Callas and Spinoza
Wayne Koestenbaum
•
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.
Up Next in Wayne Koestenbaum
-
The Ex-Lovers
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Josh Lockman, Ben Toubia • 2023 • 11 minutes
In this serio-comic adventure in contemporary queer cinéma-vérité, Koestenbaum films an encounter between two handsome ex-lovers, Josh Lockman and Ben Toubia, who recreate the arguments and tussles th...
-
The Gays
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Wayne Koestenbaum • 2022 • 13 minutes
This film is a flashy document of an improvised monologue by Koestenbaum’s alter ego, October Castelnuovo Spielhaus, who tragi-comically inveighs against the studio system and other passé networks of power. ...
-
Intimacies and Agglomerations
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • 2024 • 3 minutes
This film is a stop-motion animation work that incorporates various elements in Koestenbaum’s painting studio. Tiny dramas and collisions—adventures, aspirations, encounters, rapprochements, downfalls, redemptions—blossom into existe...
