Doc On Umberto Eco, Scholar Turned Pop Culture Star, Books Rosy NYC Open; ‘Past Lives’ Holds Strong, ‘Asteroid City’ In Top 10 – Specialty Box Office
deadline.comFans of The Name of The Rose author Umberto Eco turned out in NYC, boosting the documentary on medieval scholar turned novelist and social commentator to over $9.1k on one screen – a nice showing by The Cinema Guild for a foreign language documentary on a solid weekend for some indie and arthouse fare. Umberto Eco: A Library Of The World explores the life and work of the famed Italian writer and semiotics professor, whose bestselling novel was turned into a 1986 film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater as a medieval monk detective and his apprentice.
Director Davide Ferrario, who worked with Eco a year before the writer’s death on a video project for the 2015 Venice Biennale, gained access to his Milanese library of more than 30,000 contemporary books and 1,500 rare and antique volumes.
In the doc, the prolific author and original thinker, who has waxed eloquent on blue jeans and comic books, holds forth on the value low-brow books, the origins of fascism, the psychology of conspiracy theorists and brilliant mistakes in history.
Ferrario was in NYC this weekend for the opening at Film Forum, and for shooting on the third in a trilogy of literary documentaries, this latest on Italo Calvino.
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