Word: sardinian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Padre, Padrone. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's entrancing film about the loam-to-letters life of a bestselling Sardinian author from humble peasant origins provides the most convincing evidence since Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" of the resilient vitality in Italian cinema, the recent excesses of Fellini, Antonioni, et al notwithstanding. The Taviani brothers' first film to receive international attention, it features a host of mind-gripping sequences destined to set apart "Padre, Padrone" as one of the most important films to cross the Atlantic in the late 1970s. To name only two: the unforgettable series of shots capturing...
Padre, Padrone. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's entrancing film about the loam-to-letters life of a bestselling Sardinian author from humble peasant origins provides the most convincing evidence since Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" of the resilient vitality in Italian cinema, the recent excesses of Fellini, Antonioni, et al. notwithstanding. The Taviani brothers' first film to receive international attention, it features a host of mind-gripping sequences destined to set apart "Padre, Padrone" as one of the most important films to cross the Atlantic in the late 1970s. To name only two: the unforgettable series of shots capturing...
...feature-length film, one particular scene in Padre, Padrone (Italian for My Father, My Master) goes a long way towards capturing the purpose and theme of this film that dazzled the critics at last year's Cannes Film Festival. A portrait-type shot encompasses the entire family of a Sardinian peasant, Efisio Ledda (Omero Antonutti), seated in the waiting room of a local bank. Compelled to sell his recently inherited farmland in the face of low olive prices and a disastrous winter, the paterfamilias informs his two sons and two daughters of the plans he has drawn up for each...
...ANOTHER LEVEL, Padre, Padrone is an earthy chronicle of an event. The directors never romanticize anything or anybody, least of all the virtues of peasant life in the hinterlands. If anything, the Taviani brothers flirt with the danger of caricaturing the figure of Efisio Ledda, a self-conscious Sardinian rebuke to the Tolstoyan idealization of the muzhik. And it is the very bluntness of the portrayal of the patriarch's tyranny that reveals the directors' background in documentaries. The father's capacity for sadistic fury knows no bounds in disciplining his eldest son: Efisio is a petty and mean-hearted...
Unlike many of his colleagues working for more flamboyant directors in the Italian film industry, cinematographer Masini avoids using flashy camera angles and other distracting legerdemain with the lens. Masini instead unobtrusively records the countryside, focusing on the lush greenery of a Sardinian forest or the evanescent ambers of a pasture at dawn. And at several points in the film, Masini is content to allow events to speak for themselves, permitting the actors to move in and out of the picture while the camera remains fixed in one place. In this way the cinematographer quietly succeeds in imbuing the visual...