PLEASE NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, Ninetto Davoli will not be in attendance. In lieu, the screening will be preceded by a pre-recorded greeting by Davoli. We thank you for your understanding and look forward to seeing you at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Presented by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto in partnership with TIFF
Part of the TIFF Cinematheque Special Screenings program
THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS
Thursday, May 12 | 7:00PM
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St W | Toronto ON
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Brechtian bliss. “Considered by Pasolini his purest film and by many his masterpiece” (Mira Liehm), The Hawks and Sparrows marks a turning point in both the director’s career and the history of Italian cinema. (Godard closes his surging paean to postwar Italian cinema in Histoire(s) du cinema with an iris shot of the film’s talking crow — a major homage indeed.) In a kind of parody of the Holy Trinity, comic genius and patron saint of Naples Totò stars with Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli as a hapless father-and-son team, wandering the roads of Italy in the company of a voluble crow who is fond of debating politics and telling ancient tales. From the delightfully original, sung-through opening credits (the score is by Ennio Morricone) to the final sequence, which brings new meaning to the expression “eating crow,” Hawks and Sparrows has a deadly serious subject — “the degraded search for authentic values in a degraded world” — but its comedy is charmingly daft and buoyant. With its sly winks at Chaplin, Keaton, Beckett, Fellini, De Sica, and Pasolini’s own cinema, and to non-cinematic figures like Marx, Mao, and Dante, Hawks and Sparrows is “genial, humorous and compassionate … lively and fascinating, so primitive and droll” (Bosley Crowther, The New York Times).
This North American premiere of the 4K restoration is made possible by Cinecittà and Cineteca di Bologna, in collaboration with Compass Film.