Hacker Cinema
The Gadfly
Овод
1955 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Alexandr Faintsimmer
Italy, XIX century. The country is occupied by Austrian troops, the resistance movement is actively developing. Student Arthur Burton is involved in the activities of the underground organization “Young Italy”, envies its leader, Giovanni Bolla, and is jealous of his bride Gemma. He talks about this at a confession to a priest, as a result of which gendarmes take revolutionaries under arrest...
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another reason to repost a link to Now Then https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58
Spoilers.
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George Boole - who helped start all this with his Boolean Logic had an extraordinary family.
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But George Boole had another daughter called Ethel. She had an amazing life - which showed that there is another way. Because Ethel believed in the future.
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Then Reilly deserted her - and went off to Russia where he worked as a secret agent for the British. Ian Fleming is said to have used Reilly as the model for James Bond.
Ethel was heartbroken - and she wrote a novel called The Gadfly which, although she never admitted it, her biographer says is obviously based on the early adventures of Sydney Reilly.
It's the most amazing book. It's an over the top melodrama set in Italy about the hero, Arthur's battle against the church and the corrupt state - and his treacherous family. At the same time it is about his passionate love for an english girl - Gemma. It ends with Arthur being slowly tortured and then condemned to be shot.
Its message though is a revolutionary one. Arthur is sacrificed so that humankind can be redeemed and open the way to a realisation of the future possibilities for the world - once the old oppressive forces have been overthrown.
The Gadfly was published in 1897 in New York - under Ethel's married name, E.L. Voynich. No British publisher would touch it because of its "outrageous and horrible character". But then it was published in Russia and became an astonishing success. One writer describes how all the young Bolsheviks read it and "it virtually became the bible of the revolution".
By the 1960s it was estimated that 250 million Russian teenagers had read the Gadfly in translation. And polls showed that Arthur was consistently the favourite hero of Soviet youth. And in 1955 a film version was made - with a soundtrack by Shostakovich - which won an award at the Cannes film festival.
In 1920 Ethel went back to her husband Wilfred Voynich. He had moved to New York and had become one of the world's greatest expert and dealers in rare books.
His most famous purchase was a mysterious manuscript written in code that has come to be known as The Voynich Manuscript. No one has ever been able to break the code - it seems to have many scientific references, and herbal and astronomical illustrations.
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