Nostalgie 2001
Art documentary on the paintings of the French artist Balthus.
Art documentary on the paintings of the French artist Balthus.
Reporter Marcello has a brief encounter with Irene while waiting for a train. A young woman who has lost her sight finds herself falling for the voice of a ship's captain she hears over a radio broadcast. Egle, a massage therapist who is soon to be married, finds herself pursuing one last fling with Gabriele -- though the odds are not in her favor, since he happens to be gay. Elena is a young woman with a child who wants to abandon her husband. And Carla wonders if she has any future at all with her lover -- who is married to someone else.
Three small films for as many reflections on the senses and human knowledge. In the first episode, Emmer reviews with anthological and didactic intent the precepts of ancient philosophy, from Greek to Roman civilization; in the second, working as he did at the beginning of his career on a vast repertoire of pictorial and non-pictorial images, he analyzes the “history of the gaze” in the visual arts, from prehistoric graffiti to medieval altarpieces, from Impressionist and Cubist paintings to modern-day advertising posters; finally, in the third, recounting with irony and lightness a day of solitude in his mountain home, he reflects on the intellectual thinking of writers and great thinkers, relating to his own individual experience as much the words of oral tradition and popular culture as the writings of geniuses such as Shakespeare, Spinoza or Gogol.