Tickets $8 General, $6 Students, no comps, passes or discount cards accepted. Buy advance tickets at CornellCinemaTickets.com
This innovative set of short films was originally created to interface with a live multi-media performance directed and choreographed by Byron Suber and presented at the Schwartz in Ithaca in March 2008 with subsequent performances in New Orleans and New York and truncated performances in Dublin, Paris and Rome. The films were inspired by scenes in Italian neo-realist and post-war films such as Rossellini's Rome, Open City, Pasolini's Accatone and Mamma Roma, Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's The Eclipse. What all these films had in common for Suber was a preoccupation with Rome as filmic location. Suber made the films as a response to work he had been doing in Rome and the ways in which his time there brought forward uncanny sentiments of home in opposition to exile. Each of the films is re-creating an iconic scene from one of these masterpieces, reproducing the movement and re-transcribing it into an Ithaca location. The results are sometimes haunting, sometimes humorous and most often, oddly beautiful. In the original production, Suber collaborated with Ithaca musician/composers Mary Lorson and Jennie Lowe Stearns. Tonight's show isolates the films and musical performances to be presented as a suite titled Spoglia REDUX. Joining Mary Lorson and Byron Suber will be musicians Emily Arin, Leah Houghtaling and Amelia Sauter.
Lorson and Stearns appeared in the films and performed live onstage while having at the same time created and/or adapted music to accompany the films. Tonight's event offers the opportunity to revisit this music and these films, which were but a piece of the original Spoglia, but clearly warrant a show of their own! Video projection.
2008, color, 1 hour 30 minutes, USA