Callas and Spinoza
Very Short Films
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3m 45s
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Francesco Gagliardi • 2023 • 4 minutes
Shot in Koestenbaum’s painting studio, with a backdrop of 16mm film strips hanging from the wall, and a painted, silver-foil-decorated bureau-on-wheels, this playful short film explores a famous moment from a performance given by Maria Callas at La Scala in the 1950s, a scandalous night during which she hurled an insult at the theater’s manager, who was seated in the audience, and with whom she had a feud. Callas and Spinoza, one of Koestenbaum’s cinéma-vérité experiments, features the engaging, charismatic Francesco Gagliardi, who happens to be a performance artist as well as a philosopher. Prompted by Koestenbaum’s questions, Gagliardi finds a way to connect Callas’s onstage explosion with the philosophical theories of Spinoza.
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