Francesca Marciano in Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties"

 

Friday's guest Francesca Marciano starred in a number of Italian films prior to achieving success as a fiction writer and screenwriter.

Her credits include the virgin Carolina [pictured here, billed as "Francesca Marciani"] in Lina Wertmüller's outrageous 1975 film Seven Beauties, which was nominated for four Oscars.

Other film roles include the second-billed "Francesca" in Pupi Avati's The House of the Laughing Windows (1976) and Tutti defunti... tranne i morti (1977); and the Italian TV miniseries, La riva di Charleston (1978).

More about Marciano:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html

Read More......

Francesca Marciano in the New York Times

Michiko Kakutani reviews the new story collection, The Other Language (2014), by acclaimed Italian author and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Francesca Marciano, who visits the Writers Institute this coming Friday.

"Francesca Marciano’s magical, fleet-footed stories leap around the globe, from Rome to New York to Mombasa, from a small Greek village to a remote island off the coast of Tanzania to a fortress on the banks of the Narmada River in India. She has an uncanny ability to conjure specific places...."

More in the New York Times:   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/books/no-safe-harbor-for-travelers-in-the-other-language.html

More about Marciano's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/marciano_francesca14.html

Read More......

Maurice Walsh, author of The Quiet Man

The Kerry Writers Museum in Kerry, Ireland has a web page dedicated to Maurice Walsh, author of "The Quiet Man," the basis of the John Ford movie to be screened at Page Hall on Friday.

"Maurice Walsh was born in Ballydonoghue on 2 May 1879. He was the third child of ten and the first son born to John Walsh, a local farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Buckley who lived in a three-roomed thatched farmhouse. John Walsh’s main interests were books and horses and he himself did little about the farm, preferring to have a hired man. The most famous of these was Paddy Bawn Enright, whose name was to be immortalised by Maurice Walsh in his story The Quiet Man (though the name was not used in the movie version). John Walsh passed on to his son not only a love of books but also legends and folk tales and the theory of place that were later to be a feature of many of Maurice’s books."

More:  http://www.kerrywritersmuseum.com/index.php/kerry-literary-centre-listowel-museum/maurice-walsh

More about the Classic Film Series:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#man

Read More......

"The Most Remarkable New Movie"-- Tomorrow 3/1

"If there's a tougher sell than a Romanian movie by a hitherto unknown director, it's a Romanian movie by an unknown director that takes two and half hours to tell the tale of a 62-year-old pensioner's final trip to the hospital. Does it help to add that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu was the great discovery of the last Cannes Film Festival and, in several ways, the most remarkable new movie to open in New York this spring?"

Read more by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, April 18, 2006:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-04-18/film/the-art-of-dying/full/

Read More......

J. Hoberman at the Movies this Friday

We invite you to attend our final event of the season, a special opportunity to view and discuss film clips and the future of cinema with major film critic J. Hoberman, a contributor at the Village Voice for more than three decades, and author of the new book about trends in 21^st century cinema, Film After Film (2012).

Among other films, Hoberman will be showing clips from animated adult feature, Waking Life, and the Polish-Japanese video game digital feature, Avalon.

 

J. Hoberman, film critic
December 7 (Friday)
Reading/Discussion — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

J. Hoberman, one of the most influential American film critics of recent decades, is admired for his wit, intellectual energy and incomparable knowledge of experimental, international, independent, and Hollywood cinema. His new book is Film After Film (2012), which argues among other things that the future of film is animation and digital-image-making, ending “the need for an actual world, let alone a camera.” Senior film critic at the Village Voice from 1988 to 2012, Hoberman started with the paper in the 1970s as a third stringer under critic Andrew Sarris. Jessica Winter of Time magazine praised his work as “elegant, erudite, ambitious, and wondrously droll arts and media criticism,” and credited him for teaching her generation of critics “how to think and write about popular culture.” A portion of the Writers Institute’s fall 2012 Classic Film Series was based on Hoberman’s list of his favorite 21st century films
(see Classic Film Series Listing).

 

For more information contact 518-442-5620 or writers@albany.edu, or visit us online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ . You may also wish to visit our blog at http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/, or to friend us on Facebook. 

 

Read More......

Silent Film, "Bed and Sofa," Friday April 20, 7:30, Page Hall

"Liuda, a bored housewife who could not be more unlike the prototypical Bolshevik “New Woman,” lives in a one-room basement apartment on Third Meshchanskaia Street (the literal translation of the film’s original title), a petty-bourgeois neighborhood in Moscow. She spends her days idly, mainly reading magazines, notably the popular movie fan magazine Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran). Her husband, Kolia, is a charming and good-natured but dictatorial and egocentric stonemason."

"The couple is soon joined by Kolia’s old war buddy, Volodia, a printer who cannot find an apartment in Moscow due to the severe housing shortage that was still a major social problem ten years after the revolution. Liuda is quite understandably annoyed by the addition of yet another person to their cramped apartment; of course she has not been consulted. Yet Volodia, ingratiating and helpful, quickly wins her over by proving the perfect lodger. The sexual tension between Liuda and Volodia is palpable from the beginning, so when Kolia is called to a job out of town, it is scarcely surprising that Volodia takes advantage of the opportunity to woo Liuda openly."

Read more of the article on filmreference.com by Denise J. Youngblood, Professor of Russian and Soviet History at the University of Vermont.

Read More......