“I arrived in Turin with the last January snow, just like a juggler or a nougat peddler. I remembered it was carnival time only when I saw the stands and the bright points of the carbide lamps under the porticos, but as it was not yet dark I walked from the station to the hotel, squinting out from under the arches and over the heads of the people.” This is how Cesare Pavese began his last novel, and this is how the film begins.

Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a small town in the mountains between Turin and Genua. He lived and worked in Turin, where he committed suicide in 1950. He was forty-two.

These two places also play a part in his last two novels—Turin in Tra donne sole and Santo Stefano Belbo in La luna e i falo—and so we will walk through these two places, arriving at the station just like the main characters in both novels. There are two interviews—one with Massimo Mila, a writer and Pavese’s friend in Turin, the other with Pinolo Scaglione, a carpenter and cooper and his friend from childhood in Santo Stefano Belbo.

Straub-Huillet’s From the Cloud… bridges history and myth, modernity and antiquity. Based on six mythological encounters in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò, and on Pavese’s last novel, The Moon and the Bonfires, about the savage murders of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters during World War II, the film has affinities with History Lessons, Too Early/Too Late, and a series of films of the 2000s in which they returned to Pavese’s Dialogues. – Joshua Siegel