Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day): A Film Screening at CIMA
November 16, 2023, 6:30 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
In Italian with English subtitles (1 hr and 50 min)
In conjunction with CIMA’s current exhibition Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938 – 1948, we are hosting an in-person screening of Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day), a film directed by Ettore Scola, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren.
In Ettore Scola’s funny, humane ‘A Special Day’, Antonietta and Gabriele are never really a couple, but their brief encounter lights up the screen with the kind of radiance you get only from great movie actors who also are great stars. —Vincent Canby, The New York Times
Synopsis: Released in 1977, this historic film is about May 6th, 1938, the day Adolf Hitler visited Benito Mussolini in Rome for the first time. The film takes place entirely in a working class apartment building where Antonietta (Loren) and Gabriele (Mastroianni) are neighbors. When her husband leaves with their six kids to watch Hitler’s arrival, Antonietta unexpectedly meets Gabriele, the only other person in the apartment complex not attending the parade, and they create an unforeseen friendship. Throughout the film, Antonietta and Gabriele discover things about each other and the world around them that Scola brings to life with perfect detail and context of the start of the fascist regime.
The film will be introduced by Joseph Perna, visiting assistant professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at New York University. Perna’s research centers on vernacular modernism in Italy, with a special emphasis on cinema, photography, and magazines in the years surrounding the Second World War. He has published essays on Max Ophuls and Mario Soldati in the Italianist, and has written on early opera for a volume dedicated to innovation in Counter-Reformation Italy. He is currently at work on two book-length projects: a scholarly monograph on melodrama, Passionate Viewing in Modern Italy, and an English translation of Soldati’s interwar autobiography, America Primo Amore.
Public programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Tiro a Segno Foundation.
