Bright mystery. The Parsifal. From film to book

The Luminous Mystery. The Parsifal by Marco Filibertis the title of the book, edited by Anton Giulio Onofri (De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2022), which tells the genesis of the film Parsifalcinematographic transposition of Wagner’s work, written and directed by Marco Filiberti in 2021. The volume, which makes use of critical interventions by Giovanni Bogani, Anton Giulio Onofri, Luigi Pruneti and Paul Senhal, as well as by the author of the film himself, is accompanied from photos taken by Frances Cassaro, awarded as “Best photographic series of cinema” at the “CliCiak Prize Shots of Cinema – National Competition for Scene Photographers”, XXV edition. A real art catalog accompanied by 160 high-definition color photographs, a cross-media work, which in 200 pages embraces a plurality of languages, from photography to cinema, from theater to music, celebrated by Wagner’s work. To complete the volume, the “working notes” of Mauro Toscano, Livia Borgognoni and Daniele Gelsi, respectively director of photography, set and costume designer of the film.

The volume will be presented to the public Tuesday 29 November, at the Principe di Firenze cinema (Viale Matteotti, 13/r) at 7.30 pm, in the presence of the director, some performers of the film, moderated by Giovanni Bogani and Luigi Pruneti. The meeting will be an opportunity to retrace the steps of a highly appreciated film, whose release was received by critics in 2021 with enthusiastic acclaim, produced by Dedalus and counted among the eighteen Italian films in selection for the Academy Awards, as well as having won numerous festivals in which it has participated, including the 39th edition of Flickers’ Rhode Island Film.

At the end of the book presentation Luminous Mystery. Marco Filiberti’s Parsifalat the Principe cinema, it will be possible to see the very film that inspired it, Parsifal, considered by critics an important and passionate project of “total work of art”, an initiatory journey that leads to the heart of the mystery of our existence, where spirituality and desire approach each other almost until they merge into each other. And again, they wrote of the film: “This level of artistic ambition is rare in Italian cinema and the sense of longing that Filiberti tries to communicate through words and images is a child of our disoriented times. There is also a welcome return to the plasticity of bodies “as organic instruments”, underlined by carefully choreographed movements well performed by multi-talented actors. (Paola Casella, MyMovies.it)

Marco Filiberttheater and film director, passionate follower of the project of “total work of art” theorized by Richard Wagner himself through his “Gesamtkunstwerk”, described in the essay Art and Revolutionhas been resident in Tuscany, in Val d’Orcia since 2013, the very beautiful Tuscan valley that hosted the shooting of the film and immortalized in the photos in the volume.

The Parsifal was shot in Tuscan locations of extraordinary visual impact, including the Abbey of San Galgano, the Abbey of Sant’Antimo, the Pieve di Corsignano, the Bagni di San Filippo, the Crypt of the Lombards in Abbadia San Salvatore and the cells of San Francesco in Sarteano, up to the landscapes of the Val d’Orcia and the Val di Chiana: all the locations that come to life in the shots published in the book Luminous Mystery. The Parsifal.

Movie “Parsifal”