Above image - Mario Monicelli. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_MonicelliURL of image: http://www.mondotechblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/monicelli_mario.jpgHonour to Mario Monicelli, a great director, one of the last few Italians who still were also a human being with an heart and a sentiment. Even if I didn't share many of his point of view, I respect his figure.He voluntarily chose to end his life. In the core of the Rome of the popes. Yes, this is "not Christian", but also to continue to live a life which doesn't deserve to be lived, this is too "not Christian". A "Christian Communism" or "Christian Fascism" which forces people to live a life which destroy their last true Christian sentiment, this is anti-Christianity "in the name of Jesus Christ"! If God should have "pity for his soul", He should have well 1,000 thousands more times pity for the "soul" of many human beasts whose vital instinct pushes them to live a bestial life till the last drop of the biological life.Mario, you did the right thing.
Mario Monicelli Commits Suicide in RomeViareggio-born director threw himself from fourth or fifth floor of urology department at San Giovanni hospital-------------------------------------------------(As I have no time, no resources, no money, no support at disposition, it is clear that what I wrote is affected by many errors and uncorrectness. I am not a prostitute lay journalist of this dirty Vatican 'tollerant' regime called 'democracy'. I have not the 51% of the Bank of America supporting my writings. I don't control the Casinò of Ostenda and neither Citroen and Peugeot as the General Superior did at least in 1958. So corrections and additions could appear in the future)
MILAN – A five-floor fall from the San Giovanni hospital in Rome was the final act in the life of Mario Monicelli, last of the great maestros of the Italian cinema. At about 9 pm on Monday evening, Monicelli threw himself from the urology department at the San Giovanni hospital in Rome, where he had been admitted on Sunday. He was 95 and had been suffering from prostate cancer. Monicelli’s body was found by staff on the hospital road by the flower beds near accident and emergency. The director left no note to explain why he killed himself. Friends and relatives gathered at the hospital as officers from the Celio police station worked to reconstruct the sequence of events. Lazio regional authority chair Renata Polverini also arrived. Meanwhile, news of Monicelli’s suicide quickly spread though cyberspace. Comments, photographs, reminiscences and musings were posted on Facebook and Twitter while videos by Monicelli on YouTube registered spikes of popularity.
FATIGUED AND IRRITABLE – It appears that Monicelli first underwent treatment and then, when he was alone in the double room he had to himself, he went to the window and leapt into the void. The incident took place in the main hospital building. Some witnesses say that Monicelli had been fatigued and irritable at the disease that had struck him at the age of 95. One healthcare worker said: “He was tired of living”. The director’s wife, wearing a black jacket and grey pants, emerged wearing a strained, tear-stained expression but with her head held high. She made no comment. Mario Monicelli’s father, the author and journalist Tomaso Monicelli, also committed suicide in 1946.
CAUSTIC MAESTRO – Born in Viareggio in 1915, Monicelli is regarded as one of the fathers of the commedia all’italiana. In recent years, it had fallen to him to comment on the deaths of many dear colleagues, a task he performed wittily, ironically and without sentimentality. The bitterness that had always veined his films came to characterise his public statements. He took part in February’s Viola Day protest and in the first No B Day last December in Piazza San Giovanni. He urged young people to hang tough: “Long live you, long live your strength, long live the working class, long live labour. We need to build a republic with justice, quality and the right to work, which are not the same things as freedom”. In July 2009, he went to the Chamber of Deputies with other film-sector celebrities to protest at cuts to the combined entertainments fund (FUS). For Monicelli, Italy was “a peninsula adrift”. His adopted district of Rome was Monti, the ancient Suburra, where artisans still toil on their workshop doorstep and to which he dedicated one of his most recent films. He lived at 29 Via dei Serpenti in a small, two-room loft with a garish decor a student might have chosen.
“I CAN UNDERSTAND WHY HE DID IT” – News of Monicelli’s death took the film world by surprise. “What happened has left me utterly stunned”, said producer Aurelio De Laurentiis. “I knew him very well indeed. I knew about his great dignity, and desire always to be independent, so I can understand why he did it. Lately, his eyesight had been going but right up to the end he was perfectly capable of walking. In other words, he was a healthy man who could not tolerate the idea of depending on someone else“. “I’m shattered”, said film star Carlo Verdone when he heard the news of Mario Monicelli’s tragic death. “He must have been tired of living, and couldn’t put up with old age any more. I admired him very much as a great observer and narrator, although at times I didn’t share his cynicism. He was polite and friendly but didn’t say much. A year ago, I sent him Christmas wishes. He was surprised. ‘No one does that any more’, he said”. “I can’t go on. I have to tell you that Mario Monicelli is dead. We’d have loved to have had him on the show but he was ill, and now he’s gone”, said Fabio Fazio during the live Vieni via con me [Come Away with Me] programme he presents with Roberto Saviano on RaiTre. The studio audience greeted the news with a prolonged round of applause. “I don’t know what people will say tomorrow about what has happened”, said director and actor Giovanni Veronesi, “but I must say I have never heard of anyone committing suicide at the age of 95. He was a very special person”. Veronesi said he was “gob-smacked”. “I spoke to him a short time ago and although I knew he was in hospital, I never visited him. A shame”. “I feel great grief” said a note from the chair of Rome’s provincial authority, Nicola Zingaretti.
SUCCESSES – Mario Monicelli debuted at a very young age with a short film co-directed with Alberto Mondadori, Cuore rivelatore [The Tell-tale Heart]. One of the founding fathers of the commedia all’italiana along with directors like Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini and Steno, Monicelli directed more than 60 films and wrote over 80 screenplays. His entire life was devoted to the cinema, where he turned out an average of almost one film a year. His output was relentless from I ragazzi della via Paal [The Boys of Via Paal] (1934) through to Le rose del deserto [The Roses of the Desert] (2006) and his swansong, a short documentary Vicino al Colosseo...c'è Monti [Near the Colosseum is Monti] shown not for competition at the Venice Film Festival. Among his greatest successes were Guardie e ladri [Guards and Thieves] (two awards at Cannes in 1951), when he was collaborating with the comedian Totò, I soliti ignoti [Big Deal on Madonna Street] (nominated for an Oscar), La grande guerra [The Great War] (1959) which won the Golden Lion at Venice, and L'armata Brancaleone [The Incredible Army of Brancaleone] (1965). These were years of friendship with Risi, clashes with Antonioni, his controversial relationship with Comencini, the triumph of the commedia all’italiana and the “colonels of mirth”. He turned Monica Vitti into a comic actress with La ragazza con la pistola [The Girl with the Gun] (1968). In 1975 he carried out the last wishes of Pietro Germi, who entrusted him with completing Amici miei [My Friends]. In 1977 Monicelli returned to a more tragic vision with Un borghese piccolo piccolo [A Very Little Man]. Other films followed, including Speriamo che sia femmina [Let’s Hope It’s a Girl] (1985) and the biting Parenti serpenti [Dearest Relatives, Poisonous Relations] (1993) which proved that he was still able to read a shifting Italian society with a shrewd, mischievous eye. He returned to the set, albeit beset by delays and production hold-ups, in 2006 for Le rose del deserto, a drawn freely from the books Il deserto della Libia [The Libyan Desert] by Mario Tobino and Guerra d'Albania [The War in Albania] by Giancarlo Fusco.
OPERA IN NEW YORK – In New York right now there is a screening of one of Mario Monicelli’s neorealist films, Risate di gioia [The Passionate Thief] with Anna Magnani. It is being shown as part of a retrospective dedicated by the Lincoln Center to Suso Cecchi D’Amico, who wrote the screenplay with Monicelli. Risate di gioia is being shown with six other Italian neorealist movies.
English translation by Giles Watson
30 novembre 2010From: http://www.corriere.it/International/english/articoli/2010/11/30/Mario-Monicelli-commits-suicide.shtml
