Il Sogno di Campaldino
Illustrated film and theater screenplay
By Giovanni Enrico Arrighini
Associazione Città Infinite - Via delle Conce, 10 - lucca 55100 C.F. / P.IVA 02250360464 - info@ilsognodicampaldino.it
From 'Gli Uomini della Neve' to 'Il Sogno di Campaldino'
"Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered".
(Ezra Pound)
'Il Sogno di Campaldino' (2019-2020) was conceived as an illustrated film screenplay. The stage adaptation was realized at the end of year 2020, with only slight changes to the original story.
The work is the natural continuation of 'Gli Uomini della Neve' (2007), the author's first screenplay that will be promoted in 2022 during the centenary of the first publication of S. T. Eliot's ''The Waste Land' and R. M. Rilke's 'Duineser Elegien', cultural references for the story.
'Gli Uomini della Neve' tells about the journey, in the desolate land of the human soul, of the two characters, who are based on the artists Rainer Maria Rilke and Ezra Pound. The screenplay ends with the image of the "poet" imprisoned in a cage in the Metato concentration camp, nearby Pisa.
The presence of the secluded 'poet' comes back in the opening of 'Il Sogno di Campaldino', transforming itself into the room of the criminal asylum in Washington DC, where a patient on his last day of internment falls asleep and dreams of meeting the knight Dante Alighieri during the days of the Battle of Campaldino fought in 1289.
The leitmotif of both screenplays is the overlapping of historic reality with the artistic part, the latter enhanced in its lyrical scope by the presence of a pair of poets as characters (Rilke/Pound and Dante/Pound).
Such double register is further amplified by the dream dimension, where the patient becomes the protagonist of the dream of the 'character' he has dreamt, overturning the time horizon and the linear description of the facts.
In this perspective, the dramatic events related to the battle of Campaldino are transformed and renewed in the days of the defeat of Montaperti, until they become a veiled allusion to contemporary life with the appearance of the characters of the 'Commedia' that like 'black columns of smoke' feed the descent into the nightmare of war until the liberating parricide of the knight/hero.
'Il Sogno di Campaldino' concludes with a tribute to the 'Sommo Poeta' in the year of the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of his death, evoking on the stage his character before the beginning of the battle, an insecure and terrified young knight, called to fight for his city Florence and for his family's good name.
At that time 'La Commedia' had not yet been conceived; everything was hung on the subtle line between dream, poetry, and nothingness. That lonesome man on horseback, in the front ranks of the Florentine army, waiting to face something terrible, resembles each one of us, abandoned in continuos hesitance.
The Author
Giovanni Enrico Arrighini
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