Cinema Lessons

Writer, director, and essayist Antonio Monda presents three film lectures in the Pegasus Hall. Through the screening of sequences from memorable films, he explores the theme of this edition, Roots, in order to address two timeless questions. The first lecture, titled The Shadow Line in homage to Joseph Conrad’s novel, examines three works that reflect on what remains of one’s roots when facing adult life: I Vitelloni and two films inspired by Federico Fellini’s youthful masterpiece, American Graffiti by George Lucas and Mean Streets by Martin Scorsese.

The second lecture, entitled The Allure of Evil, reflects on the enduring attraction that human beings have always felt toward evil. As the Gospel tells us, “men loved darkness rather than light,” and it is Jesus Christ himself who declares that “the prince of this world” is the devil. This theme, which evokes both unease and a sense of the eternal intertwined with the present, leads naturally to the subject of war, explored in the third lecture, titled The Thing Homer Spoke Of. This expression, too, carries with it a sense of shock and fear, echoing the reflection made by C.S. Lewis when he first found himself fighting on the front lines during the First World War.