Eugène Green’s latest project, La Sapienza , a journey through the art and culture of Italy and France, opens on Friday at the Film Forum in New York City. La Sapienza strikes this reviewer as easily the most astonishing and important movie to emerge from France in quite some time. While its style deserves to be called stunningly original and rapturously beautiful, the film is boldest in its artistic and philosophical implications, which pointedly go against many dominant trends of the last half-century. Rather than apologizing for or “deconstructing” Western tradition, La Sapienza celebrates the West’s spiritual sources to the point that it might be called an apotheosis of European culture. Surprisingly or not, it comes from an American expatriate. Like Henry James , T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound before him, native New Yorker Eugène Green moved abroad as a young man and became, it would seem, more European than the Europeans. Based in Paris since the ‘...
100+ YEARS OF THE GREAT ITALIAN MOVIEMAKERS