21:00 - Teatro Verdi Pordenone
PEST IN FLORENZ (DE 1919; 102 min)
by Otto Rippert, screenplay by Fritz Lang
Musical Accompaniment: Günter Buchwald, Frank Bockius

Fritz Lang's screenplay relies on abstract, allegorical archetypes: a tyrannical ruler, a seductive courtesan, a moralizing hermit, and Death itself. Uninterested in crowd-pleasing entertainment, Lang's film lacks star power and relatable characters. Instead, it portrays a world in decline, marked by collapsing authority, eroding faith, and collective anxiety. It exposes the moral decay and corruption beneath the Florentine court's spectacular appearance. Lang's "retelling" is shaped by the experience of 1919: the aftermath of the Great War and the ongoing Spanish flu pandemic. What initially appears as a historical spectacle gradually reveals itself to be a moral allegory of civilization's breakdown.
The film culminates in a literal Dance of Death. A skeletal figure, personifying the plague, plays the fiddle as it dances through the city, striking down all who cross its path, including the courtesan and the hermit. The abandoned streets of Florence evoke photographs of war-ravaged battlefields littered with corpses. No one remains alive.
A dark, uncompromising vision of a civilization staging its own demise.