The Pietà and La terra trema.
Italian movie ad and my juxtaposed still for La terra trema, Luchino Visconti, 1948. The neorealist masterpiece was finally released in its integral uncut Sicilian-language version in 1965, opening at the New Yorker Theatre in Manhattan on October 12, 1965. It had never been shown in America.
I drove down to New York that day, first going to the World's Fair in Queens. There, among other things, I saw the Pietà of Michelangelo at the Vatican Pavillion. That was the only time, I believe, it ever left Italy. It was flooded with a tacky blue light and you went by it at some distance on a kind of conveyer belt.
In the evening I went to see La terra trema in a pristine glowing 35mm print at Dan Talbot's New Yorker Theatre on the upper west side. I wrote then: "I sat through the somber and beautiful three-hour film twice, and I must say that it is the most moving and powerful film I have ever seen in my life."
I was twenty-three at the time and cinematically precocious. I still am, but no longer anywhere near twenty-three. Wonder why that is.
