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Between revolution and extinction, volcanoes primeval and modernist. The opening feint is on sword-and-sandal peplum, half-naked men struggle ashore and the boat goes up in flames, Brook's Lord of the Flies is another point of departure. Fleeing disaster, the survivors find another island equally vulnerable and attempt to convince locals to join them in the mainland. The newcomers are a collective led by a zealous beardo (Giulio Brogi), a pragmatic elder (Gian Maria Volonté) presides over the agrarian hamlet, unimpressed by the refugees: "You woke me up for this?" he shrugs at his wife (Lucia Bosé). Persuasion between communities is an arduous matter, "uno spettacolo" might do the trick, violence is the alternate method. "These walls are well-built, but they will collapse." A fable about la Sinistra, just the crossroads of old and new for Paolo and Vittorio Taviani to enlarge their neo-realism with heightened allegory. Rock and burlap and sparse green and oceanic blue in hard-edged abstraction, further fragmented by abrupt blackout cuts. The grating bells of polemical art, the unintelligible hubbub of ideological debate, the barbarously atonal soundscape of breakdown. "Dovero dar retta alie mie bestie," a Gogolian animalism concurrent with the Pasolini of Porcile. Change, in a word, a far more serious danger to entrenched structures than lava and ash. Critters can sense earthquakes before they take place, says the patriarch who admits to pining for one to "destroy all of this at once." Kidnappings and slayings and suicides comprise the foundation for the utopia at the end of the road, "I imagined it differently..." A relationship with Herzog is to be observed, what's taken from Signs of Life is passed on to Heart of Glass. With Samy Pavel, Renato Scarpa, Alessandro Haber, and Steffen Zacharias.
--- Fernando F. Croce |