Melodrama regained
Melodrama regained is an essay on the openly melodramatic language in Marco Filiberti’s film work, with a particular reference to the film David's Birthday.
The director’s own critical analysis is flanked by the critical essays of three eminent personalities in Italian film culture who have investigated melodrama in film with great acumen and originality: Giovanni Spagnoletti, Mario Dal Bello and Massimo Giraldi.
The director’s statement aims to clarify, through the analysis of his literary and film experience, the inevitable relationship between his artistic identity and the dynamics of melodrama. The complex world of cultural references that color Marco Filiberti’s work emerge in this volume where his artistic epiphanies, the centrality of the piercing dualism between beauty and contemporariness and his deep affinity in intent for the films of Douglas Sirk are revealed.
Giovanni Spagnoletti investigates the articulated syntax of melodrama in David's Birthday and its more or less implicit relationship with the cinematic language of Luchino Visconti. Mario Dal Bello, on the other hand, focuses his attention on three cultural components that run through Filiberti’s film work: classicism (myth, the idea of beauty, and tragic epic story), Romanticism (Byron and melodrama, with a particular reference to Wagner) and the Christian sensibility that expresses itself in the yearning for another time and another place that pervades all of director’s film work.
Finally, Massimo Giraldi’s interpretation centres on the originality of this blatant return to melodrama, a genre that is not often used in Italian cinema and the anguished expression in Filiberti’s work of the culture’s function as an arrhythmic, subversive ethic to the reality that surrounds us.
This volume makes use of a rich selection of images, most of which were taken on the set of the film David's Birthday, by two renowned still photographers, Romolo Eucalitto and Emilio Lari.
Marco Filiberti’s David's Birthday will be presented in the Official Selection of the Controcampo Italiano section in the 66th International Venice Film Festival.