The film combines actual footage of Communist leader Palmiero Togliatti's funeral with the intermingled stories of four people affected by his death: Ettore, a Venezuelan radical who abandons the wealthy Italian woman he loves to go back to his country and help his cause; Ludovico, an ailing filmmaker who finds out that art alone is not enough; Giulia, a woman who embarks upon a lesbian affair with a former mistress of her husband; and Ermanno, a philosophy graduate who breaks up with his past.
Explores the complex relationship between the spirit, body, and mind. The film is a nightmare with closed eyes because it counts among the most terrible moments of my life, my second exile, which lasted a very long time. Inspired by an ancient Hindu legend.
"Virulentia was, above all, a place of theatrical experimentation and simultaneously a proposal to step outside the theater, set in motion by Aldo Braibanti —a 'place' where, through the individual real-life experiences that actors brought with them to the stage, life, research, poetry, and love intertwined. The camera approached this collective psychodramatic ritual in an attempt to 'reinvent' the history of vision, the biological evolution of the eye, which, emerging from the primordial waters as from amniotic ones, gazes upon the land; reliving with the actors the evolution that the species has undergone, and attempting to make visible how the past of our animal ancestors (what Ferenczi called onto-phylogenesis) is present in our dreams and everyday behaviors." (A. Grifi)
In La prova generale, Carlo (Carlo Cecchi) interviews with a tape machine and a microphone his young lover while the two wander in the beautiful splendour of a wood on the edge of the city.
On the Point of Death (Italian: In punto di morte) is a 1971 Italian drama film directed by Mario Garriba. The film won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival.
