THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL SON/HUMILIATED
A film by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
2001, 64 minutes
2001, 64 minutes
No. 124
Narrative
Narrative
Description
Straub and Huillet take as their inspiration the 1949 novel Women of Messina by the Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini, whose courageous wartime work in the underground Communist resistance press led to his imprisonment by the Fascists. These twinned films are a companion piece to Sicilia!.
They center on a community of peasants and workers, adrift in liberated Italy, who establish a cooperative in a battle-ravaged mountain village. The community then must stand its ground against the coercions of the capitalist state, which takes the form of three argumentative — and armed — hunters. The utopian ideal of a Popular Front — myriad individual voices ringing out as one — seems to be no match for an idea of progress measured in profiteering and private property, as if one can own the songs of birds and the rustling wind.
They center on a community of peasants and workers, adrift in liberated Italy, who establish a cooperative in a battle-ravaged mountain village. The community then must stand its ground against the coercions of the capitalist state, which takes the form of three argumentative — and armed — hunters. The utopian ideal of a Popular Front — myriad individual voices ringing out as one — seems to be no match for an idea of progress measured in profiteering and private property, as if one can own the songs of birds and the rustling wind.
