“The Golden Age of Film Clubs” by Emanuela Piovani is a cinematic soap bubble that will make everyone unaware of the existence of Annabella Miscuglio understand that France is not the only place where people believed that filming could change lives.
A feminist and nonconformist, she made many documentaries on burning issues. As recalled by Emanuela Piovani’s film, her work on prostitution remains banned to this day, and although she collaborated with RAI, notably with a film on another heretic, Pier Paolo Pasolini, her name still evokes controversy today…
In this delicate and melancholic film, the character of Arabellqa-Annabella has just died, and it’s her ghost that appears to her son and comes back to the memory of her friends who collaborated on her films. A beautiful ghost since the ever-radiant Laura Morante lends her features. She is inevitably sublime…
A tribute to cinema before digital and numerical technology, “The Golden Age of Film Clubs” focuses on the cinema Arabella ran in a small town in Puglia, a cinema called “the Arena,” telling how she defended arthouse cinema and also showcased her own works…
Unfortunately, a victim of obsolete formats as well as censorship, her cinema faded away.
Taking its time, showcasing each of Arabella’s friends involved in her experimental cinema and nostalgic for that free and carefree era, Emanuela Piovani didn’t create a completely polished film, seeking to charm at all costs.
Like Arabella, this fragile but charming film is full of surprises, and its good humor is contagious.
It also reminds us that Italy is a country of culture where, in the post-1968 years, there were people who believed in utopia without needing to take up arms to try to change a world stuck in Catholic conformity and revolutionary communist spirit.
