Tognazzi.

This picaresque stream-of-consciousness comedy follows a recently graduated draftsman, Bonifacio B. (Brass’s newborn son was also named Bonifacio), who is offered a job by a large firm. The problem is that Bonifacio is a manic-depressive who is morally opposed to working for large firms — even morally opposed to performing any sort of work whatsoever. He must have been traumatized by a viewing of Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto (1961), to which many an homage is paid here. (A fellow who is almost a dead-ringer for Bonifacio appeared in Olmi’s film: the morning after the exam, when the successful applicants assemble in a waiting room. Look at the guy who argues that the test score counts more than nepotism. Hmmmmmmmmmm.) Bonifacio wanders the streets of Venice, meeting friends and acquaintances, many of them leftist activists. One rebellious friend he can only visit at the local insane asylum, as the stress/futility of activism has shot his nerves. Bonifacio pursues his prankish thoughts, surrealistically remembering his outrageous fascist childhood and his military service, and wistfully recalling his brief but doomed engagement to the winsome Gabriella — doomed only because he can’t face up to any form of responsibility. Ultimately, in a jolt of an ending, he decides to reject the job offer.

Bonifacio’s grandfather offers his wisdom

Despite the political and somber subject matter of this angry-young-man story, much of the film is hilarious, nearly all of it is good-natured and light-hearted, and all of it is warm and loving. The actor who plays Bonifacio, Sady Rebbot, had recently made a hit as a murderous pimp in Jean-Luc Godard’s austere Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux, which is excerpted here when Bonifacio fantasizes about being a glamourous criminal. And Brass chose Pascale Audret to play Gabriella after seeing her in a French stage production of The Diary of Anne Frank. (She’s my favorite of all the actresses in Brass’s films.)

When In capo al mondo was first screened at trade festivals in late 1963 audiences and a fair number of critics alike went wild with enthusiasm and were certain they had witnessed the emergence of a major talent. (Variety’s critic, “Hawk,” called it “insouciant.” I can’t think of a better word to describe the dialogue—well, at least what little I can understand of the dialogue thanks to my poor knowledge of Italian.) Little could the critics have predicted what would happen next. The censors banned the film, and the church, especially in the person of the Patriarch of Venice, railed against it. No one in authority wanted to see family life, the Axis, the church, or the military treated in anything less than a heroic manner. To present such subjects humorously was more than the censors could bear. But the film’s worst crime was making a hero out of a fellow who thinks that work is evil. This was apparently a federal offense, in violation of Article 1 of the Italian Constitution, which states that Italy is based upon labor. The censor demanded cuts, and also demanded a new title. Brass wouldn’t make the cuts, preferring to shelve the film instead. But he was willing to negotiate a new title. Did the censor have any suggestions? No suggestions at all, so long as it’s different. So Brass chose Chi lavora è maledetto (Whoever Works Is Cursed), but at the last moment settled on something more euphonious: Chi lavora è perduto (Whoever Works Is Lost). This new title was a play on Mussolini’s adage that “chi si ferma è perduto,” or “whoever stops is lost,” by which he inspired his public to keep fighting and to keep the faith. (And Mussolini’s dictum had also been used as the title of a 1960 movie starring Totò.) Nearly a year later the political situation had cooled, and Zebra Film managed to clear the film for release, with one exceedingly brief cut during the priest scene. Though the film earned enough of a profit to make Brass a marketable filmmaker, it never realized its full monetary value, for its box-office potential was crippled when the censors restricted it to adults only. (Today it would almost certainly get a PG. My guess is that the reasons for the restriction were probably the briefest glimpses of the slightest nudity, such shocking vocabulary as “merda,” Gabriella’s traumatic search for a doctor willing to perform an abortion, the wacked-out repressed-pedophile priest, and the icon of Jesus winking in agreement at Bonifacio. But that’s only a guess.) The studio, angry with Brass for having caused such a ruckus, gave the film a small release and then quickly withdrew it. Mario Gagliardotto’s book, Obiettivo Brass, reveals yet another controversy engendered by this film, one far more personal: In one scene, Bonifacio is amused by a fascist epitaph on a gravestone. Unbeknownst to Brass, it was Brass’s father who had written that epitaph. In revenge, father disinherited son!

Bonifacio at the art museum

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: At the Cinémathèque Française, Brass had associated with Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, the founders of the French New Wave (la nouvelle vague) movement. Chi lavora è perduto, though filmed in Italy and Switzerland, can nonetheless be considered a New Wave work. It is perhaps the only New Wave work that’s not French.

A young Bonifacio taunts his friends

POETIC INJUSTICE: Chi lavora è perduto had been unseen for decades when the Spazio Oberdan, a new film archive housed in an old movie palace in Milano, screened a 16mm print on Saturday, 30 September 2000, with Brass in attendance. The original 35mm prints were black and white, except for the funeral of the partisan, which was in color, filling the screen with red flags. But the 16mm revival print was entirely in black and white. This is the same print that was later shown on television.

A moment from the only color sequence.

SIGNING THE FILM WITH HIS FACE: This might have been Brass’s first time in front of a movie camera. (Was he on camera in L’Italia non è un Paese povero? Take a look at the stills.) During Bonifacio’s fantasy, we see a newsreel cameraman quickly approach him. From the back he looks like Tinto Brass. Then in the next shot we see the cameraman’s face, and, no two ways about it, there he is! According to Antonio Tentori’s book Tinto Brass: Il senso dei sensi, Brass also doubles for a boater earlier in the film, but I can’t recognize him.

Bonifacio in the spotlight. Tinto Brass as a 16mm TV-news cameraman.

HOMAGES: As noted above, homages are paid to Il posto and Vivre sa vie. Another homage consists of dupey-looking clips from Roberto Rossellini’s breathtaking Paisà (a.k.a. Paisan). I suspect that one of the final shots, a clip of the entrance gate to Auschwitz, was probably used in Ça ira. There are also a couple of blink-and-you-miss-it shots and edits deliberately reminiscent of the breakthrough 16mm American independent film from 1948 called Dreams That Money Can Buy. So that explains why Bonifacio’s job interviewer speaks via speeded-up tape. Did anyone catch anything else? (If you’ve never seen Dreams That Money Can Buy, you owe it to yourself to rectify that situation. It’s a collaborative effort by a bunch of the greatest artists of the 20th century, shot for next to no money on Kodachrome with a home-movie camera in a New York City loft. If your equipment can play Region-2 PAL DVDs, you should purchase a copy from the BFI. And then you can sign up for the Louisa M Alcott Chapter of the American Cheesebinders Union.)

MORTALITY: I was saddened to learn that Sady (a.k.a. Saddy) Rebbot died of cancer at the young age of 59, and that Pascale Audret died in a motor accident at the young age of 63. How fragile life is.

Bonifacio would like to be rich, but alas...

QUESTIONS FOR OUR READERS: Who dubbed Sady Rebbot’s, Pascale Audret’s, and Monique Messine’s voices? Can any of you Francophone lip-readers tell if they were speaking Italian or French? Tinto Brass dubbed Tino Buazzelli to give him a proper Venetian accent. It seems that this film was also shown in France as Qui travaille est perdu and in Germany as Wer arbeitet, ist verloren. Does anyone know if that’s correct? Do the French and German dubs still exist?

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE  SEE:
AnteprimaAnnoZero Film Festival, 30 May 2001
DEAD LINKS THAT MIGHT COME BACK TO LIFE SOME DAY:
Torino Film Festival, 13–21 November 2003
Il critica film
tamtamcinema: The Daily of Italian Cinema, 29 May 2001
tamtamcinema: The Daily of Italian Cinema, 6 June 2001
Verona contemporanea 4 no 1 (April 2000), esp p 8
Cristiana Paternò, “Bellaria 2001: Anteprimaannozero,” Monday, 4 June 2001

THE MUSIC:

A mere 44 years after the première, the full soundtrack album is released. Well, what was the rush?

Now, at long last, I get to see Nistri’s poster as published. Not only that, but I can see even more clearly why I can’t understand much of the dialogue or narration in this movie. What on earth does that doggerel mean?

NOTE: Just after I posted the above, Italian-born Marco Fornier, bless him, came to the rescue. You see, I understood most of the words, but I didn’t see how they formed sentences. Now that he has rendered it so sensibly, it all seems embarrassingly obvious. Here goes:   Mondo = World     can ( = cane) = dog     boia = executioner     crepa (from crepare) = die [Note from RJB: “croak” or “kick the bucket” might better convey the mood]   fam (= fame) = hunger     noia = boredom     ernia = hernia     toco (= tocco) = slice     pan (=pane) = bread             Thus:   Damn world Nasty world You die of hunger You die of boredom Nasty world Damn world What a hernia For a slice of bread                Truly inspired verse. But it loses something in the translation.

DVD forthcoming from
.
The announcement has so far quietly been made at Forum Raro Video — Tinto Brass “d’Epoca”

Moris Ergas presenta
un film scritto, diretto e montato da Tinto Brass

Chi lavora è perduto
—in capo al mondo—

World première at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, 25 August 1963
Originally scheduled for release on Thursday, 5 December 1963;
actually released in late 1964
Running time: 78 minutes (at 24fps)
[Official running times of 98 and 90 minutes are incorrect.
The 16mm print shown on cable television was transferred at 24fps rather than the usual 25
by the simple means of running the film on a standard projector and pointing
a primitive low-resolution video camera with after-image problems at the result.]

Letterboxed at 1.85:1, but on the +1 cablecast, if you looked really carefully, you would have seen that there was a faint image behind the black bars at the top and bottom. So Tinto shot this movie at Academy 1:1.375, or maybe even MovieTone 1:1.18 or perhaps even full-frame 1:1.33. The masking was then done in the lab.

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