Sicilia!

Beautiful historic documentary of the life in Sicily during the 30ies.

Stunning images on land, people and houses.

The majority of actors are villagers of Sicilian villages.

They speak in dialect, so it is difficult to understand the movie without subtitles. Central part in the movie are the oranges, that nobody wants to buy.

I saw the movie ten years ago and since then I didn't have occasion to saw it again. When I first saw the movie I also thought it is boring. I needed more years to understand that this is a great movie.

Hope everybody would get the chance to look at it, till the end.

A beautiful simple film in high-contrast black-and-white. Tribute, commentary, criticism, discussions of food, history, class, music, politics, religion, the nature of Sicily and Sicilians Adapted from a novel, the film simply consists of a series of conversations perceived by a man who has returned to Sicily- from America, he says, but we learn Sicilians aren't always truthful. On landing the traveller talks with an orange-seller, a labourer who has been paid in the oranges he helped to grow because the grower cannot sell them himself; on a train he eavesdrops on two bureaucrats standing by a window, a talk with travelling-companions where a land-owner regrets that he cannot be a better man with a better conscience; on another train, a conversation with another man who lacked the courage to become a singer; a strange silent interlude some minutes long where the camera looks from a window at the arid landscape they pass through. Then the longest scene, a long conversation between the man and his mother about his childhood, her relationships with her father, a "man's man", her husband, who was so scared when she gave birth unexpectedly that he was no help at all, her children and other men. The two of them sit against a gleaming white wall by a table. The last scene is a meeting with an itinerant knife-sharpener- a kind of light relief and a figure of hope, an archetypal figure of the Sicilian past filmed in the open air of an empty square. He sharpens the traveller's penknife and returns half his fee. The film's technique is stylised and simple, gazing at faces, pulling back a little to show them against walls or other backgrounds, watching them and being watched in silence as well as speech. We are not told when the film is set (in the 1930s, in fact) but have to deduce it from evidence- the absence of motor cars, what the people say, the way they are dressed- and are left to infer that it is about a timeless place and people.

Sicilia! Is an unusual film that expands the definition of what a film is. It relies more on dialogue than cinematic effects/techniques. In fact, camera can stay on an actor for five minutes. It makes you feel as if you are watching a play than a film. Any cinephile will highly rate this film but I can imagine it'll be a class unto philistines.

"A 66-minute Brechtian elocution executed with stone cold precision, Straub-Huillet's SICILY! is a reworking of Elio Vittorini's novel CONVERSATIONS IN SICILY, a man returns to Sicily, his fatherland from New York after a Homeresque absence, encounters a fruit vendor when he disembarks, several passengers on the train (one of whom decries the stink of underclass!), visits his mother and finally engages a conversation with a knife-grinder (a faux-father figure who defies conventionality, he never sharpens knives or scissors). "

read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks

"Conversazione in Sicilia" by Vittorini is one of the most interesting books of Italian literature from the 1st half of 20th century (in 1950 an edition with wonderful b/w pictures by Luigi Crescenzi was published: a real gem). The novel consists basically in dialogs between the protagonist, Silvestro, and people he meets on his voyage to his native country, Sicily, that he left years ago to live in Milan (and not in New York, as the orange seller at the beginning of the movie believes - with Silvestro indulging him in the error, by pretending he's an immigrant coming back). The dialogs oscillate between vivid descriptions of past events and philosophical considerations on good and evil or on man and world (like in the stunning dialog with the knife grinder, which seems to come out of some ancient tragedy). In the movie, however, the really bad acting spoils completely the text. If you use non professional actors, you can't expect that they will be able to render convincingly such a complex, multi-layered text as the one by Vittorini. While watching, I wondered the whole time, whether the bad acting was due to the actors' inability in memorizing their lines, to their absence of training, to their not being professionals, or to the directors' will to produce a sense of estrangement (for which I couldn't see any reason - neither artistic/aesthetic, nor textual/political). It was like they were reading the text for the firs time, without knowing where exactly to make a pause. They would stop a sentence abruptly just to re-assume it by adding a final word, as if they had just remembered that they forgot it. Again, if this was done willingly, the result was extremely annoying. The filming itself seemed to be the work of non professionals - even if the directors are indeed professionals: long takes from a running train or slow takes of a landscape with a city, with no particular artistic or aesthetic value, just something everyone holding a camera could do with no particular effort. They did nothing to conceal the fact that they were filming in present Sicily (when the train leaves Catania, you see ugly modern buildings and a freeway), even if the text is so obviously connected to the Thirties (starting with the prices and the references to the War, which is evidently WWI). I had the whole time the impression of someone deciding to make a movie by taking his/her cam-recorder and asking some friends to do the acting without rehearsals. As much as I love Vittorini's book, I really hated the movie.