Luna Rossa
LUNA ROSSA
Red Moon over Naples
The Neapolitan is not interested in the truth. Nor is he interested in usefulness. Naples is founded on what one feels. (Jorge Alvis)
Naples, the wonderful, obscene, inventive, generous, desperate, fatalistic Naples, the capital of a world where, as they say, Europe, Africa and the Orient collide. A mentality all its own reigns here: the Neapolitan is not interested in the truth, for every truth is at bottom ugly. Nor is he interested in usefulness. Naples is founded on what one feels. In Naples, feeling determines everything.
The film "Red Moon over Naples" seeks to give a picture of this most singular of all Italian cities, and does so with the help of Neapolitan music. Nowhere in the world has the moon been sung about more often than in Naples. But it is not only the moon that the Neapolitan loves to sing about, but also his own city; for hardly any other Italian feels so bound to it. Today, however, he does so with a certain unease. For Naples too, the beautiful city on the gulf, has taken on a new face. And more than ever, the beautiful melancholy expressed in so many Neapolitan songs is felt as an ugly gloom.
"This portrait of Naples resembles a painting by Arcimboldo, who composed faces out of a single element: vegetables, or fish. Here it is simply sounds that paint this city, through the tangle of tones drawn from the spoken language, in the perpetual hubbub of a world subject to the threatening spasms of Vesuvius. Almost no commentary in this evocation, which plays with the masks of the Harlequin, but words gathered or declaimed with a savoury, philosophical-popular cheek."
Bernard Mérigaud, Télérama, Paris, 10 February 1999
The film is available for 7 € (digital streaming access) - in the Italian and the English version. After purchase you will get immediate access to the film.
ITALY, 57', DV Cam, colour
Production: Brintrup / ARTE / ZDF / RAI
