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(Un uomo a metá). Abandoning the barren expanse of Sardinia for the lush countryside of Tuscany, De Seta also left behind the theme of man in nature for the nature of man, making what Alberto Moravia called “the story of a neurosis as told from the inside.” A refined young writer, Michele (played by Jacques Perrin, who won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival), is in the midst of a slow descent into madness. Escaping from an asylum, he returns to his boyhood home to discover the reasons for his present decline. Beautifully shot by Dario Di Palma (who also worked with Ettore Scola and Lina Wertmüller), Half a Man exhumes the source of neurosis by setting past experience adrift in an ether of nowness. Or, as Pasolini wrote: “The memories are like hallucinations and the cutting is done in such a way that this narrative violence, this violence which the narration does to itself in order to destroy the passage of time, is clearly visible, distressing, almost shocking.” This is a timeless story told in just that way.