Boccaccio ‘70

This is a FREE screening with a limited number of complimentary tickets. Please RSVP via our virtual-cinema-order-form; you will then be emailed a unique screening link for the film that will be active from Nov 6–12.

Introduction by Karen Pinkus 

Four of Italy’s greatest auteurs—Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica, and the lesser-known Mario Monicelli—joined forces for this 1962 portmanteau. Drawing from an original idea by Cesare Zavattini (screenwriter of such classics as Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D.), each director contributed a short film on love’s deepest moral questions. The title makes reference to Giovanni Boccaccio, whose realist poetry and aptitude for dialogue act as models throughout.

Monicelli’s Renzo and Luciana was originally dropped from worldwide distribution—all the more reason to see it here—and depicts a working-class couple (Marina Solinas and Germano Gilioli) struggling to hide their pregnancy. In Fellini’s The Temptations of Dr. Antonio, we meet a staunch public decency pundit who meets his match when a provocative billboard of Anita Ekberg invades his fantasies. The Job (Visconti) introduces us to a weary socialite (Romy Schneider) whose only means of independence brings her to the last place she ever expected to find it (pictured immediately above). Last but not least is The Raffle (de Sica) (pictured), in which Sophia Loren stars as a carnival booth manager whose mounting debt leads her to raffle off her own body for one night. A fascinating montage of some of cinema’s most striking leading ladies taking matters into their own hands.

The film will be introduced by Professor Karen Pinkus (Comparative Literature/Romance Studies), who references the film in her new book Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema. Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly, writes:

"In this wonderfully inventive and beautifully written book, Karen Pinkus adopts a cinematic lens to capture the dynamism of cultural production and social life in early 1960s Italy. But the questions she investigates - about the transformations of work by technology, the relations between humans and machines, and the powers of cinema for social analysis - are just as urgent for understanding today's social world."

The University of Minnesota Press will offer a 30% discount on Clocking Out using the code BOCC70 on the press website: https://www.upress.umn.edu or on the warehouse's customer service line (1-800-621-2736).

website: kinonow.com/film/boccaccio-70/5d02bd9ca14648e9250e613a

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