Sicily!
The shots of the orange pickers next to the basket of unsold fruit are reminiscent of Tina Modotti, of Walker Evans, in other words of the great social photography of the twenties and thirties. And after these first images, the traveler from the north or from America, who visits his mother after years of absence, boards the train, and the film travels into the heart of Sicily, which could just as well be the heart of Germany or Persia, but is definitely our heart. Sicilia! is a condensation, not an abridgement, of a novel by Elio Vittorini from the late 1930s, in which he dreamily, yet laconically and humorously describes his return to Sicily. Straub/Huillet follow their monolithic life project, conceiving their actors in a Brechtian sense as reciting bodies that call out rhythmically composed dialogues to each other. Unrivalled: the almost Dadaist sequence of dialogues between the traveller and the local scissor grinder, who does not grind scissors.
Supporting Film: À propos de Nice
Jean Vigo was twenty-five when he made this, his debut film, a silent cinematic poem that reveals, through a thrilling and ironic use of montage, the economic reality hidden behind the facade of the Mediterranean resort town of Nice. The first of Vigo’s several collaborations with cinematographer Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov’s brother and a future Oscar winner), À propos de Nice is both a scathing and invigorating look at 1930s French culture.
