Daniel Schmid: Il Bacio Di Tosca (Tosca's Kiss)

This event has already taken place and ended on 2 May 2009

Daniel Schmid (1941-2006) is considered one of the most significant auteurs of the European avant-garde. A major influence on his friends and peers including RW Fassbinder, Schmid was fascinated by the desires and fantasies we create to veil the reality of the everyday. This will be a rare opportunity to see his film Tosca's Kiss.

Schmid's preoccupations with opera, theatricality, romanticism, and decay receive perhaps their loveliest, most poignant treatment in this remarkable documentary. The setting is Casa Verdi, a home for retired opera singers and musicians founded by Giuseppe Verdi. Schmid achieves an extraordinary rapport with his subjects, who relive (and often resing) their glorious pasts with a mixture of bittersweet nostalgia and good-natured hamminess. The title refers to the fatal dagger in Puccini's's opera, but the sting of encroaching mortality is counterpointed by the eternal youthfulness of memory and art.

"This funny, moving film is a voluptuous memento mori ... Schmid has made a film about old age and dying which is neither sentimental nor grotesque but cumulatively startling" J. Hoberman (Village Voice),

Dir. Daniel Schmid Italy / Switzerland 1984 1h 27m Subtitled

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie Film & Events Programme

To accompany the exhibition Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie there is a series of events, talks, tours and film screenings during May & July.

Each film screening will be preceded by two commissioned trailers: The Freedom of Negative Expression by Chris Evans and Lapdogs by Neil Cummings.