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Alain Delon gives one of the finest performances of his career in Valerio Zurlini’s La prima notte di quiete (Indian Summer), as we end this year’s To Save and Project on a high note with a weeklong theatrical run—the first ever in New York—of the unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s austere, tragic romance in its original, uncut Italian version. A failed poet, alienated from his wife (Léa Massari) and his demanding aristocratic family, Delon washes up in the seaside town of Rimini as a substitute high school teacher and seduces one of his students, the fragile and beautiful Sonia Petrovna. Zurlini was a director of uncommon intelligence and restraint, transforming the Rimini of Federico Fellini’s carnivalesque Amarcord into a purgatory of lost souls. The film’s title, possibly a Goethe verse that loosely translates as “Death, the first night of peace,” is one of Zurlini’s many thoughtful allusions—to Dante, Stendhal, and Piero della Francesca, among others.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, and Cynthia Rowell, independent consultant.
Electronic subtitling provided by Sub-Ti Ltd.
Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.
Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black and by Steven Tisch, with major contributions from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Karen and Gary Winnick, and The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.
