Film
Pasinetti made a range of small but fascinating contributions to filmmaking in Southern California in addition to his teaching, scholarship, and writing. For Joseph L. Mankiewicz's critically acclaimed Julius CesarPasinetti served as a technical advisor. Julius Cesar (1973) won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Marlon Brando), Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Music, Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture and Best Picture.
Also produced in 1953, but in Italy, was Michelangelo Antonioni's evocative film La Signora senza camelie Pasinetti wrote the screenplay with Antonioni, who was related to him by marriage. In this film, he also appears among the group of guests waiting for the arrival of the actress Clara Manni (Lucia Bosè) at a private house. In 1973, Pasinetti played a small acting part in Francesco Rossi's compelling depiction of Lucky Luciano, the fabled American mafia boss who ran operations both in the US and Sicily.
Pasinetti taught both comparative literature and Italian at the University of California at Los Angeles for over 40 years. Pasinetti served as a founding editor with Yale's Maynard Mack of the critically acclaimed Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. W.W. Norton & Company has been publishing this standard college text since the mid-1970s. Pasinetti's companion essays on Erasmus' "In Praise of Folly," and Machievelli's classic The Prince guided generations of college students. World Masterpieces is now in a seventh edition. Pasinetti also edited both the first and second editions of Norton's new "global" Anthology of World Literature.
Pasinetti's work "Melodrama" is included in Massimo Riva's 2007 Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction.
Read more about this topic: P. M. Pasinetti
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They’re obliged to overstate their own importance.”
—François Truffaut (1932–1984)
“The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half- piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The woman’s world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.”
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)