Giunti Odeon presents the second event in the series organised in collaboration with the Teatro della Pergola: to coincide with  Before the Storm, written and starring Umberto Orsini, one of Billy Wilder's greatest masterpieces and one of the greatest films in the history of cinema, Sunset Boulevard, comes to the big screen. Joe Gillis (William Holden), a Hollywood screenwriter, is going through a difficult period in his career. To escape the debt collectors (he is not paying his car instalments), he ends up in an old house that seems abandoned, but is not. It is inhabited by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a former silent film star. Joe agrees to review a terrible script that the diva is writing, dreaming of a sensational return to the set. The atmosphere in the house is gloomy, dark, almost deadly. The diva constantly screens her old films, and the guests are surviving mummies (Buster Keaton is among the regulars). A prominent figure is the butler von Mayerling (Eric von Stroheim) who, it turns out, was also Norma's first husband. The woman ends up falling in love with the young man, who in turn is in love with a colleague of his (Olson). Gillis accepts his situation as a kept man for a while, then gives in. But Norma, now mad, shoots him as he is leaving. The man falls into the swimming pool, a symbol of the things he had so desired.

Giunti Odeon presents an extraordinary film dedicated to one of the greatest icons in rock history: Bruce Springsteen, “The Boss.” 1981: Springsteen is fresh off the success of the River Tour, which made him famous far beyond his native New Jersey, and his record label wants a new LP right away to “strike while the iron is hot.” But he is in the midst of a crisis, partly due to guilt over leaving his roots behind and leaving behind that working-class world of diners, pinball machines, and suburban houses, and partly due to his conflictual relationship with a father who drank heavily and was violent.

Everywhere he goes, he is followed by a dark shadow and an emptiness that he cannot shake off until, in a room in his modest apartment, he composes the songs that will be part of his least known and most respected LP - Nebraska - far removed from what the record company expects. Bruce wants them to be mastered exactly as he recorded them on an audio cassette (without a case), and he doesn't want to do any tours, singles, or interviews: not even put his face on the cover.

Ad assisterlo è il manager e produttore discografico Jon Landau che, pur comprendendo le esigenze della casa cinematografica, crede nell'onestà artistica di Springsteen. E Bruce, a 32 anni, rimane ferocemente attaccato alla sua verità e cerca la sua strada, anche se su di lui grava quella forma depressiva che lo accompagnerà per tutta la vita, e che affonda le radici nella sua infanzia tormentata.

Giunti Odeon pays tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini on the 50th anniversary of his death with one of his most famous films. The screening of Teorema is the final event of the workshop dedicated to the great director and the third event in the series organised in collaboration with the Teatro della Toscana, coinciding with the performance Ma a che serve la luce? by Virgilio Sieni (at Teatro della Pergola, 26 and 27 november).

“If a middle-class family received a visit from a young god, whether Dionysus or Jehovah, what would happen?”. This is Pasolini's hypothesis, on which he bases and proceeds to demonstrate by reductio ad absurdum his theorem: “the inability of modern man to perceive, listen to, absorb and live the sacred word”. In 1968, Pasolini created a work in the form of both a novel and a film (originally intended to be a theatrical tragedy). For the first time, the setting is within an upper-middle-class family (in Milan). 

The author imagines that a young and beautiful boy, a mysterious visitor, a god, enters the house and, having carnal relations with all the members of the family, strips them of their false bourgeois respectability and their fragile identity, and then abandons them. After his disappearance, they all fall into a deep crisis and only the maid, of peasant origin (played by the prodigious Laura Betti, Pasolini's friend and companion since the late 1950s), undergoes a beneficial metamorphosis, becoming a sort of “holy madwoman”. The utopia of a definitive crisis of the bourgeoisie is staged by the poet-director with cold colours that correspond to the detachment of the direction, which contemplates the actions as reports of a geometric demonstration. A devastating angel, the Guest is the bearer of an eros that takes on a sacred and purifying function that upsets every coordinate of the bourgeois aquarium and ends with a desolate image of the desert where the father of the family wanders desperately, alone and naked, condemned to scream endlessly.

Giunti Odeon presents a film that tells the Italian story of the Theosophical Society, which since 1902 has been promoting ethical values that are increasingly necessary in today's world, torn apart by conflicts of all kinds. The documentary narrates the genesis of the Italian theosophical movement and the influence it has had on the thinking and work of figures of great intellectual stature from the worlds of literature, science, psychoanalysis, politics, the arts and education.