Giuseppe Pupi Avati

Comments

Stagecoach

I believe that all directors owe a debt to John Ford for the boundlessness of his skies. His ability to always identify the ideal place to put the camera. The stagecoach sequence is a technical masterpiece.

Wild Strawberries

This is the most extraordinary film about the circularity of time that has ever been made.

Bergman, at only 39 years old, already knew the entire path of life until its ideal conclusion.

He knew that the last nostalgia is that of childhood.

It's a Wonderful Life

This is a film that mysteriously comes closer to me as time recedes. I sense that I am part of it. Few films are able to ‘include’ you. The fraction of space that the director and crew had reserved for themselves is gone. The whole story is around me. I am in the film. I belong to it.

8½

This is the film that suggested to me the extreme potential of filmmaking. It is the film that inspired most of the filmmakers of my age to embark on this challenging profession.

Vampyr

I believe this is the archetype of my ‘extinct’ films, the ones I go searching for with a flashlight among the moss and surfacing bones of old film libraries. Where everything is death. The only gasp, that flash of light from my flashlight that unveils Dreyer's vampire.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

This is the first colour film that was screened in Bologna in the very early postwar period. I was seven years old.

It seemed to me that colour cinema was even further from the reality I hated than black and white cinema, and it knew how to show me something else.

Bicycle Thieves

Along with Luciano Emmer’s Sunday in August, one of the great films that depicted reality for the first time in the history of Italian cinema, without, however, renouncing the emotional junctures of popular storytelling that the cinema of that time demanded.

The 400 Blows

Through this film I understood the enormous difference between a film director and a ‘film author’.

Truffaut's lesson was fundamental.

Psycho

Along with Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, one of the films to which I owe my passion for Gothic cinema, that sort of storytelling that departs from verisimilitude and then knows how to make the UNBELIEVABLE terrifyingly true. Only the great storytellers know how to accompany you on this descent into the abyss.

The Cameraman

Not even one in the hundreds of shots that make up this extraordinary poetic event catches Buster Keaton below his expressive peaks.