22 | ARTICLE
ICFF 2022
GIUSEPPE TORNATORE “Giuseppe Tornatore is one of the few authentically original voices to emerge in the cinematic world over the past 40 years. He champions community values, solidly grounded in emotional engagement and interaction, over the brash, loud, self-proclaiming egocentricity that has increasingly dominated western societies since the nineteen-eighties .
by Carlo Coen Yet, viewed superficially, his narratives appear old-fashioned, flirting frequently and precariously with overt melodrama and sentimentalism while managing nevertheless to mount a powerful critique of what our societies have become . . . Tornatore subtly employs every technical device at his disposal to enforce the spectator’s identification with the wistfulness of his protagonists, in their growing awareness of a sense of perCinema Paradiso, the film that sonal loss and revealed him, and that immediately qualified him as the director who nostalgia.“ regained to Italian cinema This is how Doug Thompson from University of Hull summarised brilliantly the core of Giuseppe Tornatore’s cinema, as well as his contribution to our comprehension of the contradictory nature of the times we live in. When we talk about Giuseppe Tornatore, we mean Sicily. This great Italian director has in fact dedicated much of his career to the representation of the island where he was born and raised. Later, he detached himself from his origins, and explored new paths, themes of a profound and broader universality. This could happen precisely because he had been able to fully come to
terms with his Sicilian roots: Cinema Paradiso (1988), Everyone Is Fine (1990), The Star Maker (1995), Malena (2000), Baaria (2009), the documentary The Three-pronged Screen (1995) Tornatore's Sicily, the Sicily of the past, the one that no longer exists, is represented above all in Cinema Paradiso, the film that revealed him, and that immediately qualified him as the director who regained to Italian cinema the prestige and the critical acclaim it had lost in the crisis of the Eighties. Cinema Paradiso not only is a film dedicated to Cinema as “Dream Factory“, but also to human relationships.
