Tag Archives: Italy

Audio Podcast Novel: Pinocchio (Chapter 18)

by Cimaxion

DOWNLOAD PINOCCHIO – CHAPTER 18

Click here to get all the chapters

We’re back! The story continues.

This is one of the great children’s stories of the world. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 masterpiece, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is the story of the wooden marionette who desperately wants to be a real boy. His adventures are full of mischief, wonder, sadness, joy, treachery, danger and all the exuberant life of a real Italian boy. This is the English translation by Carol Della Chiesa.

Reading and illustration by Alessandro Cima

All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute copies of our MP3 audio or video stories. They are for your personal use. If you choose to burn our MP3 stories onto a personal CD, do not make copies of the CD or distribute them to other people. Also, do not sell CDs containing our audio stories. All audio stories are copyrighted by Candlelight Stories, Inc.

Les Mysteres Du Tarot De Marseille: French Tarot Documentary

by Cimaxion

TarotDocumentaryFrance

This is a fascinating French documentary exploring the artistic connection between the oldest deck of Tarot cards known as the Tarot de Marseille and 15th century art. The documentary travels to Italy where Tarot was born to follow various leads and look at examples of the oldest Tarot decks and Italian art.

The work of Sandro Botticelli features prominently, as does Plato’s philisophical cave allegory which deals with the nature of reality and whether what we see is just a rough projection of reality. The connections between this idea and the Tarot’s Devil card are fascinating.

The documentary is entirely in French without English subtitles, so you’ll probably need to speak French to enjoy this.

Western Italian Style: 1968 Spaghetti Western Documentary

by Cimaxion

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This is a 1968 television documentary about the Italian film phenomenon known as the Spaghetti Western. These bold, violent, colorful movies took a dark and sometimes comic look at the western genre. In many cases, I think these films surpassed the American westerns they emulated by playing more loosely with the violence and morality that often made for a kind of stiffness in the American films. If you aren’t familiar with the full scope of the Spaghetti Western, it’s really amazing how many full length versions are available on YouTube.

 

 

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Audio Podcast Novel: Pinocchio (Chapter 17)

by Cimaxion | 2 Comments

DOWNLOAD PINOCCHIO – CHAPTER 17

Per l’Italia!  More of our story!

This is one of the great gifts from Italy to the children of the world. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 masterpiece, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is the story of the wooden marionette who desperately wants to be a real boy. His adventures are full of mischief, wonder, sadness, joy, treachery, danger and all the exuberant life of a real Italian boy. This is the English translation by Carol Della Chiesa.

Subscribe to audio podcast

Subscribe to audio with iTunes

Reading and illustration by Alessandro Cima

All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute copies of our MP3 audio or video stories. They are for your personal use. If you choose to burn our MP3 stories onto a personal CD, do not make copies of the CD or distribute them to other people. Also, do not sell CDs containing our audio stories. All audio stories are copyrighted by Candlelight Stories, Inc.

Audio Podcast Novel: Pinocchio (Chapter 16)

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

DOWNLOAD PINOCCHIO – CHAPTER 16

Per l’Italia!  More of our story!

This is one of the great gifts from Italy to the children of the world. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 masterpiece, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is the story of the wooden marionette who desperately wants to be a real boy. His adventures are full of mischief, wonder, sadness, joy, treachery, danger and all the exuberant life of a real Italian boy. This is the English translation by Carol Della Chiesa.

Subscribe to audio podcast

Subscribe to audio with iTunes

Reading and illustration by Alessandro Cima

All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute copies of our MP3 audio or video stories. They are for your personal use. If you choose to burn our MP3 stories onto a personal CD, do not make copies of the CD or distribute them to other people. Also, do not sell CDs containing our audio stories. All audio stories are copyrighted by Candlelight Stories, Inc.

Audio Podcast Novel: Pinocchio (Chapter 15)

by Cimaxion

DOWNLOAD PINOCCHIO – CHAPTER 15

Per l’Italia!  More of our story!

I’m digging up some of the old files I never posted from years ago. This book is long and it’s very hard to record. I am going to make an effort to finish it soon.

This is one of the great gifts from Italy to the children of the world. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 masterpiece, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is the story of the wooden marionette who desperately wants to be a real boy. His adventures are full of mischief, wonder, sadness, joy, treachery, danger and all the exuberant life of a real Italian boy. This is the English translation by Carol Della Chiesa.

Subscribe to audio podcast

Subscribe to audio with iTunes

Reading and illustration by Alessandro Cima

All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute copies of our MP3 audio or video stories. They are for your personal use. If you choose to burn our MP3 stories onto a personal CD, do not make copies of the CD or distribute them to other people. Also, do not sell CDs containing our audio stories. All audio stories are copyrighted by Candlelight Stories, Inc.

Traumatografo: Magnificent and Mysterious 1975 Film by Paolo Gioli

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

I did not know this filmmaker, Paolo Gioli, existed until yesterday. And that really bothers me because I feel a very strong kinship with this filmmaker just on the basis of having seen two of his pieces. What can a filmmaker do with his own backyard? That is the question that comes to my mind as I watch his films. Can a filmmaker take his camera out back and make something astounding? Of course. In fact, that skill is central to being a creative filmmaker. It is the feeling I get from Gioli. He makes films that have a guiding concern but he is not afraid to slip a little off of the main track and let you see him experimenting. One can observe his enthusiasm for a new mechanical technique and he allows his film to wander into the territory of the new machine or splicing method for a while. And then he comes back to the main thing. He never lets this get out of control and it is a miracle to watch. One can learn how to experiment by watching a brilliant experimentalist. It’s that simple.

There are many filmmakers I wish I could meet and perhaps work with. Gioli is one of them. In fact, this brings to mind again my thought that things like YouTube are the greatest cinematic development of the past half century. The reason has nothing to do with screen format or size or image quality. It has to do with intimacy. The feeling of connection one can get by watching a filmmaker’s work on the computer is far more intimate than could be achieved in a theater. It is this quality that is the most important contribution of online film to world cinema. Intimate connection to the artist. It has a powerful effect on artists and communicates ideas and inspiration from generation to generation far more effectively than any prior cinematic display technology.

Here is a nice long article by Bart Testa about this wonderful Italian filmmaker.

Here is an article by David Bordwell on how Gioli’s hand-made cameras influence his ‘vertical cinema’ technique.

Those Dreams That On the Silent Night Intrude; The Secret Cinema of Jerzy Treblinka: A Film by Luca Gennari

by Cimaxion

This is a Super 8 film made on a single cartridge without post-production effects by Italian filmmaker Luca Gennari for the Straight Eight Festival at Cannes 2010. There’s a great reference to the brilliant Super 8 filmmaker Derek Jarman buried in here. This film glories in the history of abstract, surreal and neorealist cinema. But it fuses those things with a documentary realism. It ties the artistic workings and ramblings of a mysterious filmmaker to the darkness, horror and murder of the Twentieth Century.  I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again… Italy is involved in a cinema movement that is just as profound as the movements there in the 1940s, 50s, and sixties. The filmmakers in Italy who are today using the Web for their expression are the equals of Fellini and Rossellini.

Propaganda Mussolini: A Film by Massimo Balloi

by Cimaxion

Italian filmmaker Massimo Balloi has made an abstract film that attempts to explain the descent of Italy into modern fascism. The rapid turn of Western democracies toward a virulent corporate fascism does in fact resemble the ideas put forth by Mussolini in the 1930s and 40s. But his effort was to mimic the efficiencies of the corporation in government. The new effort currently underway is to replace government control with corporate control. The danger is real and it is extreme. Even in the United States we see a Supreme Court allying itself with corporations. In Italy, you have a very basic corporate buffoon running the country as if it were a criminal enterprise. In the U.S. you have completely false liberals maneuvering a corporate front man into the Presidency so that every decision is made with a seemingly logical inclination toward the interests of the large corporations. We are now fighting entire wars based solely on decisions by corporations.

The twenty first century will not be the century of war against terrorists. It will be a century of war against corporations. They will gain an upper hand initially, but this will be short-lived. I say this because once you get inside these corporate structures you can observe how shockingly weak they are. BP is your perfect example. A single broken valve can weaken the entire stack of cards. These corporate entities can only flourish while people are asleep.

So? Adventure in the Univerphone

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

This is an Italian animated TV series about an inventor who gets sucked into the virtual world inside his cell phone. You know… like most Americans do… while they are driving at 75 mph on the freeway and they smash into a concrete pylon, spattering their dull brains across five lanes of traffic. And most deservedly so. But this little animated preview looks inviting. I like it. The series is made by Marco Bigliazzi and Fabrizio Bondi of Toposodo Episodic Productions.  The series has its own web site.

It’s Gonna Rain: A Short Film by Luca Gennari

by Cimaxion | 2 Comments

Italian filmmaker, Luca Gennari made this beautiful and gently moving piece about her grandmother. The rural setting is a classic part of Italy. The slaughter and skinning of the rabbit is something that I have seen several times in the northern villages of Italy. Italian filmmakers seem to me to be developing a magnificent new cinema of memory with the new accessible tools of film and video making. But it is the Italian filmmakers that I see most delicately capturing the operations of memory today.

Justus 2: A Film by Ryan Spring Dooley

by Cimaxion

Ryan Spring Dooley (aka MarvinTiberious on YouTube) and Juppy Nash made a catchy little tune and played it on an Italian rooftop where they could enjoy the place they were in and become infected with art. Dooley’s films are a constant stream of creativity and artistic perception unlike anything else. He combines old and new and creates works so easily expressive that you wonder why anyone needs anything more than paper, paint and a camera to do anything. Watch this film and wonder at just how good it really is. Masterful.

The filmmaker is also using Kickstarter to fund a bigscreen project: