La Sua giornata di gloria (1969)
Directed by
Edoardo Bruno
Also Known As:
Glory Day (International: English title) (informal title)
His Day of Glory (International: English title)
Runtime: 82 min
Country: Italy
Language: Italian
Subs: English
Color: Color
Sound Mix: Mono
imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209377/
1969 Nominated Golden Berlin Bear Edoardo Bruno Berlin International Film Festival
This Tuesday, No Shame Films offers a double blast of revolutionary Italian cinema circa 1968: Bernardo Bertolucci抯 Partner and film critic Edoardo Bruno抯 His Day of Glory, both making their DVD debuts, the latter almost unseen for over two decades ?even in Italy. Bertolucci抯 third feature finds the director under the thrall of Godard, taking up the French New Wave抯 political assault on moribund convention while struggling to find his own voice as an artist in the space it opened up. The film plays as a loose adaptation of Dostoyevsky抯 The Double, in which Giacobbe (Pierre Cl閙enti), a young, uptight theater professor, is pressed by his tuned-in doppelg鋘ger to undertake a series of ever-more-rebellious sexual, aesthetic and political acts. Riffing on the film抯 explicit schizophrenia, Bertolucci moves Partner forward in dazzling fits and starts, deconstructing the mechanics of cinema one minute (Cl閙enti frequently crosses shots to expose the split-screen trickery behind his twin抯 appearance), luxuriating in long, sweeping Hollywood-style crane shots the next. There抯 a hint of Andy Hardy/揕et抯 put on a show?enthusiasm in the air ?only Giacobbe expects that his climactic street performance will trigger the final curtain for the entire bourgeoisie. One imagines that Bertolucci had similar aspirations for Partner at the time: Even in its more didactic moments, the film pops with a galvanized sense of purpose built on dreams of a revolutionary cinema ?dreams now faded into memories of what might have been. Much the same can be said of His Day of Glory, a black-and-white, Brechtian thriller about an intellectual抯 transformation into a street-fighting man.
Disc two contains the film La sua giornata di gloria which translates as His Day of Glory. Director Eduardo Bruno made this one picture and then became a respected film critic. It's a fantasy gabfest about brooding communist revolutionaries in a supposedly future Rome where policemen execute weapon-carrying radicals on the street. Perhaps two minutes of staged action are followed by an hour of people sitting and talking, or rehearsing a scene from Mother Courage. Discussions of Marxist aims and practical revolution finally come to an end as the group prepares for an armed showdown. Our troubled hero and his obligatory sensuous girlfriend are delayed by a rainstorm and hug one another while the battle is heard via an off-camera audio barrage. Phillipe Leroy has a small role, and Pierre Clémenti appears in a couple of shots at the beginning, along with a re-purposed clip from Partner.
TORRENT HERE
(Edoardo Bruno's only film, from disc2 of the new "Partner" dvd release. Should be english subs included, if not, tell me, I'll rip/share it from my own dvd.)