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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
(1573-1610) Italy

Painter

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Caravaggio - The movie by Derek Jarman

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was one of the last painters of the Italian Renaissance. As a youth he sold his paintings on the streets of Rome; as an adult, his constant companion was a deaf-mute boy he'd bought as a child; his models were usually prostitutes and low-life street people; he fled from Rome to Naples after killing a man; and he died a pauper.

movie 1Writer and director Derek Jarman created this biography on a shoestring budget of $715,000 from the British Film Institute, shooting in abandoned warehouses along the Thames River in London. The story is told in a series of flashbacks as Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) lies dying in poverty.

Part fiction, part fantasy, and partly based on the known facts about the painter's life, the film follows Caravaggio's childhood on the streets, to his sponsorship by the wealthy Cardinal Del Monte (Michael Gough), to his infatuation with the streetwise gambler, Ranuccio (Sean Bean), whom he hires as one of his models.

When Ranuccio's prostitute girlfriend Lena (Tilda Swinton) announces she is pregnant, there is some question as to the identity of the father, since Caravaggio has also fallen in love with her. Lena is later found dead, having drowned in the river, and Ranuccio is arrested and charged with her murder. Caravaggio believes Ranuccio innocent and engineers his release, only to find his model now admits to the killing. Enraged, Caravaggio slits Ranuccio's throat.

In a film filled with eccentricities, some of the most humorous involve the use of deliberate anachronisms - pocket calculators, motorbikes, typewriters, airplane noises in the background. Caravaggio is credited with inventing chiaroscuro, a style of theatrical lighting employing artfully placed shadows, and this technique is carried over into the actual design of the film, where the live recreation of Caravaggio's paintings earned cinematographer Gabriel Beristain an award at the 1986 Berlin Film Festival.

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Caravaggio - The movie (UK 1986)

movie 3PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS:
Nigel TerryCaravaggio
Dexter FletcherYoung Caravaggio
Noam AlmazBoy Caravaggio
Sean BeanRanuccio Thomasoni
Garry CooperDavide
Spencer LeighJerusaleme
Tilda SwintonLena
Michael GoughCardinal Del Monte
Nigel DavenportMarchese Giustiniani
Robbie ColtraneCardinal Borghese
Jonathan HydeBaglione
Jack BirkettThe Pope

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Critique by Edwin Jahiel

movie 2Painter-cineaste Derek Jarman, one of the "enfants terribles" of the contemporary British scene, has come up with an avant-garde "biography" of the great Italian painter Caravaggio (1573-1610) which is imaginary yet factual, artful yet campy, arty yet artsy, original but self -indulgent, and fascinating for specialized audiences.

It is done in broken bits, against all traditional notions of continuity. As it goes along, it invents, at times gratuitously, at times on the fragile basis of history (or legend) -- and it is always perversely, often delightfully, anachronistic. Stylized places and years move in and out, merge, fuse, separate. There are" nows"-- the 20th century, vague, almost atemporal; 16th century "thens"; twilight, "no time" zones; periods when the incursions of modernity in the past vary in intensity: a corrupt Roman tinkering with a musical calculator as he talks to a Cardinal, a Caravaggio patron; a typewriter, a motorcycle, modern dress. The anachronisms are not visually intrusive. They are reinforced by sounds of accordeons, jazz bands, jets, radio or TV, which, however, are not shown.

The story may be confusing, but the art visuals are not, and they're quite extraordinary. Caravaggio used models for paintings and Jarman goes to the paintings to reproduce the models as living still lifes, in minute reconstructions.

The painter's models were people of the lower classes. The revolutionary, naturalistic, forceful, controversial Caravaggio -- an out and out tradition-breaking avant-gardist -- used whores for Madonnas (as in "The Death of the Virgin," scandal-making, because of its different emphasis of figures), cutthroats for saints, novel angles and perspectives : in "The Conversion of St. Paul " a huge horse dominates.

Jarman repeats Caravaggio's magnificent use of sometimes brutal light in what is the best demonstration of chiaroscuro, a Caravaggio innovation and, to this day, a lesson about the immense possibilities of one-source lighting.

Says Jarman: "Caravaggio invented dramatic lighting ...similar to the kind of light used in the cinema. In a way he invented cinematic light.... Every Italian cameraman is grounded in Caravaggio..."

As Caravaggio paints, the canvases-in-progress are so convincingly done that, so far as I know, they're the very best I have ever seen in a film. (I have no documentation on the movie and I cannot identify the person who did those paintings).

movie 4The film's Caravaggio is bisexual, with the stress on homoeroticism. His major non-art passion, Ranuccio, is his equally bisexual model, a beautiful low-life hunk that becomes the painter's blood brother after a fight in a dive, and whom Caravaggio kills at the end.

You cannot judge "Caravaggio" by habitual standards. It has wretched excesses, "longueurs," claustrophobia, calculated distancing. But it is also an original experiment, a one-of-a-kind tribute to a ground-breaking master, and a feast of color, light and shadows.

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