Thirty-five films and seventeen new restorations for sixty years of career and, in addition, numerous archival prints in 35mm. These are the numbers of Cinecittà's tribute to Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) to be held from December 1 to January 10, 2024 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The exhibition presents a rich selection of films featuring Morricone's most famous soundtracks (including Sergio Leone's Nameless Man Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West, John Carpenter's The Thing, Roland Joffé's Mission, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 and Giuseppe Tornatore's Nuovo Cinema Paradiso) alongside lesser-known titles (such as Navajo Joe and Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence, The Big Heist by Sergio Sollima, Danger: Diabolik by Mario Bava and The Red Tent by Mikhail Kalatozov).
Not only that, but a rare German television program from 1967 will also be on display showing Morricone himself performing as part of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (Il Gruppo), a radically experimental collective of composers and musicians who came together in Rome in 1964 in a spirit of non-hierarchical improvisation.
The original combination of classical instrumentation with new electronic technologies, musique concrète and jazz, seriality and simple noises taken everywhere have made his compositions for the cinema great. The conscious use of harmonicas, pan flutes, bells, twang guitars, drums and, above all, the human voice and whistle, revolutionized the music of popular genre cinema, from westerns to horror, from operatic comedy to melodrama, and continues to influence contemporary composers and musicians such as Hans Zimmer, Angelo Badalamenti, Radiohead, John Zorn, Mica Levi, Jay-Z and Metallica.
The retrospective dedicated to Ennio Morricone will be inaugurated with the screening of the film Nuovo Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore. The film will be screened at MoMA on Friday, December 1, at 19 p.m., at the Roy and Niuta Titus 1 Theater.
The tribute to the Maestro will continue on Saturday, December 2 with the screening of the documentary Ennio, which will be shown at 15:30 p.m. at the Roy and Niuta Titus 2 Theater.
The event, dedicated to the two-time Oscar winner, is organized by Joshua Siegel, as curator, and Francisco Valente, curatorial assistant, Department of Cinema, The Museum of Modern Art and Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero of Cinecittà. And this is thanks to Cineteca Nazionale (Maria Bonsanti), the Morricone family and Marco Cicala.
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