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Lou Castel
Lou Castel (born Ulv Quarzell; 28 May 1943) is a Swedish actor who became known through his work in Italian films. Life and career The son of a Swedish father and an Irish mother, Castel was born Ulv Quarzell in Bogotá, Colombia, where his father was working as a diplomat. He and his twin brother grew up in Cartagena. When Castel was 6, his parents separated. He followed his mother to Europe and went to school in London, briefly at Dartington Hall School with his sister Solveig, then in Stockholm. He subsequently went to live in Rome where his mother was working in the local film industry. A communist, Castel's mother also introduced her son to politics. Interested in acting from an early age, he attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, but was quickly kicked out. His first movie role was an uncredited extra in ''The Leopard'' (1963). Two years later, he gained international fame for his performance in ''Fists in the Pocket'', in which he played the epileptic ...
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Fists In The Pocket
''Fists in the Pocket'' ( it, I pugni in tasca) is a 1965 Italian psychological drama film written and directed by Marco Bellocchio, his directorial debut. A dark satire of family and social values, the film centers on a young man suffering from epilepsy (played by Lou Castel in his film debut) who plots the murders of his dysfunctional family. ''Fists in the Pocket'' was controversial upon initial release, embraced by some critics while condemned by others in the Italian filmmaking establishment. It was a significant sleeper hit and has since developed a strong following, embraced as a landmark work for the county's cinema. Plot Four siblings, a sister and three brothers, live with their blind mother in a provincial villa. Three of the siblings suffer from epilepsy; the eldest son, Augusto does not. Augusto is the only provider for the family. One of the brothers, Alessandro, decides that Augusto would be free to live his life as he pleases if the mother and other siblings we ...
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Damiano Damiani
Damiano Damiani (23 July 1922 – 7 March 2013) was an Italian screenwriter, film director, actor and writer. Poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini referred to him as "a bitter moralist hungry for old purity", while film critic Paolo Mereghetti said that his style made him "the most American of Italian directors". In 1946 Damiano Damiani became part of the so-called Group of Venice with Fernando Carcupino, Hugo Pratt and Dino Battaglia. Life and career Born in Pasiano di Pordenone, Friuli, Damiani studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, then made his début in 1947 with the documentary ''La banda d'Affari''. After a few years as a screenwriter, he directed his first feature film in 1960, '' Il rossetto''. Before his career as a big screenwriter, Damiani was first a comic cartoonist in association with the "Group of Venice". Focused on the comic ''Asso di Picche'' (1945–49) the comic featured a masked vigilante who fights crime all over the globe and is in charge ...
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Claude Chabrol
Claude Henri Jean Chabrol (; 24 June 1930 – 12 September 2010) was a French film director and a member of the French New Wave (''nouvelle vague'') group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues and contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, Chabrol was a critic for the influential film magazine ''Cahiers du cinéma'' before beginning his career as a film maker. Chabrol's career began with ''Le Beau Serge'' (1958), inspired by Hitchcock's ''Shadow of a Doubt'' (1943). Thrillers became something of a trademark for Chabrol, with an approach characterized by a distanced objectivity. This is especially apparent in ''Les Biches'' (1968), '' La Femme infidèle'' (1969), and '' Le Boucher'' (1970) – all featuring Stéphane Audran, who was his wife at the time. Sometimes characterized as a "mainstream" New Wave director, Chabrol remained prolific and popular throughout his half-century career.< ...
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Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders (; born 14 August 1945) is a German filmmaker, playwright, author, and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for ''Buena Vista Social Club'' (1999), about Cuban music culture; ''Pina'' (2011), about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch; and '' The Salt of the Earth'' (2014), about Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. One of Wenders's earliest honors was a win for the BAFTA Award for Best Direction for his narrative drama ''Paris, Texas'' (1984), which also won the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Many of his subsequent films have also been recognized at Cannes, including ''Wings of Desire'' (1987), for which he won the Best Director Award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders has been the president of the European Film Academy in Berlin since 1996. Alongside filmmaking, he is an active photogr ...
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Character Actor
A character actor is a supporting actor who plays unusual, interesting, or eccentric characters.28 April 2013, The New York Acting SchoolTen Best Character Actors of All Time Retrieved 7 August 2014, "..a breed of actor who has the ability to be almost unrecognizable from part to part, and yet play many, many roles convincingly and memorably. .." The term, often contrasted with that of leading actor, is somewhat abstract and open to interpretation. In a literal sense, all actors can be considered character actors since they all play "characters", but the term more commonly refers to an actor who frequently plays a distinctive and important supporting role. Character actors are generally well-known and recognizable by the audience (by appearance if not by name), even if they play different types of roles in different movies. A character actor may play characters who are very different from the actor's off-screen real-life personality, while in another sense a character actor may ...
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Years Of Lead (Italy)
, partof = the Cold War , image = Stragedibologna-2.jpg , image_size = 300px , caption = Aftermath of the bombing at the Bologna railway station in August 1980 which killed 85 people, the deadliest event during the Years of Lead , date = Late 1968 – mid 1988 ()Resurgence from 1999 to 2005 () , place = Italy (mainly Northern Italy) , result = Far-left and far-right terrorist groups dismantled , combatant1 = Supported by: , combatant2 = Supported by: , combatant3 = Supported by: , commander1 = , commander2 = , commander3 = , units1 = Armed Forces: +90,000 soldiers (1973) Gladio: 622 members , units2 = BR: Several hundred active members PL: 1,072 members and collaborators O22: 25 members PAC: 60 militants AO: 200 membersGun Cuninghame, Patrick. "Autonomia In The Seventies: The Refusal Of Work, The Party And Poli ...
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Italian (Marxist–Leninist) Communist Party
Union of Italian Communists (Marxist–Leninist) () was a pro-Chinese communist group in Italy. The UCI(m-l) was founded in Rome on 4 October 1968. Its main organ was ''Servire il popolo''. The main leaders of UCI(m-l) were Aldo Brandirali, Enzo Todeschini, Angelo Arvati and Enzo Lo Giudice. After a schism at the end of 1970, the main group of the leaders moved from Rome to Milan. On 15 April 1972 the UCI(m-l) was transformed into Italian (Marxist–Leninist) Communist Party (''Partito Comunista (marxista-leninista) Italiano''). With the appearance of the Leninist poet Francesco Leonetti in the party, the theoretical organ of PC(m-l)I became known as ''Che fare''. The PC(m-l)I had a front organization amongst Italians in West Germany, called Union of Italian Migrant Workers (''Federazione Italiani Lavoratori Emigrati''). The PC(m-l)I was dissolved in 1978, and its remaining adherents largely became involved in Autonomia Operaia Autonomia Operaia (Italian: ''Workers' Autono ...
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Maoism
Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. The philosophical difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that the peasantry is the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than the proletariat. This updating and adaptation of Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. Later theoreticians expanded on the idea that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, arguing that he had in fact updated it fundamentally, and that Maoism could be applied universally throughout the world. This ideology is often referred to as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to d ...
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (; 31 May 1945 – 10 June 1982), sometimes credited as R. W. Fassbinder, was a German filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures and catalysts of the New German Cinema movement. Fassbinder's main theme was the exploitability of feelings. His films were deeply rooted in post-war German culture: the aftermath of Nazism, the German economic miracle, and the terror of the Red Army Faction. Other prominent themes in his films include love, friendship, identity and more generally, the throes of interpersonal relationships. His first feature-length film was a gangster movie called '' Love Is Colder Than Death'' (1969); he scored his first domestic commercial success with ''The Merchant of Four Seasons'' (1972) and his first international success with '' Ali: Fear Eats the Soul'' (1974), both of which are considered masterpieces by contemporary critics. Big-budget projects such as '' Despair'' (1978), ''Lili Marleen'' and ''Lola'' (both 1 ...
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Beware Of A Holy Whore
''Beware of a Holy Whore'' (german: Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte) is a 1971 West German drama film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that features Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder himself. Fassbinder considered this to be his favorite of his own films. While in a hotel with too much drink, drugs and time the cast and crew of a film are gradually unravelling as they await the arrival of their director. Semi-autobiographical, the film was influenced by the shooting of the director's earlier '' Whity'' in Spain. The film features music from Leonard Cohen's first album ''Songs of Leonard Cohen'' and from ''Spooky Two'' by Spooky Tooth, among others. Plot ''Beware of a Holy Whore'' opens with a soliloquy (delivered by Werner Schroeter) about the synopsis of a Disney story featuring Goofy, the dog. Goofy cross-dresses in his aunt's clothes to teach a kindergarten class and, after being ridiculed by the class, takes a "poor orphan girl" ...
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Orgasmo
''Orgasmo'' is a 1969 giallo film directed by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker, Lou Castel, and Colette Descombes. It follows a wealthy American socialite who finds herself preyed upon by two nefarious young siblings who indulge her in sex, drugs, and alcohol while she vacations at an Italian villa. This film helped launch the second phase of Baker's career, during which she became a regular star in Italian productions. After its Italian premiere in February 1969, ''Orgasmo'' was released in the United States under the alternative title ''Paranoia'' later that same year. It was one of the first films to carry an X rating in the United States under the newly-established Motion Picture Association film rating system, and this fact was sensationalized for its American promotional materials. The film marked the second of four collaborations between Lenzi and actress Carroll Baker, who had previously starred in '' So Sweet... So Perverse'' (1969), and subsequently starred in ...
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Umberto Lenzi
Umberto Lenzi (6 August 1931 – 19 October 2017) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and novelist. A fan of film since young age, Lenzi studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and made his first film in 1958 which went unreleased, while his official debut happened in 1961 with ''Queen of the Seas''. Lenzi's films of the 1960s followed popular trends of the era, which led to him directing several spy and erotic thriller films. He followed in suit in the 1970s making ''giallo'' films, crime films and making the first Italian cannibal film with ''Man from the Deep River''. He continued making films up until the 1990s and later worked as a novelist writing a series of murder mysteries. Biography Early life Umberto Lenzi was born on 6 August 1931 in the Massa Marittima province of Italy. Lenzi was a film enthusiast as early as grade school. While studying law, Lenzi also created film fan clubs. Lenzi eventually put off studying law and began pursuing the technic ...
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