The Empty Canvas

A young man trying to become a painter breaks away from his wealthy and overbearing mother and moves to a district of Rome where the artists live. There he becomes taken with a beautiful model, but she wants a relationship without attachment. He cannot accept that, and the affair turns steadily into an obsession. The empty canvas stands for both his inability to work and the emptiness in his life. It was adapted from the novel by Alberto Moravia. The difference between the mother and the model is a subject of the film in itself: both of them hold on to the man, one through money and the other through indifference. Horst Buchholz, Catherine Spaak and Bette Davis appear in Damiano Damiani’s hundred and five minute Italian film, completed in 1963.