Search Film, Company, People...

MAVERICK MODIGLIANI

MALEDETTO MODIGLIANI

By Parisi VALERIA

NEXO DIGITAL S.R.L. - as SALES

Documentary - Completed 2020

‘Artiste maudit’, scandalous genius and indisputable master of 20th Century Art: a portrayal that goes beyond the legendary to celebrate the centennial since his death. Narrated here from the original point of view of his young wife Jeanne Hébuterne who committed suicide two days after his death

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- ITALY
- Languages
- ENGLISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN
- Duration
- 97 mn
- Director(s)
- Parisi VALERIA
- Synopsis
- Born in Livorno, Tuscany, Dedo or Modì, as the artist was often nicknamed, lived a short, tormented life, narrated here from an original point of view, that of his young common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, who committed suicide two days after his death at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris on 24th January 1920. The documentary feature opens with the character of Jeanne and a reading of a passage from "Les Chants de Maldoror", a book Modigliani always kept with him. The action of the film unwinds through museum halls, enriched by the art works of the Albertina in Vienna and "Modigliani and the Adventure of Montparnasse", the splendid exhibition dedicated to the artist at Livorno’s City Museum, as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the great museums and art collections in Paris.
  Understanding Modigliani, the fourth son of a family of Jewish origin on the verge of financial crisis, means starting from his hometown Livorno, in an Italian province that made him feel caged in from the outset. Modigliani decided to leave and go in search of something else. He went to Florence, then Venice and arrived in Paris in 1906, aged 21. This was where the legend of Modigliani - womanizer, alcoholic, tragic artist - was born. In reality, he was a man masking an illness, clinging to life and to his art.
  In this documentary film the paintings themselves speak to us, filmed in dedicated sets from "La Filette en Bleu" to the portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne. Striking a fine balance between footage of the city as it is today and black and white photos and archive footage as it was then, Jeanne's narrative voice talks to us about Paris at the turn of the century: the ville lumière, the metropolis, the centre of modernity. It was an already established art market and a magnet attracting, from all over Europe, painters and sculptors that were going hungry then, only to be worth millions today, first and foremost Modigliani himself. Moving from one makeshift lodging to the next, Amedeo Modigliani, poor, hungry, but full of enthusiasm, met an aspiring poetess, the twenty-year-old Russian, Anna Achmatova, and the English journalist and feminist Beatrice Hastings. These were the women he painted portraits of, and whose faces, almost caryatid-like, became the very icons of his art. We discover Modigliani by comparisons made between his work and the work of other contemporary artists, above all Brancusi and Picasso and their work and art spaces (the Atelier Brancusi at the Centre Pompidou and the Musée Picasso in Paris).
  Then there are his art dealers and collectors. Modigliani, however, would die poor and unrecognized. Only later did he become one of the most highly rated artists in the world. And one of the most copied.
  We discover him at the free port of Geneva, in the workshop of Marc Restellini, one of the world's leading experts on Modigliani. And then in London, amid art fairs and in the studio of an artist who is a declared forger.