St. Michael Had a Rooster

In the 1970s, Italy experienced a trend toward political cinema, which sometimes took the form of a critical reinterpretation of the past. Within this trend, however, the Taviani brothers sought a modern aesthetic approach that took into account the revolution of the French New Wave. They chose to draw inspiration from Brecht’s theater, combined with the tradition of Italian peasant plays, in rejecting traditional dramaturgy and acting. One of the clearest examples is this film, which transposes a Tolstoy story to 1870s Italy. An anarchist attempts to spark a revolt in a village in Umbria but fails and is arrested. He spends years in prison, and eventually comes face-to-face with a new generation of revolutionaries who consider him outdated. Shot on a low budget, the film transforms this limitation into a stylistic choice that underscores the character’s loneliness, and at the height of the Movement’s heyday, it tackles one of the themes dearest to the Taviani brothers: the contradictions (if not the impossibility) of revolution. 4K DCP digital restoration by Cinecittà and CSC-Cineteca Nazionale.