Equilibrium

“I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them. Whether they are good or bad is beside the point…”

A nameless graphic designer is haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned. Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy’s present ‘economic miracle’ he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms with “arrows, signs, advertisements”; invents a new, purposefully incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes even more unbalanced. He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young, Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war…

Known primarily as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of Guerra’s birth, and with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael Bracewell, Equilibrium remains a relevant, powerful, and intensely visual account of a truly (post-)modern man.

Author Biography

Tonino Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy, in 1920. The son of illiterate peasants, Guerra first started writing poetry in his early twenties while interned in a German prison camp with other anti-fascist protesters. After the war, he moved to Rome where he met the director Elio Petri, heralding the start of his screenwriting career. He went onto produce over one hundred film scripts, receiving Oscar nominations for Carlo Pointi’s Casanova 70, and Michelangelo Antoninoi’s Blow-Up. In 1975 he won the Academy Award for Fellini’s Amarcord.