What's in your name? In the glorious city of Catania, the “flower of volcanic baroque”, there is a small, but quite remarkable cinema museum. A handsome young man-guide is always ready to tell in detail and show anyone the stages of the emergence of the “tenth muse” from the “magic lantern” to the first computer effects. The visitor will be invited to sit at the office of Don Carleone or walk along the Italian street of the late 40s. It is there, in the motley exposition, between the positives of the first (dead) films of the company "Etna-film" and the original posters of silent classics, you will unexpectedly find a "red hall", on the walls of which there are shots from films shot on the island of Sicily.
It turns out that almost all the main directors of Italy shot their best films here: “Leopard” and “The Earth Trembling” (Lucino Visconti), “Stromboli, the Land of God” (Roberto Rossellini), “Night” and “Adventure” (Michelangelo Antonioni), “Beautiful Antonio” and “Beautiful November” (Mauro Bologna), “The New Cinema Paradiso” and “Malena” (Guseppe Tornator), “Razvodier” (Jetro) and many others. Here hung photos from the shooting of the fifth film Francesco Rosi “Salvatore Giuliano”.
Sicily is one of the most cinematic places in the world, and Sicily is such an exaggerated and radical degree of Italian, with all its pros and cons. It was here that one of the first criminal-mythic icons of Salvatore Giuliano operated in the postwar years. Sung by the covers of magazines and folk legends, he remained for the simple layman a “man-mystery”. Who is he? Local Robin Hood or National Terrorist, Mafia or Fanatic Patriot?
Rosie rushes headlong into a detective investigation on the one hand and a political thriller on the other, looking for a balance between the two styles and finding it in a consistent chronicle of the life and death of the legendary bandit. Showing the first shots of the place of death and the corpse of Giuliano in the cozy streets of the ever sunny Castelvetrano, he moves to this hour, from the bloody town raids of partisans-fascists, in the ranks of which Salvatore became a “colonel” at the end of World War II, to systemic acts of separatism against the authorities and communists throughout the northwest of Sicily.
The black and white image is as close as possible to the documentary film, without “falling down”, but in its obsessive imitations of reality. In some places, it even resembles the famous “Citizen Kane” Orson Welles. But the Italian director goes even further, hardly showing Giuliano himself in the film. He skips through the general plans of the raids of his squad, or we see his dead body, but his role is not even secondary, it is episodic. But how skillfully Rosie uses it, showing the atmosphere of total terror that struck Sicily. One mention of the name Giuliano, like an octopus, covers all the cities of the island every second worry, acting for miles. The name of the main character is much more important than his ambiguous life, and the myth is his true deeds.
The Italian director is generally characterized by a collective hero – the “Italian people”. And the historical writing and chronicle of other events that took place in the Italian system of government become both a method and a style. Already in this tape, the path that Francesco Rosi has chosen for himself is clear - this is a political and social cinema that will bloom with a lush color in Italian cinema of the 70s, that's when he will shoot his best films: The Case of Mattei, Shining Corpses and Christ Stopped at Ebola.
7 out of 10