Made in Italy: Morricone, Leone, and More | July 12-August 31, 2024

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As a boy, Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) considered becoming a doctor or competitive chess player, but he was encouraged by his father, a trumpet player, to study music. After graduating from the Conservatory of Music Santa Cecilia, Morricone, while writing his own compositions, worked as a trumpet player and arranger of popular music. In 1961 he began scoring movies. Morricone was constantly engaged in research and experimentation-from 1964 to 1980, he performed and recorded with the avant-garde improvisation ensemble Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza-and the depth and scope of his musical erudition, from classical to jazz, popular to experimental, orchestral to folk, are evident in the hundreds of films he scored.
Along with the iconic Italian Westerns he scored for Sergio Leone, Morricone’s talent for deploying unique instrumentation for dramatic, critical, or comic effect is apparent in his work on the first films of Lina Wertmüller (The Lizards) and Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket). Elio Petri’s Giallo ghost story A Quiet Place in the Country and twisted policier Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion feature radically different soundscapes to communicate psychological rupture and social decay. Themes of revolutionary hope and the forces that would crush it are powerfully realized in the music of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Liliana Cavani’s The Year of the Cannibals, while the temporal complexity and moral ambivalence of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America resonate through Morricone’s composition. Replete with new restorations, Made in Italy: Morricone, Leone, and More offers the opportunity to be immersed in the movies that launched the maestro’s career.
-Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Maid in Spain for dollars trilogy :)