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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Luca Guardabascio

Photo by Noah Purdy © 2011 noahpurdy.com 
Not too long ago, I met a very kind and extraordinary man walking along the campus of Robert Morris University; his name was Luca Guardabascio, and he was one of the visiting scholars for the Fall 2011 at this school.
I soon realized that Guardabascio was a very intriguing artist and a very dedicated soul to the Italian cinema. At six years old, Guardabascio published his first collection of short stories- 70 short stories to be exact. 
He always had an interest for eccentric movies, especially The Twilight Zone. As a matter of fact, Guardabascio formed a new genre for movies, called marron, that he introduced to the Italian cinema.
"Marron is a genre that I build from thriller and film noir," said Guardabascio. 
The first movie that he produced under this genre was Dismophobia, a short story about a man who has fallen in love with a woman who rejected him. The movie is in black and white with a single scene in sepia, and has a very original ending. 
Guardabascio, who is also an actor, took part in many cinematic projects in Italy, such as  Con Rabbia e con Amore and Anime Nera. 
He is also a screenwriter and a novelist. His book, Una Guerra Privata, depicts a friendship between an Israeli and a Palestinian. They both live in Italy under the same roof, and fall in love with the same woman.
In the story, both friends realize that despite the political and ethnic conflict between Israel and Palestine, they are not so distant as people. Nonetheless, falling in love with the same woman has created another type of conflict between the two friends, and at the end of the book, an unlikely resolution is revealed. 
"I'm very interested in other culture," said Guardabascio about the book. 
He wrote another book about the summer of 1983, entitled Ancora Un'estate o un'estate Ancora.
He further explained that it was an important time period because there was a lot of issues that were being raised in world, such as the discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). 
"In Italy, with Betino Craxi in charge, the socialist party went into power for the first time," said Guardabascio. "It was a very good period of time. Italy went into G7."
As he mentioned, many other things happened during that time. A girl by the name of Emanuella Orlandi was kidnapped in Vatican and no one knows what happened to her until this day. In addition,  Israel invaded the South of Lebanon, which became the tragic first Lebanon war. 
As a result, the book emphasized on the growing fear among Italians of the world outside of home. The story focuses on a man who kills a shy singer because of jealousy and hides the body in the sea. People begin to speculate that the shy singer is kidnapped.
I have the impression that this is just one aspect of the book as the book seems to incorporate many more. Although I do not speak Italian, this book is definitely something that I would like to read. 
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