355 Hands Over the City

[Awesome Welles]

Damn! That's a real shame.

Hopefully some other top distributor will fill the void...

[tavernier]

Damn! That's a real shame.

Hopefully some other top distributor will fill the void...

Yeah, like Facets or New Yorker.

[Narshty]

This is an immense film. It manages to be fully gripping, in the best manner of full-blooded drama, in its examination of the minutiae of corruption in the sort of topic one would invariably look at the headline then skip over in the newspaper. As someone who couldn't get past the first hour of Salvatore Giuliano, it was a revelation - Rosi and his screenwriters prove exceptionally lucid guides to a tangled socio-economic web. The unexpected thing is that, despite laying clear exactly how powerful men are able to legally manoeuvre entirely within their personal economic interests, it's not depressing. It doesn't make one feel helpless or despairing, but informed and alert. It's also satisfying dramatically in its structure of Machiavellian takeover, almost but not quite a political thriller (it's exciting, but not on the visceral levels one usually expects). One wants to see the whole devious scheme played out, even if it's to the detriment of the public at large, just to have demonstrated how the system really works. It seems to be one of the key influences on The Godfather Part II and it's extremely hard to imagine this kind of subject matter being done in a more engaging, audience-friendly way while not sparing any of the intricacy that the topic demands (nor Rosi's prodigious formal skills - the early sequence involving a full-scale building collapse in the packed city centre is heart-stopping; Rosi confirms in the extras it was a condemned structure they rigged to go one piece at a time to get maximum setups and visual impact). A stunning achievement overall.

[ellipsis7]

Coppola clearly took big influences fron this & SALVATORE G for the GODFATHER TRILOGY...

And nothing changes.!..

Italy's toxic waste crisis, the Mafia – and the scandal of Europe's mozzarella

By Michael McCarthy and John Phillips in Rome
The Independent, Saturday, 22 March 2008

It may be the moment when the throwaway society meets its retribution. A shadow this weekend hangs over one of the great staples of modern European life – Italy's mozzarella cheese.

The topping on a billion pizzas, the magic ingredient in a million salads, is at the centre of a major food scare involving pollution, corruption, the Mafia and southern Italy's remarkable crisis in waste management.

It centres on the buffalo milk used to produce the purest form of the rubbery, cream-coloured delicacy, now as prized an Italian export as extra virgin olive oil – mozzarella di bufala. High levels of dioxins, potentially hazardous pollutant chemicals, have been found in buffalo milk in a group of dairies in Campania, the southern province centring on Naples where most mozzarella production takes place.

Italy's public health authorities believe that the contamination is the result of illegal dumping of toxic waste in Campania, where the waste industry is under the control of the Camorra, the local branch of the Mafia, and where Naples and its region are undergoing a major waste management crisis, with disposal facilities either broken or full, and rubbish piling up in the streets.

The scale of the problem is such that it is becoming the cautionary tale par excellence of the modern throwaway society, showing how a major city can be swallowed up by its own refuse and making Naples and its region a symbol for filth around the world.

Over the past week, Italian authorities have searched dozens of buffalo dairies and seized milk samples for tests after higher-than-permitted levels of dioxins were discovered in products from 29 mozzarella makers. After government chemists had analysed milk samples taken from some 2,000 herds of buffalo, the herds attached to 66 dairies have been quarantined pending further investigations, and prosecutors in Naples have placed 109 people under investigation in connection with the inquiry, on suspicion of fraud and food poisoning. Already, sales of mozzarella across Italy are said to have fallen by up to 50 per cent.

Many Italians are naturally linking the buffalo milk contamination to the local waste and pollution scandal. "Of course we don't know for sure scientifically, but the high rate of dioxin is most likely linked to what the buffaloes ate," an Italian environmental official admitted yesterday, adding that the buffalo "grazed in areas where we know that toxic waste has been dumped in recent years".

[ellipsis7]

New 2K resto showing at Venice (sezione Venezia Classici), clearing the way for a BR upgrade...

Le mani sulla città di Francesco Rosi (1963)
Il restauro è stato progettato, curato e finanziato dalla Cineteca Nazionale con la collaborazione degli aventi diritto, la francese Société Cinématographique Lyre e la compagnia italiana Galatea, sulla base dei negativi originari e due duplicati positivi in buono stato di conservazione. Il negativo scena è stato acquisito in digitale a 2k. Le lavorazioni sono state realizzate presso il laboratorio Cinema Communications Service/Eurolab di Roma con la supervisione della Cineteca Nazionale.