Martin Eden
Based on the Jack London novel, Martin Eden follows a sailor trying to remake himself as a writer, in this passionate and timeless story of class consciousness and failed ideals.
A passionate and enthralling narrative fresco in the tradition of the Italian classics, MARTIN EDEN is sure to be a landmark film in Pietro Marcello’s bright career. A captivating and unconventional adaptation of the 1909 novel by American writer Jack London, Marcello’s film transposes the story of a striving autodidact to an unidentified Italian port city, removing precise temporal cues.
Initially a sailor, Martin Eden is inspired to educate, elevate, and remake himself as a writer following a chance encounter and romantic infatuation with the sophisticated, higher-class Elena. As Martin develops and intensely pursues his new-found obsessions, both literary and social, he betrays those around him, denies his class consciousness, and rejects his humble origins, which gnaw at him from within.
Shot on Super 16mm with echoes of Rossellini’s search for truth and Visconti’s nihilistic decadence, the film’s formal brilliance includes intermittent use of archival footage as a living, breathing, haunting pulse beneath the film’s celluloid surface. (source: www.tiff.net)