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Film Screening:"The Great Silence" ["Il grande silenzio"]
(Sergio Corbucci, 1968, 105 min, Italy, Color, DCP)
On an unforgiving, snow-swept frontier, a group of bloodthirsty bounty hunters, led by the vicious Loco (Klaus Kinski) prey on a band of persecuted outlaws who have taken to the hills. Only a mute gunslinger named Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) stands between the innocent refugees and the corrupt bounty hunters. But, in this harsh, brutal world, the lines between right and wrong are not always clear, and good does not always triumph. Featuring superb photography and a haunting score from maestro Ennio Morricone, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak, brilliant and violent vision of an immoral, honorless West is widely considered to be among the best and most influential Westerns ever made.
"A STUNNING RESTORATION. Twists a revenge melodrama into a searing tract about race and class... The snowy landscapes are shot in gorgeous widescreen by Silvano Ippolito, and the Film Movement Classics restoration is so crisp, the production looks like it was finished yesterday." - Eric Monder, Film Journal International
"I regret the loss of a certain kind of craziness that used to flourish in movies - the kind that is on rich and ripe display in THE GREAT SILENCE... It's anarchic and rigorous, sophisticated and goofy, heartfelt and cynical." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"[Corbucci's] West was the most violent, surreal and pitiless landscape of any director in the history of the genre." - Quentin Tarantino, The New York Times
Said to have been intended as a cry against the assassinations of the revolutionaries Che Guevara and Malcolm X, Sergio Corbucci's masterful THE GREAT SILENCE has achieved a cult following for its uncompromisingly bleak cast on American violence, racism, and greed. A portrait of frontier justice meted out during the Great Blizzard of 1899, the film is set in a spare and annihilating wintry landscape to rival those of John Ford's CHEYENNE AUTUMN, André de Toth's THE DAY OF THE OUTLAW, Robert Altman's MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER and Quentin Tarantino's THE HATEFUL EIGHT. Ennio Morricone's score, which the composer considered his best for a Spaghetti Western, is "reminiscent of the DIES IRAE mass and Giacinto Scelsi's hypnotic HYMNOS from 1963," as the scholar Mark Lager observes. "[His 'Voices in the Desert'] is a requiem for the lost lives of 1968."
- MoMA
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Event URL: https://cinematicarts.duke.edu/screensociety/screenings/great-silence-sergio-corbucci-1968
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Screen/Society screenings are free and open to the public.
Parking Info: https://artscenter.duke.edu/parking
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Event venue
Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University, 2022 Campus Dr, Durham, NC 27708-9940, United States
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