For Pontecorvo’s episode of 12 REGISTI PER 12 CITTA’, he has Ennio Morricone return to the fold, though Morricone was born in Rome and Pontecorvo in Pisa. The subject, however, is Udine.
The two men had a closer than usual collaboration, actually sharing the composition credit on BATTLE OF ALGIERS. When Pontecorvo visited Edinburgh International Film Festival I asked him, at the q&a, how this came to be, unknowingly triggering one of his favourite anecdotes. I will retell it in comments upon request, but you can hear the great man retell it on the extras of the Criterion disc.
Pontecorvo — who gets a bad rep over that tracking shot in KAPO, which isn’t, to me anyway, particularly offensive — but I can understand the principle — spends a surprising amount of time on the landscape OUTSIDE Udine, but this is worthwhile stuff.
The VO begins with Boccaccio’s Decameron, so that our journey to the city seems to cover time as well as space — from the timeless drives and mountains the author might have seen, past vineyards and villas, to the city itself, which we reach via a long pan across conjoined 19th-century illustrations.
The tracking shot in Udine, the first anyhow, occurs along a portico, looking out at Roman statuary, pulled along by the flow of traffic in the intervening street. It seems unlikely that it would offend either Rivette or Daney, who took such exception to GP’s earlier move.
Mostly, however. Pontecorvo prefers to pan sedately. Once bitten.
The VO is a touch touristic — though it does more than just dole out facts and dates, it doesn’t aspire to poetry. We learn that there’s “an unusual Tiepolo” which tries out new painting techniques, but not what those techniques are. No time? Then why bring it up? Sometimes you just need to FIND time.
Another tracking shot, a nice one, passing through the galleries of the Archbishop’s Palace — frescoes by Tiepolo. Like a number of his fellow directors, Pontecorvo is moved to MARIENBAD-like glides here — but we should note that such explorations of screen space are an Italian invention, dating back to CABIRIA (though we could also note that the first camera dolly was constructed for that film by a Frenchman Spaniard, Segundo de Chomon).


We learns that the Archbishop’s library contains a collection of heretical and sorcerous texts — I wish we had time to leaf through a few volumes, preferably illustrated. But we do get to gloat at some gargoyles.
“Udine, a city made for man,” concludes the VO, a touch weakly. It’s one of the results of a piece being uninspired: you can’t think of any solutions that would pep it up. But when you see a work like the Antonioni, Bertolucci or Zeffirelli shorts, the solutions seem obvious. It can’t just be because they had better cities. Udine looks pretty nice.


