"La Vita Nova" film by Antonella Eye Porcelluzzi Original Version Soundtrack UZBAZUR
TRAILER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-1qYZeQMWU
The Film: « The inevitable beginning - La Vita Nova »
CRITIC: »we very much admired the film's adventurous spirit and bold form" Daniel Kasman, MUBI
COMMENT: « The prose by Dante in LA VITA NOVA creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante's way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Dante and his poet-friends inherited from the Provençal poets, the Sicilian poets of the court of Frederick II, and the Tuscan poets before them). Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered on the self and more aimed at love as such: he intended to elevate courtly love poetry, many of its tropes and its language, into sacred love poetry. Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love—transparent to the Absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor. » (Treccani, « Beatrice », 2015)
SHORT SYNOPSIS: The love story between Dante Alighieri and Beatrice is worldly famous, immortalized in Dante’s whole work of poetry. This film is dedicated to La Vita Nova, the juvenile work where Dante describes the story of his meeting with Beatrice, first as a child and then as a young woman, This film sketches the essential traits of the spiritual union between the two, lasting throughout all Dante’s life and over the centuries.
PRESENTATION BY THE AUTHOR : « I met this book after having spent 7 years in building a Divine Comedy of mine, This consists in a trilogy of films for 3H30 of vision on my fictional/experimental interpretation of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise by Dante Alighieri. My attachment to Dante as a poet and as a man, a multifaceted personality of alchemist and erudite-intellectual with a strong political and social background was increasing, but I never thought about continuing working on his opus, and an exhaustive commitment to his complete work was not my aim at all.
But meeting by chance La Vita Nova at a certain moment, where this book was the only voice I was able to listen to, convinced me to perseverate. I couldn’t detach from the book, analyzing it’s very peculiar form between poetry and prose, and it’s Romanticism ante-litteram (the text is from 1295), so I started writing, sketching a storyboard, as well as recording my voice singing some of the sonnets and « canzoni » from this text. I was producing my work without institutional funding, I was independent, so I could concentrate on the development of my research, and change my script according to the visions the book was progressively giving to me. This very basic way to work brought me to be more and more essential in my film-treatment: I finished by just concentrating on the fundamental and eternal-lasting union between the two characters, on the persistence of the invisible and indelible presence of love, as well as on its spiritual transformation. So the love union between Dante and Beatrice could get its unicity, and evolve out and further than the mundane events narrated by Dante. This became my red line to follow as a film-maker. As in all my films, I am creating an original and empathetic style to give back to contemporary audience my vision of some classics. » AEP 2019
The Albums originating from the film as soundtracks
For what concerns the sound-track(s) of the film, this element constitutes the peculiarity of the LA VITA NOVA PROJECT.
Given the intense musical activity of the project’s author (AEP), music naturally formed a crucial point of the work from its beginning.
The film gave origin to two distinct music-works, the reason why we are releasing also the film by a music label, Scott Boatright’s « Sounds from the Corridor ».
« The album « La Vita Nova » by Simone Santarsiero’s UZBAZUR, is the soundtrack of my film in its Original Version. This album was especially born to accompany the film in its projections and shows. It is a subtle and poetic work in experimental electronics and dark-ambient sound. My choice of the young talented Simone was also influenced by the fact that he comes from Tuscany as Dante.
The « Come Today » Album keeps a quite legendary story in itself. A first part of it was born when I trusted Wilfried Hanrath, experimented German composer and interpreter in various music styles, with my voice-recordings of Dante’s sonnets. This encountering produced some main tracks (one is with Matt Gretchell). Then Wilfried felt the need for a third-part-intervention, the meeting with the Anonymous Masses, the group by Klaus Siepmann, and his songs inspired by the work of the american collective The Residents. The resulting album « Come Today », forms a non-homogeneous, singular and still harmonic combination of the jazzy-soul music by Hanrath on the old Italian in Antonella’s interpretation of Dante’s sonnets, with the modernist avant-garde influence brought by Siepmann: « Come Today » was born, quite a musical journey (You’ll find the album’s continuity in the bonus tracks, which we recommend in order to get the spirit of this record at its best).
Come today is an alternative soundtrack for my film too: two albums and a film, LA VITA NOVA PROJECT is this. « (AEP 2019)
An anecdote, Come Today came from Wilfried Hanrath’s nice and creative misunderstanding of « Come Tu Dei », which in the ancient Italian by Dante, spoken by Antonella in her songs, means « As you have to ».
CREDITS
• Jean Peut-Être Dante
• Antonella Eye Beatrice
• Adrian Nicholls album covers and web-side of the project
• Antonella Eye Porcelluzzi project, script, director, editing, production
Music:
• COME TODAY Wilfried Hanrath / Antonella Eye Porcelluzzi / Anonymours Masses
• UZBAZUR
• Scott Boatright - SOUNDS FROM THE CORRIDOR distribution