Tosh and Kimley Discuss "Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (Ennio Morricone in conversation with Alessandro De Rosa)

Book Musik Episode 4 – Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words

Posted on August 1, 2019 by Book Musik

Tosh & Kimley discuss Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (Ennio Morricone in conversation with Alessandro De Rosa.) The great Italian composer whose music everyone knows even if they don’t know his name has scored literally hundreds of films, first gaining fame for his scores for the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly) and then working with a who’s who of Italian directors (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe Tornatore to name a few) and eventually getting noticed by Hollywood and beyond. Terrence Malick, Brian de Palma, Pedro Almodóvar, and Quentin Tarantino have all been lucky enough to have an Ennio Morricone score for their films. His IMDB page currently lists 519 composer credits! And that does not include his incredible output of “Absolute Music” and his work with the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza where things get really interesting.

Book Musik: Ennio Morricone In His Own Words

Soundcloud: Ennio Morricone Book Musik

La Notti Bianche (White Nights) by Luchino Visconti

I saw the most amazing film last night.  La Notti Bianche (White Nights) by Luchino Visconti.   For one, I can't imagine having Marcello Mastroianni and Jean Marais in the same room or scene.   Two different visions of male beauty.   The Mastroianni character is great.  He's sort of the typical Italian guy in a new town, looking for an obsession.  He finds it in Maria Schell, who in turn is obsessed with Jean Marais.   The Marais and Schell characters are much more complexly than Mastroianni - and it's interesting to see how he is placed in this remote yet seductive world.   The cinematography is brilliant, and I believe the story takes place in Venice, Italy.  If so, the landscape of that Italian city is a separate character in the film as well.  Another highlight is a great dance scene in the middle of the film.  When Italians rock, they rock (dance) hard.  I haven't seen such  a great film in a long time - so it was a shock to come upon Notti Bianche, to remind me that the cinema arts is superb.