Wednesday, May 31 + Q&A
Sunday, June 4
On Wednesday, May 31st Professor Joseph Luzzi will return to The Moviehouse to introduce and conduct a Q&A to kick off the first film and the series.
Director: Federico Fellini
Writer(s): Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Carlo Ponti
Cast: Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard Basehart, Aldo Silvani, Marcella Rovere, Livia Venturini
With this breakthrough film, Federico Fellini launched both himself and his wife and collaborator Giulietta Masina to international stardom, breaking with the neorealism of his early career in favor of a personal, poetic vision of life as a bittersweet carnival. The infinitely expressive Masina registers both childlike wonder and heartbreaking despair as Gelsomina, loyal companion to the traveling strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn, in a toweringly physical performance), whose callousness and brutality gradually wear down her gentle spirit. Winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, La strada possesses the purity and timeless resonance of a fable and remains one of cinema’s most exquisitely moving visions of humanity struggling to survive in the face of life’s cruelties.
Tickets: $16 / Superstar Members $14
1hr 48 mins / NR
[This film will be shoown in restored 4K digital with uncompressed monoaural soundtrack.]
Joseph Luzzi received his PhD from Yale University is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, where he also teaches courses on film and Italian Studies.
He is the author of five books, including his most recent work, Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (Norton, 2022), a New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 and Guardian Book of the Day selection. His other books include Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins, 2015), which has been translated into multiple languages.
Joseph’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TLS, Bookforum, and American Scholar, among others, and his scholarly writing has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, Raritan, Italica, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Read more
"The way La Strada moves within a consistent reality of its own creating, without fumbling or straining for effects, gives a suddenly new impression of what movie-making competence might look like." - Harper's Magazine