Back cover, book published by X-Libris (c) 2007.
Buy the book, Robert Redford and the American West.
PREFACE (excerpt)
My love affair with the movies began when I was a child growing up in Italy in the 1950s. In elementary school I loved comedies with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, such as Artists and Models (1955), musicals such as Brigadoon (1954), science fiction such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) based on the novel by a beloved author, Jules Verne (I was also a voracious reader). My favorite actors were Tony Curtis in Trapeze (1956), Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (1959) with Doris Day, Tony Perkins in Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock. This was before I saw Sean Connery in From Russia with Love (1963), when he became and remained my favorite actor of all time. At age 14 I had started seeing films on Saturday afternoons with my first boyfriend, while having a secret crush on Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (1959). At age 16 I began considering myself a politically engaged intellectual. That was the time of the great Italian cinema by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni –I decided I wanted to become a photographer after seeing Blow-up (1966)– but our god was Jean-Luc Godard; he truly revolutionized cinema.
I started college at 17, studying Liberal Arts at the University of Bologna; and in 1969, I had to decide what I was going to do with my life. So I thought perhaps I could become an underground filmmaker like Stan Brackage–by then the psychedelic revolution had been coloring our vision with rainbows. Unfortunately there were no film studies departments in Italian universities yet, so I had to find a professor willing to help me create my own curriculum. Luciano Anceschi, who taught Aesthetics, consented and put me on a film study regimen that included Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947); he suggested I write a thesis about the work of French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet–founder of the nouveau roman, he had written the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad (1962) by Alain Resnais and directed Trans-Europe Express (1966) with Jean-Louis Trintignant.
robertredfordamericanwest 