Salvatore Giuliano (1962, Francesco Rosi) (Patreon)

49/100

Second viewing, last seen 1997. The absence of conventional narrative/characters was nigh-well intolerable to me back then, as I recall, whereas my subsequently refined palette (snort) perceives this anti-biopic as a fascinating but somewhat enervating experiment—the hindrance, for me, lying in what Rosi chooses to foreground instead. Never had any trouble rolling with Jancsó's similarly protagonist-free The Red and the White, which sustains cinematic shock and awe via purely formal means, its portrait of wartime chaos substituting the camera's inconstancy for a human perspective. Rosi's comparatively subdued approach here, employing Giuliano as a structuring absence, demands a lot more foreknowledge, or at least some degree of pre-existing emotional connection to the events glancingly portrayed. No reason it shouldn't, of course, since the film was aimed at an Italian audience for whom Giuliano and the Portella della Ginestra massacre were still reasonably fresh in memory (about as distant for them as the Virginia Tech massacre is for us, though obviously the two aren't exactly equivalent). But watching Salvatore Guiliano gives me a sense of what it might be like for someone who knows virtually nothing about Bob Dylan to sit down with I'm Not There. I understand and theoretically appreciate the movie's refractory nature, but that response is dry to the point of being chapped; devoid of onscreen context, the parade of confederates and associates and traitors melds into one long historical footnote cast loose from its text. A hole's only meaningful if you recognize what's missing. Still often gorgeous to look at, but Montelepre itself arguably deserves most of the credit for that.