The story of a great italian OrchestraThe story of a great italian OrchestraThe story of a great italian Orchestra
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A documentary on Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, combining archival footage with contemporary interviews.
This film premiered at the 2013 Vancouver Film Festival, co-sponsored by the local Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and it is easy to see why. Rather than telling us anything significant about the workings of a putatively important artistic organization (the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia), the filmmakers settle for amiable interviews with musicians who utter banal platitudes and uniformly praise "being Italian" as the secret of their music-making. This pandering to a national stereotype of Italians as "joyful, loving, life-affirming," etc., is as insulting to an international audience as it is meaningless. On its own terms this point of view begs the question of why this orchestra shouldn't therefore be exactly the same as any other Italian orchestra. Although the director claims to be personal friends with many of the musicians interviewed, he inadvertently makes many of them look as peculiar as the actors who impersonated symphony musicians in Federico Fellini's 1978 political satire "Orchestra Rehearsal," especially in the latter surreal parts of the film which purport to actualize some of their anxiety dreams. The only really memorable sequence is archival footage of George Pretre conducting Ravel's "Bolero" as a kind of private psychodrama.
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- rustle49
- Oct 4, 2013
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- Il carattere Italiano
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- Runtime1 hour 40 minutes
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- 16:9 HD
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