A Season in Hell (1971)
The tumultuous life of Arthur Rimbaud, the cursed poet, who completed his masterwork at the age of twenty, became an arms dealer and died at thirty-seven; and his passionate relationship with Paul Verlaine, full of wanderings, storms and falling out.
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Tied for the best movie I have ever seen
Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
"Une Saison en Enfer"I first saw "Una stagione all'inferno" (1970) "A Season in Hell" at a film festival in 1971 in Rome Italy. It's a pretty good adaptation of putting some parts of the life of poet Arthur Rimbaud into film. It details his relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine (Jean-Claude Brialy) and even goes into depth with his mysterious life in Africa as a slave trader. I found it to be unusual and of the time, since many literary adaptations were produced in Italy or France at the time.I came across it later in the 1980's when I saw it at a Rome film school library. I could not get a copy from them, as they refused me. It's pretty much impossible to find, but I did manage to get a Japanese VHS tape that was subtitled with either Japanese or Korean language characters. It was dubbed horribly in English.Terence Stamp, an intriguingly ambiguous actor, was just coming off working with Pier Paolo Pasolini in Teorema (1968). Jean-Claude Brialy worked with many of the French "nouvelle vague" directors (including Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard, Louis Malle, and Truffaut.)The director, Nelo Risi, seems to have an interesting run of films with uncommon themes, then he dropped off the map. He also used some art-actors, American actors and Italian actors of the time, which include an interesting list: Jean Seberg (Breathless (1960)), Luigi Pistilli (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)), Gian Maria Volonté (A Fistful of Dollars (1964)), Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), Sacco & Vanzetti (1971)), Geraldine Chaplin (Doctor Zhivago (1965), Zero Population Growth (1972)), Helmut Berger in Visconti's film The Damned (1969), Martin Balsam of Psycho (1960), and Bruno Ganz of Wings of Desire (1987).If you enjoyed "The Stranger (Lo straniero)" (1967) by Italian film director Luchino Visconti, based on Albert Camus' novel, or "Beyond Good and Evil" (1977) directed by Liliana Cavani, about Friedrich Nietzsche, or "L'invenzione di Morel" (1974) directed by Emidio Greco and based on the novel "The Invention of Morel" by Adolfo Bioy Casare, which are all equally hard to find, you will probably also enjoy "Una stagione all'inferno" (1970) "A Season in Hell.Further reading: Rimbaud: A Biography by Graham Robb Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl (It has very rare photographs of Rimbaud in Harar, Ethiopia in 1883.)Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters by Wallace Fowlie