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Invitation to an afternoon film
Eastern March 23rd 2008 at 5 pm
c/o Andrea Splisgar, Lehrter Strasse 57 Haus 4, 10557 Berlin, 030 46735333
TOBY DAMMIT, Federico Fellini, Italy 1968, 40 minutes
Fellini’s forgotten masterpiece TOBY DAMMIT, a forty minute film made in 1968,
is one of the three short films adapted from stories by Edgar Allan Poe
that were distributed together to Italy as TRE PASSI NEL DELIRIO,
in France as HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES,
and in England and the US as SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.
Fellini’s film is an adaption set in a contemporary Rome of Poe’s ‘Never bet the Devil your head’ published in 1841.
Poe’s work is a brief comic satire of the transcendentalist movements that were then popular in Europe and America.
Fellini’s work takes two elements from Poe’s story:
First the plot of a drunk who confronts a mysterious stranger on a bridge and bets him his head;
the man falls to see that the stranger is the devil who subsequently wins the bet.
Second Fellini takes the name Toby Dammit, Toby being an English slang term for ass in Poe’s time.
In short, Toby Dammit is a dammed ass.
RSVP
