Claudia Cardinale Once Upon a Time 

Get Tickets: bampfa.org/program/claudia-ca...
Born in a Sicilian community in Tunis in 1938, Claudia Cardinale grew up speaking Sicilian dialect, French, and Tunisian Arabic, and aspired to be a schoolteacher. But after winning a trip to the Venice Film Festival at seventeen, stardom and fluency in Italian and English followed. Whether exemplifying the transcendent muse-in Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2-or embodying wives, widows, or working girls, Cardinale’s performances are imbued with an intelligence and depth that surpass the confines of the scripted characters. She balanced vulnerability with steadfast determination in her roles (including a girlfriend of a partisan in Luigi Comencini’s Bebo’s Girl, and a jilted showgirl in Valerio Zurlini’s Girl with a Suitcase) and brought nuance and subtlety to Mauro Bolognini’s unattainable beauties in La viaccia and Senilità. As Angelica in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Cardinale symbolizes the future of the nascent Italian nation, her primordial beauty and a preternatural grace propelling her ascension in a new social order. And as the widowed Jill in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, she is a civilizing life force in a landscape of greed, corruption, and death.
Coproduced by Cinecittà, Rome, and featuring new restorations, Claudia Cardinale Once Upon a Time focuses on her great performances from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Reflecting on her career in a 2014 interview for Art Film Fest, Cardinale noted, “Most people live only once, but I’ve had 141 lives.” This attitude toward her characters, whom she lived into being, is a fundamental element of the timeless relevance of these films.
-Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator
Organized by Paola Ruggiero and Camilla Cormanni, with thanks to Marco Cicala and Germana Ruscio, Cinecittà; Annamaria Di Giorgio, Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco; Carmen Accaputo, Cineteca di Bologna; Roberto Cadonici, Fondazione Mauro Bolognini; Francesca Tripodi, Cristaldi; Francesco Simeoni, Radiance Films; Massimiliano Mauriello, Titanus S.P.A; Flavia Ferucci, RAI; Annamaria Napoli, Mediaset; Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Katie Dintleman, 20th Century Studios; George Schmalz, Kino Lorber; David Jennings, Sony Pictures Releasing; Jack Durwood, Paramount Pictures.