ALEX FARBA

By Alex Deleon ~ filmfestivals.com

              
The 34th edition of the Bergamo film festival in Northern Italy (officially known as The BERGAMO FILM MEETING) running this year from March 5 - 13, will be featuring one of the most interesting personal actor tributes of the as yet early 2016 festival season.  The hommage and retro in question is to the iconic goddess of the early French Nouvelle Vague, Danish-French actress (and vocalist) Anna Karina. Karina (born 1940) charmed the boots off of eveybody in a series of iconoclastic films by Jean-Luc Godard, in the early to mid sixties, with her perfect cleancut beauty, naughty sexiness, and slightly Danish accent in such films as: Band of Outsiders, A Woman is a Woman (and whutta woman!) and Pierrot le Fou.

 She was often paired with Jean-Paul Belmondo in films that became the Trademark of the then ground breaking New Wave. She didn't have to exhibit any great profundity as an actress because that was not what the New Wave was about, but her captivating screen presence was enough to make more "serious" directors such as Buñuel (La Religieuse, 1966), Visconti (The Stranger, 1967), Cukor (Justine, 1969), Delvaux (Rendez-vous à Bray, 1971), Fassbinder (Chinese Roulette, 1976), and much later, by Jaque Rivette in "Haut, Bas, Fragile", 1994. 

French director Rivette who just passed away thus month at age 87 was also associated with the new wave but more in line with elder statemen like Eric Rohmer. Hopefully some Rivette films will also be screened at Bergamo

 as a kind of "In Memorium".

Twelve Karina films will be presented during the festival week and the actress will attend the festival in person.

Aside from the scheduled presence of Karina which is alone sufficient justification for a trip to Bergamo, there will be a selective retro of films by Hungarian master, Miklos Jancsó, who passed away in 2014 at the venerable age of 92. Besides his numerous Hungarian films now considered classics, for a brief period in the early seventies Jancsó, perhaps to take a breather from the pressures of working under a communist regime, spend enough time in Italy  to shoot four films there.  This is oddly enough a kind of a blank interlude in Jancso's career and is little known compared to his major Hungarian works. The director himself  was not overly enthralled by his Italian films and regarded them as throwaway in-between movies he made just to breath the air of a free country for a while. in any case he was clearly not in his element artistically away from Hungary and working with non-Hungarian actors. One of these films, however, "The Pacifist" 1970, provides an intriguing intersection in Bergamo, because it starred Antonioni muse Monica Vitti in the odd role of a journalist in a murder film.  Vitti directed by Jancso is one for the books whether the film is any good or not!

Hungarian model and activist Ilona Staller, alias "Cicciolina", became a porno star in Italy as well as a serious candidate for high public offices. 

Jancso's best known Italian film was ""Public Vices and Private Virtues" (Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù, 1975), also known as "Vice and Pleasure" which achieved a certain notoriety at the time because it was about a  debauched pan-sexual young  prince who has sex with everybody in sight, male and female, and contained orgiastic sex scenes viewed as explicit (relatively speaking) for the time.  This might be seen as a predecessor to Guccione's mainstream porno extravaganza, Caligula, which came out only a few years later and aroused endless discussion.

Another talking point about this picture was that the Budapest born Hungarian starlet Ilona Staller was in it. Staller had resettled in Italy, redubbed herself "Cicciolina" and was enjoying a thriving career in Italy as a major porno star!  This film has been classified by some as straight pornography and by others as political symbolism --or "Eroticism within a deliberately anarchic context" -- which makes sense in the context of some of his other politically charged films populated by totally nude women in questionable situations. Because of the scenes depicting orgies, the movie was banned in Italy and Jancso was sentenced to four months in prison but was later acquitted on appeal. Whatever else Jancso may have been he was certainly a rebel at heart always forcing viewers to confront things they normally would look away from -- such as mass unexplained nudity and sado-masochism.  Jancso's Italian period has been almost entirely neglected or glossed over by the international film critical press and the films themselves are all but unknown and rarely seen. Hopefully the upcoming Bergamo FIlm Meeting will show them and thereby fill out the jigsaw puzzle on one of the most unusual Maestros of world cinema, Miklos Jancsó. -- And don't forget, even geniuses like Pushkin wrote some "dirty poems".

Whatever other delights may be on tap at Bergamo 2016 remains to be seen, but one thing is sure. This relatively unknown film festival is not going to remain unknown for long.

Alex, Budapest