Antonio Rezza's screaming and speechless Jesus

(by Francesco Gallo) (ANSA) - TURIN, NOVEMBER 25 - "I make a Christ who doesn't say a word, he shuts his mouth and stops his beggar author. I will never be so petty as to tell with a sick mind what the body has to the mind subtracted, that is the meaning: my gestures have taken the knowledge out of the hands of the cheating brain".

   This is how Antonio Rezza talks about Christ in His Throat which will be screened in the Official Selection Out of Competition tonight at the 40th Turin Film Festival.

   A film, black and white, that of the eclectic Rezza, and so suffered and tormented that it saw the light back in 2004.

   The protagonist is precisely a child of God who does not say a word, but prefers to lie on Mary's knees screaming devastating phonemes without sense that they cannot but damn every human ear.

   And it is precisely the Madonna, mother par excellence, who is central in following her son during earthly suffering.

   A Christ in any case lost, that of Rezza, who however does not fail to heal, in his own way, the sick man as if he encounters a singular demon.

"The film is philological until I direct it: Mary giving birth, Joseph dozing, the Archangel proclaiming, Herodemanomette, Battista sloshing. But when I direct it, I get out of hand because, other than God's, I don't even recognize my own word" says the director and performer.

   And again Antonio Rezza in his cryptic language: "Here the problem is not communicating, here the virtue lies in the fact that what I wanted to say I didn't say: the action rebelled against the suggestions of the cravattata mind. I wrote many things to put into mouth to the son of God. But at the exact moment in which the body detached itself from the will of the hierarch author to interpret the knowledge of the flesh - he continues -, there, with the burning stone, the blinding light and with the limbs aching from unnatural postures , I got rid of the stupid meaning that the beggar thought wanted to impose on my chest. I, similar to Christ in the pain of my skin, started to scream so as not to stop anymore. And the author bowed his head to myself".

(HANDLE).