I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them. Whether they are good or bad is beside the point... A nameless graphic designer is haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned. Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy's present 'economic miracle' he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms with arrows, signs, advertisements ; invents a new, purposefully incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes even more unbalanced. He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young, Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war... Known primarily as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of Guerra's birth, and with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael Bracewell, Equilibrium remains a relevant, powerful, and intensely visual account of a truly (post-)modern man.
Tonino Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy, in 1920. The son of illiterate peasants, Guerra first started writing poetry in his early twenties while interned in a German prison camp with other anti-fascist protesters. After the war, he moved to Rome where he met the director Elio Petri, heralding the start of his screenwriting career. He went onto produce over one hundred film scripts, receiving Oscar nominations for Carlo Pointi's Casanova 70, and Michelangelo Antoninoi's Blow-Up. In 1975 he won the Academy Award for Fellini's Amarcord.
Title: Equilibrium
Author: Guerra, Tonino
ISBN: 9781913430016
Binding:
Publisher: MOIST
Publication Date: 2020-09-30
Number of Pages: 152
Weight: 0.1580 kg
A diary, a tragedy, PTSD, madness. A trip worthy of Hunter S. Thompson or Charlie Kaufman, obviously filmic and surreal but succinct and clear like fresh water. Samantha Morton ---------- Equilibrium, about malaise, sexuality without love, bewilderment, scorn, constantly thwarted relationships and a man trapped in his own head, speaks in a deep way to our ongoing search for intimacy, tenderness, communication, and different attachments to objects and nature. Even now, it's a far more satisfying read than many rushed-to-publisher analyses of the current situation. Review 31 ---------- A disturbing and gripping mind-boggler, at once hilarious and nightmarish. Mubi's The Notebook ---------- Fantastic: an absurd novella [...] strange funny and painful. Roland Barf's Film Diary ---------- A modernity in which things and their values are shifting and loose [...] This is postmodern as in 'after the present.' Manchester Review of Books ---------- Guerra as a solo artist turns out to be every bit as talented, original, and challenging as the directors he worked with a Criterion Collection October Book of October ---------- Powerfully written, and endlessly mesmerising, it's a story both timeless and incredibly resonant in 2020. Left Lion ---------- At times wildly funny and at others disturbing. A Burley Fisher Book of the Year ---------- A South London Gallery Christmas Book Choice.
