Lampadato

Lampadato is an Italian term meaning a sunlight tan, but the way Alan Levine’s translation machine get’s at it is much better:

I love this assignment, and it made me go back to an Italian film I watched recently, Gomorrah (2008) , that provides a look at Italy’s mafia which is about anything but respect, honor, and family values. One thing that always struck me on my numerous trips to Italy with Antonella over the last ten years was just how reviled the Mafia was by the average Italian.  There was nothing to be romanticized about it, which is so different from the approach taken by US pop culture over the last century. Gomorrah does a pretty good job capturing that sentiment on film and laying bare the social sickness that is the mafia in Italy. What’s more, it captures a Mike Leigh-inspired abject neo-realism of Naples that is such a far cry from the ostensibly golden innocence of Italian cinema in the 1950s.

The opening scene highlights a massacre in a tanning salon, and the infrared blue of the opening shot immediately came to mind when I read the above untranslatable word, so I was inspired to reproduce it here. I may do another one of these soon, they are fun and very simple. I pulled the image into Picnik, added the text, and voila!

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4 Responses to Lampadato

  1. Alan Levine says:

    Nicely done, you are no Schadenfreude. That worked out well for your familiarity with Italian life, the movie bit adds a whole new visual dimension to the definition.

  2. Mikhail says:

    Nice post and that is a great movie. I loved the unnervingly unceremonious ending.

  3. I love this assignment as well for the reason that there is an image or story that seems to pop up instantly with each word.

  4. Reverend says:

    @Alan,
    Movies are cool for this assignment, and it helps me escape the “necessity” of using creative commons images, which I often feel to be a limitation. Not that I have anything against creative commons, but why the hell can;t I use whatever I want? I like Downes take on this here:
    http://letsmakesomeartdammit.blogspot.com/2011/12/la-douleur-exquise.html

    @Mikhail,
    Great way to describe this film, unceremonious, it really does force you to re-examine all the affection the US entertainment industry has lavished on the mob. Very, very odd when you think about it a bit.

    @Michael,
    I actually found a few words way too hard, so I went with the easier ones that are more literal. The French love ones seemed way too deep and amorphous, I like literal, I guess that is why I am a religious fundamentalist.

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