Labor's Love Lost: The Films of Vittorio De Seta

7/6/06 to 7/9/06

Bandits of Orgosolo, July 7

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Six Shorts by Vittorio De Seta
Thursday, July 6 19:30
De Seta's vivid documentary glimpses of postwar Sicily capture "the vitality of an unspoiled culture."-Martin Scorsese. With Détour De Seta, a portrait of the director.
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Half a Man
Friday, July 7 21:00
A refined young writer in the grip of madness returns to his boyhood home to discover the reasons for his decline in this beautifully shot and performed "story of a neurosis as told from the inside."-Alberto Moravia
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Bandits of Orgosolo
Friday, July 7 19:00
In the remote Sardinian countryside, a simple shepherd, wrongly associated with bandits, must flee across the forbidding mountains. The film has the stark authenticity of neorealism, lyrically heightened by De Seta's austere photography.
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Diary of a Schoolmaster
Sunday, July 9 15:00
De Seta intermingles reality and fiction in portraying the struggles of a young teacher, played by an actor, in a real classroom. With short The Swordfish Season.
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Labor's Love Lost: The Films of Vittorio De Seta

7/6/06 to 7/9/06

In postwar Italy, particularly in the south, modernization struck with rude and sudden force, dislodging the conditions that had sustained traditional culture for centuries. Raised amid aristocratic Sicilian society, Vittorio De Seta, as an aspiring filmmaker, found himself profoundly detached from what he called his "gilded, stupid childhood" and instead turned his attention to the regional livelihoods that were everywhere threatened. By 1954, he had made his first short film, The Swordfish Season, capturing the dignity of everyday labor, steeped in time-honored craft, communal bonds, and a devotion to the locale itself. A succession of short films followed that became a catalog of this vanishing world of people “who seek the way to redemption through the labor of their hands,” as Martin Scorsese, a champion of De Seta's work, described them. Anything but touristic, De Seta's films are stunning for their unvarnished appreciation of regional culture, their elegant cinematography, and a willingness to promote the voices and views of those the filmmaker venerates. In 1961, De Seta redirected this same interest in customary culture toward the feature form, producing the award-winning Bandits of Orgosolo, a stark but beautiful neorealist tale about a Sardinian sheepherder forced into banditry by cruel circumstance. It is with great pleasure that PFA screens Vittorio De Seta's films in a long-overdue revival of this forgotten master from Sicily.

Steve Seid
Video Curator

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Thanks to Amelia Carpenito, Italian Cultural Institute of New York; Margarita de la Vega, Flaherty Film Seminar; Cineteca di Bologna; Sally Berger, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Alessandro Rais and Marcello Alajmo, Filmoteca Regionale Siciliana; Cinecittà Holding; RAI; Salvo Cuccia; Consigliere Armando Barucco, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and San Francisco Italian Cultural Institute.

Labor's Love Lost: The Films of Vittorio De Seta

7/6/06 to 7/9/06

Past Films

Six Shorts by Vittorio De Seta

Half a Man

Bandits of Orgosolo

Diary of a Schoolmaster