BEN BURTT
COME TOGETHER at Rotonda by la Mobiliare
Lose yourself in the core of Locarno Film Festival’s pulsating atmosphere at Rotonda by la Mobiliare .
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ESTABLISHING SHOTS
Giona A. Nazzaro ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Il cosiddetto passato è qualcosa che a ben vedere non è mai passato del tutto e che – in fondo – sta ancora… passando. Il nostro presente indicativo, d’altronde, è un precipitato, un insieme di tanti momenti la cui sintesi, o meno, ci proietta in avanti. Ci sembra che questa dinamica sia ancora più vera nel caso della storia del cinema. Fuorviante ed inutile tentare di compartire la storia del cinema. Il cinema è sempre – tutto – al presente indicativo. Ed è esattamente per rafforzare quest’idea che la celebrazione del centenario della Columbia lo abbiamo pensato come una riscoperta piuttosto che come una riproposizione del già noto. Il curatore della retrospettiva, Ehsan Khoshbakht, che ha lavorato a stretto contatto con Grover Crisp, responsabile degli archivi, ha potuto selezionare i
film che sarebbero andati a comporre il programma attingendo le informazioni da fonti di prima mano. In questo modo sono tornati alla luce opere che non si vedevano da molti anni e restauri che vedranno a Locarno il buio delle sale per la prima volta. Inutile sottolineare che si tratta di una retrospettiva che ha già fatto storia. Per avere un’idea di quel che abbiamo in serbo, basti pensare che Gun Fury, diretto dal leggendario Raoul Walsh nel 1953, e distribuito in Italia con il titolo di Il suo onore gridava vendetta, sarà proiettato in tutto il suo splendore… in 3D! Conferma, semmai ce ne fosse bisogno, che il cosiddetto passato è ben saldo nel nostro presente. Buon cinema, ci si vede in Piazza Grande!
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Christopher Small
LEAD EDITOR: Leonardo Goi
DEPUTY EDITORS: Hugo Emmerzael, Maria Giovanna Vagenas, Keva York
STAFF WRITERS: Laurine Chiarini, Savina Petkova
CONTRIBUTORS: Eddie Bertozzi, Pamela Biénzobas, Giovanni Vimercati, Emerson Goo, Lucia Leoni, Cici Peng, Daniela Persico
TRANSLATORS: Tessa Cattaneo, Anna Rusconi
BRAND, EDITORIAL & MEDIA: Oliver Osborne
DESIGN: Joshua Althaus, Nadine Curanz, Alex Furgiuele
PHOTOGRAPHERS: Elia Bianchi, Julie Mucchiut, Ti-Press,
PHOTO INTERN: Indra Crittin
COVER PHOTO: Davide Padovan
PARTNERSHIPS: Marco Cantergiani, Laura Heggemann, Nicolò Martire, Fabienne Merlet
CROSSWORD DESIGNER: Nicholas Henriquez
HIGHLIGHTS
PIAZZA GRANDE
21:30 GAUCHO GAUCHO by Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw
84’ | o.v. Spanish | s.t. English, French
CONCORSO INTERNAZIONALE
14:00 Palexpo (FEVI)
AGORA by Ala Eddine Slim 102’ | o.v. Arabic | s.t. English, French
16:45 Palexpo (FEVI)
GREEN LINE by Sylvie Ballyot 150’ | o.v. Arabic, French | s.t. English, French
CONCORSO CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE
11:30 PalaCinema 1 CRICKETS, IT’S YOUR TURN by Olga Korotko 105’ | o.v. Russian, Kazakh | s.t. English, French
18:00 PalaCinema 1 HANAMI by Denise Fernandes 96’ | o.v. Cape Verdean Creole, Japanese, French, English s.t. English, French
RETROSPETTIVA
09:30 GranRex
THREE WISE GIRLS by William Beaudine 69’ | o.v. English
11:30 GranRex GIRLS UNDER 21 by Max Nosseck 63’ | o.v. English
14:00 GranRex WOMEN’S PRISON by Lewis Seiler 80’ | o.v. English
18:30 GranRex UNDER AGE by Edward Dmytryk 59’ | o.v. English
20:30 GranRex TOGETHER AGAIN by Charles Vidor 100’ | o.v. English
14:30 La Sala MY LIFE IS WIND (A LETTER) by Anahita Ghazvinizadeh 33’ | o.v. Arabic, English | s.t. English, Italian PARDI DI DOMANI – CONCORSO CORTI D’AUTORE
15:00 PalaCinema 1 STREET OF NO RETURN by Samuel Fuller 93’ | o.v. English | s.t. French HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
17:30 BaseCamp PopUp @Istituto Sant’Eugenio THE FUTURE OF SURVIVAL PUBLIC ENCOUNTER: DIGITAL MIGRATIONS
From the top: Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director and Marco Tullio Giordana. Sandy Altermatt, the presenter for the Piazza Grande. All images: Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press
The cover photos were done in collaboration with BaseCamp
Sandy Altermatt, the presenter for the Piazza Grande, is dressed by VOG Lugano Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director, is dressed by Kälin Moda
“We’re
Just a Noisy Part of the Orchestra”:
BEN BURTT ON THE SOUNDS OF STARWARS AND INDIANAJONES
Ahead of receiving the Vision Award Ticinomoda at Locarno77, Pardo asked Ben Burtt to share some tales from his five-plus decades as a sonic treasure hunter and designer in Hollywood.
by Keva York
Just as Indiana Jones has quested for relics imbued with supernatural powers, so too has Ben Burtt quested for sounds with the power to give life to the cinematic image. While still in his twenties, Burtt was recruited by Lucasfilm to design the sounds for what would become Star Wars (1977), which would reshape the principles of science-fiction sound design – and launch his career into hyperspace – with the creation of such iconic effects as the lightsaber’s static-y buzz, Darth Vader’s machine-assisted breathing, and R2D2’s endearing bleeps. Burtt’s innovation lay in his attunement to the multivalent potential of real-world sounds: instead of relying on synthesizers, he could find inspiration in the humble hum of a film projector or the crackle of a broken microphone cable.
Through his contributions to the original Star Wars trilogy and then to the rollicking Indiana Jones adventures and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Burtt helped define that thrilling first wave of Hollywood blockbusters – and he has continued to break cinematic ground, working on the Star Wars prequels (as sound designer and editor), two Star Trek films – Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) – and WALL•E (2008).
Keva York: A number of your most famous sounds, from the Star Wars lightsaber to the voice of E.T., have their basis in accident and in everyday objects, and that actually makes me think of Andy Warhol – he always kept his tape recorder on him, and referred to it as his wife. I wanted to begin by asking, do you have a Warhol-like attachment to your recording equipment?
Ben Burtt: From the time I started doing sound in the movie industry, I realized that if I carried a tape recorder with me, I was likely to find very interesting and useful things along the way, even if I don’t know what they might become. When I started in 1975, in the early days of Star Wars, of course, the equipment was gigantic: I had a 30-, 40-pound suitcase with gear in it. If I took that on vacation, my family always wondered, “What is this thing rolling along with us?” But we wouldn’t have the blaster sound today had we not dragged along that heavy tape recorder – in fact, it was a Swiss tape recorder, a Nagra. We were hiking in Pennsylvania and we went over a ridge top and under a radio tower, and we bumped into some cables that were holding the tower up – and I heard that wonderful twang sound. I said, “That’s a laser gun,” and recorded it right then and there. That was an accident, but I was prepared for it to happen.
Nowadays, recorders have gotten down to iPhone size, or even smaller if you want them to be. One time, when I was working on The Phantom Menace (1999), I went to the store to get a cold drink, and inside the fridge was a really great humming sound – something was broken, and the fans were sort of talking to each other. So, I took my little recorder from my pocket and put it in there. I pretended to shop for a while, and when I came back, I had this wonderful recording. That became an electric, shimmering force field.
KY: The right sounds don’t always simply fall into your lap, though. I know that creating R2D2’s voice was difficult, and that it took a long time to get the right combination of robot and expressivity. Are there other sounds that proved as elusive?
BB: Well, it happened more on Star Wars than other movies, because Star Wars was dealing with fantasy and often there was no precedent for what we were going to hear. That was the case with R2: there maybe hadn’t been a talking robot in movie history that made sound that wasn’t human speech, so I couldn’t say, “What have people learned about this in the past?” You’d be surprised though: even in ordinary, non-science-fiction movies there are challenges, because movie sounds are a caricature of the natural world. It’s all subjective, there are no rules to it. People will have different perspectives on what’s important, too. I remember working on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and at the end of the movie there are two sequences close together. In one of them, a character is having a sword fight on top of a Jeep, but plants are bumping him in the groin: “bump, bunk, bang” – it’s a comical thing. And I won’t mention the director’s name [laughs], but he really wanted a certain sound, and they worked on that for hours one morning while I was in the other room, making the sound of a gigantic time machine for the aliens to take off in. There was more time spent on those plant hits than there was on the time machine. Sometimes when sound people get together, we laugh about our experiences of trying to not only please ourselves, but the people we work for. The best way to deal with that is – and it’s harder to do nowadays – to get to know your client: what they’re sensitive to, what interests them. I was very lucky with George Lucas, because we all worked in the same house for a number of years. You’d have lunch together on the patio and he’d come by your room, and you could kind of workshop things. Even though there was a hierarchy of command – it wasn’t a democracy, it was a benign dictatorship – nonetheless, there was a flow of communication. That made me a much better servant to him. With R2, there was a struggle for six months. We’d meet every so often and play what I’d come up with, and finally, because we were frustrated, we found that we were actually vocalizing the sounds we wanted, like two little boys with their toys, you know? “R2 goes over here, and it goes, ‘beep boop boop beep’.” That gave us the idea of blending a human performance into R2’s electronic language, so that it had a sense of being something with a soul. Up to that point, it had just been electronic sounds and squeaky pipes and little things like that, but nothing human-derived. Once we got that idea, it began to click. That was so much a product of us working together and knowing each other well. Lucas and Spielberg were very open – you could experiment and they were willing to listen. You don’t often have that opportunity nowadays; directors especially are very busy in post-production, they’re probably more concerned about the picture cut and the visual effects. You don’t get that one-on-one all the time that helps you to develop and finish an idea in sound.
KY: I also wanted to ask about a sound you didn’t create but is personal to you, or at least you personalized it, being the Wilhelm scream – which came from a 1951 Western and had been in multiple films by the time you got to it, but it sort of became your sonic signature. What was it about that scream, of all the screams in the old sound library, that attracted you?
BB: Oh boy, okay. Well, as a teenager very interested in sound and film, one of my hobbies was to record movies off television. This is long before you could videotape something – so I would just have my tape recorder connected to the TV, and if I liked a movie, I would record it, and I would listen back later just with headphones. That’s how I replayed movies, for my own entertainment – but because I did that for so many 1000s of hours, I suppose, I got very familiar with the fabric of American motion picture sound. I could tell you whether something was a Paramount movie, or Universal, or Columbia, just by the sound effects in it, and I could probably pinpoint a rough year – because the studios all had libraries that were their signature. I kept books where I wrote down all the times I’d heard different sounds – it was
like birdwatching. You know, “Oh, there’s another one. I’ve got that one.” That scream was in a whole lot of Warner Brothers Westerns and science-fiction films I saw in the 1950s and 1960s. When I got to film school and was working on one of my first films, I said, “Well, it’d be fun to put in an homage to some of my favorite classic Hollywood sounds,” and so I put in the Wilhelm scream – I had a copy of it from television. Richard Anderson was my partner then, later we did Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) together – we just got a big laugh out of putting that scream in there. It was a private joke, that’s all. We were also cutting kung fu movie trailers at that time as a job, and we’re putting Wilhelm screams in them... Richard and I went our separate ways: he stayed in Hollywood, I came up north to work for Lucasfilm. I put the scream in Star Wars, when that Stormtrooper falls into the power trench – then Richard put it in a film, and I’d put it in another one, and we’d challenge each other: “Did ya hear it?” It wasn’t until the internet came along that people caught on. Someone made a website and started charting the scream – and that actually kind of damaged it for me. It was an in-joke that escaped! Next thing you know, everybody at Skywalker Sound is putting it in every movie, and Peter Jackson’s put it in Lord of the Rings, and it’s in Titanic (1997), and so it propagated throughout the world – an unintentional audio virus.
KY: We should talk about IndianaJonesandtheLastCrusade, which is screening at Locarno. You picked up an Academy Award for it, so obviously it’s notable in that regard, but tell me about why you chose to play it here.
BB: I have a special love for all the Indiana Jones films that I worked on. There was a particularly high morale among the crew and for myself. They were fun adventure movies, and we loved the physicality of them. Unlike being in space with robots and wonderful, fantastic things, this was down to earth; it was fistfights and fire and boats and avalanches and rockslides. And I just prefer that to some degree, I feel more comfortable creatively with it. Also, everything was physically there, so creating and cutting those sounds – completing the cinematic illusion – was more satisfying than, say, Crystal Skull, in which the animals and cars and so on were digital. Even though they do a great job with them, it’s not the same – I can see it, and I find the sound less satisfying.
Lucas and Spielberg were very open – you could experiment and they were willing to listen. You don’t often have that opportunity nowadays
But Last Crusade in particular doesn’t get as much attention as I think it deserves. Raiders is the classic, and I have a love for it, of course, but we learned a lot between Raiders and Last Crusade. Sound reproduction technology had gotten significantly better, and we were just the right age. The sound crew had spent seven or eight years honing our skills; I feel it’s our best mix. I’ve surprised myself when I’ve gone back and played those movies in a big theater, I’m very proud of what was done. I thought, “Well, it’s not shown as much, so let’s show it.” It’s a personal favorite.
KY: In talking about the sounds of both IndianaJonesand Star Wars, there’s you and then, of course, there’s John Williams, who provided the music. I’m curious, would you two be kind of siloed while working, or would you compare notes? Or was there a bit of rivalry there?
BB: A little of all of that. In the established movie industry, music is sacred. It’s up here on this high platform, and sound effects are near the bottom, down near the animal trainers and the caterers. When I entered the industry, there wasn’t traditionally any communication between sound editing and the composer. You just arrived at the mix with your sound effects, and the composer sent his music over, and the mixers did their best to sort it all out. At Lucasfilm, we were trying to exert more control – George didn’t want to wait until we started mixing. So, right when we had the first assembly of a scene, I’d sketch in sound effects and we’d put in temporary music, and we’d follow this kind of pattern: screening it for ourselves periodically, really trying to work sound and music together, even though we knew it wasn’t final. And then Johnny Williams would be invited in, and he’d sit down with Lucas and Spielberg, let’s say, and really talk about what kind of music they wanted and where. By the time we get to that final mix, everybody’s kind of educated –that’s what we’re hoping for. We know that John Williams is going to come in with wonderful music, but it’s not going to be real surprising. We already know there’s going to be a march here, a love theme here, a suspense theme there…
Over the 10 years, let’s say, from StarWars, the first one, to Last Crusade, I had ever-increasing interaction with Johnny Williams. On Return of the Jedi, we talked a lot about the music the Ewoks would have, and I got to write the lyrics to the song he wrote [“Ewok Celebration,” a.k.a. “Yub Nub”]. There might have been a hidden sense of rivalry, sure. I was getting attention for my sound ef-
fects and sound effects are not really interesting to musicians; they tend to mask the orchestra. And that’s true – but you can’t have a motorcycle chase without the motorcycle sound. If there’s sound and music at the same time, you have to work out a back and forth. It’s really all music, in a sense – we’re just a noisy part of the orchestra.
KY: I also have to ask you about the StarWars prequels: not only did you do sound on all three, but you were also the only throughline editor. Editing those films must have been a huge game of 4D chess, because of how much ground they were breaking on the digital technology front. I was curious as to how that role came to you, and how much trepidation you felt taking it on.
BB: Well, as you know, George Lucas was always interested in new technology, and he invested a lot of money into finding ways to make movies that would satisfy his needs. One of those was to try to develop digital sound; another was learning to manipulate imagery digitally. Out of that came Pixar, for instance – which was not initially a company that made films, but a tool for working with digital images – and also the EditDroid, which was the first nonlinear editing system. I was on hand during all of that, and I was very interested in it; I was kind of a test pilot with the EditDroid, because most fulltime picture editors found it frustrating to work with this new tool that broke down and didn’t do everything they were used to. But I was willing to use it, because I wanted to cut the home movies that I’m always making, and this was a quick way to do it, and cheaper. And I had been a film student – I wasn’t just interested in sound, I always wanted to be a director, an auteur, like every other film student – so I had the skills to edit.
I was doing lots of projects within Lucasfilm and for outside customers, cutting IMAX movies digitally; all this was an experiment. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles , from 1992 to 1996, was a real proving ground, we discovered that you could do amazing things in the editing room: you digitized the picture and then we could erase a character. I remember the day we figured that out. George Lucas saw that, and it was this moment of, “Oh my gosh, look at what the future brings! We can keep directing the movie in the editing room, we can break images down and put them back together a new way, and we can do it kind of cheaply.”
Certainly for the prequels, we put all that effort into it. George Lucas was beginning to achieve his dream, which was to sit on the couch and say, “Let’s try this, let’s do that.” The level of activity in the editing room was increased by an enormous amount, and it got more and more complicated, and we tried wilder and crazier things. And then there were the digital characters – we’d never had digital characters before Jar Jar Binks. That was a whole thing: How do you film a character reference on set, and then in the editing room create the performance? Looking back, it was thrilling, that “anything goes” kind of feeling. It changed the way movies were made, the prequels. But today when I say that, nobody’s impressed anymore, because it’s practically just the tools that any kid has on iMovie.
KY: Does it ever feel like a Pandora’s Box, though – embracing digital; the standardization of this idea of “directing in the editing room”?
BB: Yes, definitely, there is a Pandora’s Box element to it. You need to have discipline with this very flexible, very fastmoving methodology, because it allows for procrastination. When it was all film, you really were governed by a much more linear process. It’s very expensive to make changes with film, because you’d need to get a new print from the lab. You don’t have the freedom to change something at the last moment unless it’s really an emergency, and you’re willing to pay a lot of money. But digital is not expensive, insofar as the media doesn’t cost you anything. You’re not forced to move forward in the same way: I can save my version as editor, I can save the director’s version, I can save a different version for each producer – and the studio can be in competition, cutting with their own editor. So you get this multiplicity of versions, it’s very hard to keep track. Instead of narrowing the film down, making it the best you could in the time available, now it’s more like a circle of people all doing their own versions and they finally collide in the middle, and somebody has to sort it out.
KY: Someone has to find the nucleus.
BB: Yeah. And it’s like, radioactive. It’s fission – if it doesn’t go well, it blows up. Maybe I’m going at it too philosophical, but from my age and my perspective, those are the kinds of things I see. I love the new technologies, they’re so convenient; I can put a whole feature film together on my laptop and it would look darn good on most screens. I have a 24-year-old daughter who does editing – it’s not her profession, but she just absorbed it along the way –and she’s just quick and nothing bothers her. It’s just, “Oh, I’ll move that over here, and I’ll change that.”
KY: Doesn’t she know she’s supposed to be tearing her hair out?
BB: Right, it makes it hard to say, “Wait a second, it’s a hard job!”
KY: Well, it’s still hard to make something good. I think that often gets lost.
BB: That’s always been the challenge: do we end up making better films? Well, they’ve been working with that problem for 150 years, you know, and there are great films made at every time in cinema history. There’s no better era than another, that’s not the way it works in art. There are eras you pass through where these are the favored tools, and then there’s another era where it’s a different set of tools – and the best films will migrate around.
◼ The Conversation with Ben Burtt VISION AWARD TICINOMODA will take place on Thursday, 15.8 at 10:30 at Forum @Spazio Cinema
◼ Indiana Jones and the LastCrusade screens on Thursday, 15.8 at 16:30 at the GranRex
HANAMI, Between Fogo and Locarno
Telling the story of a Cape Verdean volcanic island through the lives of its inhabitants, director Denise Fernandes presents her ethereal debut feature Hanami in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente at Locarno.
by Laurine Chiarini
Born in Lisbon to Cape Verdean parents and raised in Locarno, Denise Fernandes is one of the rare homegrown filmmakers to screen at the Festival. After making her Locarno debut in 2020 with her short film Nha Mila, she is back in 2024 with Hanami, her first feature film. Drawing from her multicultural background, she tells a story of sisterhood, identity, and immigration against the volcanic backdrop of Fogo Island, in Cape Verde, as infused with a touch of Japanese culture — a fascination she has carried since childhood. In our conversation, Fernandes reflects on the eight years it took her to complete the film, how the creative process doesn’t always require explanation, and the marvel of similarities between places that initially seem worlds apart.
Laurine Chiarini: You studied film in Lugano and Cuba, two places with distinct cultural and artistic approaches. What motivated this decision?
Denise Fernandes: Very early in my life, I knew I wanted to study film. The school I chose at the time was the CISA Film Academy in Lugano, which I attended for three years. After that, I applied to another film school in Switzerland, but it didn’t work out. That’s when I got offered the opportunity to be the first student from Lugano to participate in an exchange program with the International School of Film and TV (EICTV) in Cuba. I said yes, without thinking too much, and ended up spending two years there. It was a happy accident that made absolute sense in retrospect, because I needed to detach myself from Western artistic references. Being in an international school with people from Asia, Africa, and South America was like a calling, compelling me to explore my Cape Verdean heritage in the films I would be making.
LC: You have a very multicultural upbringing – between Cape Verde, Portugal, and Switzerland. Is making films a way of bringing these countries closer, and of keeping your personal history alive?
DF: When I chose cinema as my language of expression, I never thought about my multicultural upbringing – at least not until several years later. When I finished film school in Cuba, it was a moment of, “What do I do now?” It felt strange to realize how much hard work it takes to bring a film into existence. That’s when the thought occurred to me that I could bring my Cape Verdean side into it. Although it was still a distant one, I felt simultaneously totally detached and very close to this side of my identity. At the time, it seemed no one was talking about the representation of African women in cinema. I saw an opportunity rather than a responsibility: since I was in a position to make films, I thought I might as well use this opportunity for something meaningful.
LC: Your previous shorts have been selected in various festivals, and your short Idyllium won the Swiss Cinematography Award at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur in 2013. How have festival play and awards affected your own career as a young director?
DF: At the beginning, I didn’t know much about the festival system. Now, I can navigate it much better, and I love the proximity to the audiences that such settings provide. My previous film, the short Nha Mila, is the one that travelled the most. After it premiered in Locarno, it went on to be screened at various film festivals and venues in Europe, Brazil, Lebanon... I was happy to see it as a chance for the audience to learn more about the Cape Verdean community. I really appreciate that festivals make space for different kinds of movies. I don’t take these selections for granted, and seeing one of my movies screened is always such a heart-warming experience.
LC: Let’s jump to Hanami, which is premiering at Locarno. What were the main challenges when moving from shorts to a feature film?
DF: At some point during the shooting, I forgot all about the shorts I made and felt like I had zero experience! But I think it is normal for a filmmaker to feel that way when they embark on a new project; what you did before doesn’t matter because you have a new challenge. Writing was cool, but when pre-production and filming started, this turned into a great odyssey, like facing an avalanche coming toward me and thinking which direction to run in. You need so many resources for a feature film to avoid it falling apart. You constantly have to make so many decisions and choices, at times not being sure whether they are the right ones until you are in the editing room. You even question if a character you had imagined has enough material to build upon later. And of course, the time commitment is enormous and very protracted: Hanami was eight years in the making.
LC: “Hanami ” means “flower viewing” in Japanese, and commonly refers to the act of going to view cherry blossoms. Why this title, and where does the film’s story originate?
DF: After hanami comes a shower of petals. I somehow see the title as an oxymoron, because the lack of rain is a pressing issue in Cape Verde. Climate change brings dryness, one of the main causes for immigration. But I don’t really have a rational answer otherwise: it just came to me. Creativity can be very immediate and instinctive, and then it starts to develop. But at the same time, everything comes from somewhere, right? From the time I was a child, I was exposed to great storytelling from children’s books and anime. I was very receptive to the idea that there were no limits to it. I knew I would be making a film in Cape Verde, and when it comes to African countries, people aren’t used to seeing the same storytelling that you see in the Western world. I didn’t want to restrict my creativity in any way: whatever I imagined could happen on this island, I would run with it. I kept an open mind, so combining Cape Verde and Japan happened because the two cultures have many basic things in common. Both are islands, have turtles and volcanoes… These similarities are already there; they just need to be exposed. It was a conscious and at the same time perhaps unconscious way to say, “Hey, this is a remote place, but you can always find similarities in other cultures; we are not as different as we think.” I didn’t want Japan to just be an idea; I wanted to put it in the film. I haven’t been there yet, but I am forever grateful for growing up with Japanese anime.
LC: Nana, the protagonist, is portrayed first as a child and then a teenager. It must be especially difficult to find two different actresses to play the same character at different ages. How did you cast Daílma Mendes and Sanaya Andrade, your young actresses?
DF: The casting was a very long process: I had been travelling to the island since 2016, and had people on my radar since 2018. For the character of Nana, my team and I looked in every school and kindergarten on the island. In 2021, I found the actress to play Nana as a child in a kindergar-
ten; however, she was too young at that point – I didn’t know when I was going to film and couldn’t make any promises to her or her family. In 2022, about six months before filming started, we conducted an extensive casting call. Daílma Mendes, the same little girl, was still in my heart, and after a few rehearsal sessions, we decided to definitely cast her as Nana. After that, we had to find someone to play her as a teenager. My team searched a lot on the island; we carried out even more intensive castings with exercises, but it wasn’t easy. At some point, I almost regretted that the script required people who matched physically, because I felt it might limit my options. But I am so happy that I insisted on that, because it allowed me to keep a realistic idea of the same character growing.
LC: The film paints a story of immigration with all the implications that has on the extended family. It could really take place anywhere in the world, but it’s a subject that also concerns your family directly.
DF: Even with a great deal of fantasy involved, it was fundamental for me to write and speak about what I know. One of the scenes shows members of the family coming from abroad and having lunch and talking about many things. As I child, when family members from French-speaking Switzerland came to visit, I was very curious and would try to understand them. Even though they no longer lived in Cape Verde, seeing them was an opportunity to learn more about the country’s culture. I was trying to understand the Cape Verdean heritage that shapes both my identity and my family’s collective story.
LC: In the film, knowledge comes from the young – a team of young biologists teach the small kids about wild turtles on the beach – as much as from the elderly, as when Nana is sent to look for “witch soap” to cure her fever. Traditionally, wisdom comes with experience, but here it seems to transcend generations.
DF: Yes, there is this sentence at the beginning when the grandmother, holding Nana as a baby, says, “The island will take care of you.” I really wanted to show how this place lives as a community, how everyone, together, looks after and takes care of each other. Some people seem to pop out of nowhere: when Nana becomes ill on the beach, the island takes care of her. This is really what I wanted to show. In Western culture, the idea of community is something that we don’t experience in the same way; we think it’s normal not to be rooted inside a wider community, but it’s at the basis of human survival. Immigration can split communities, but it can also strengthen them, when family members support others from abroad. I wanted to show how Nana’s childhood was, and that it takes a village to raise a child.
LC: The narrative is also a plea for nature, with the inclusion of a Japanese volcanologist and his turtle. The landscape is shown in a way that feels like a kind of “magic realism”; a character in its own right.
DF: The landscape is the main element in the film, it was the first character that inspired me. In 2014, I first thought that maybe I should do a film in Cape Verde and set it as my goal. My family doesn’t come from Fogo, where the film was shot, but from another island. Since I was a child, I had heard about Fogo and its nature; I felt it could provide a magical canvas. It was beautiful – a perfect environment for us to work in. So many things, such as witch soap, seem invented but actually do exist in real life. The violin is the instrument of the volcano. People really play it there; it is not romanticized. I found about these traditions through my research. People might think that Cape Verde is just about beaches and holidays: I can’t blame them, but I wanted to show the nature as it is, to break stereotypes. I am no different myself: I had to learn these things and am still learning. The topic of conservation came naturally to me. It was important to include it, because it is a real-life issue. During my trips to Cape Verde, I met real biologists – very dedicated people, often very young, working for the preservation of turtles, plants, and birds. Again, these are real people, who I also wanted to feature somehow in the film.
LC: It is also a tale of freedom and identity. Nana seems to have no choice but to remain on her island forever, but the choice is not as simple as that when the opportunity arises. This is a turning point, when we understand that, in fact, she is freer than her mother, who was forced to emigrate.
DF: I am always on the edge between being very clear and not giving away too many details. For me, one of the aspects of storytelling is that people should not be surprised – it should remain coherent. I hope people will understand Nana’s choice. What I wanted to do was to break the narrative that people who emigrate are looking for a better life: sometimes, they choose to move, but often, they are forced to. If they had a choice, they might have chosen to stay with their family, their nature, their community. I wanted to bring complexity to a narrative that’s too often simplified. I wanted the audience to get to know Nana, which is why I did the film in two parts – her childhood, and then her teenage years. At some point, the audience knows her better than some of the characters around her; her decision should be altogether surprising and yet make sense to us.
LC: At some point, the visiting family asks Nana’s uncle Nelson to “please speak Creole”. You are multilingual yourself; how do you decide which language to use in your films?
DF: I feel extremely fortunate that languages have been a part of the different cultures I was surrounded with. I believe Italian culture and literature have influenced my storytelling. In Cuba, I had one short with no dialogue, and the other one was in Spanish. Nha Mila was in Creole. I feel like I could shoot in different languages if needed. The Creole my family speaks is different from the one spoken in the movie, because they come from a different island. Being able to shoot in Cape Verdean Creole from Fogo made me so happy: I didn’t take it for granted, as these languages can disappear.
LC: In the outdoor scenes, the camera often remains still while characters move within the frame. Some of the indoor layouts are artistically dense, using fishing nets or drying sheets to create multiple layers.
DF: Sometimes, an image simply precedes the story. When I was writing the film, ideas would sometimes stem from a particular image. For instance, I had this idea of a woman playing the violin in the film, and I could see it clearly, but then I needed to establish a way to include it in the story. A justification of why and how. I had collected different mood boards. The fireworks scene, for example, comes from a Japanese photographer, Shōji Ueda, to whom I wanted to pay tribute in the film. I wanted to recreate that image. I had far more references than the ones that ended up as stills in the film. My driving force to start writing the film was a picture by Nan Goldin that showed two Japanese brothers surrounded by a shower of petals. During location scouting, I shared my references with my cinematographer Alana Mejia Gonzalez and art designer Rafael Mathé. Many setups that appear natural required a significant amount of work and transformation. It may seem obvious, but art direction is such a powerful component of storytelling. There were numerous interventions, sometimes quite fantastical, such as using fishnets in the abandoned house, but also natural places that we found. Finding this house was almost magical – a little miracle.
LC: Among the movies supported by the Films After Tomorrow initiative, launched at Locarno in 2020 to support filmmakers during the pandemic, was the Swiss filmmaker Pierre-François Sauter’s FarWest (2024), presented this year at Visions du Réel. It was also shot on an island in Cape Verde: is the country becoming the next place to film?
DF: I really don’t know if Cape Verde is the new filming destination. On one hand, it is great that this beautiful country is gaining more visibility. But I am aware that local filmmakers can face significant challenges to finance their projects – this is a reality in the industry. Not all countries can provide equal means when it comes to filming, and making a movie takes a lot of resources. I stay open-minded, but – faced with all this – I don’t stop questioning things.
◼ Denise Fernandes’s Hanami premieres Today, 14.8 at 18:00 at PalaCinema 1
ReadDanielaPersico’sreviewofthefilm(inItalian)onp.14
la cultura in prima fila
KEVIN B. LEE ON THE FUTURE OF SURVIVAL
As a Deaf writer, film programmer, and landscape designer/planner based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, Emerson Goo has a relationship with cinema that to some degree has to be mediated through other technologies. He engages in a conversation with Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at USI Università della Svizzera italiana, to discuss these kinds of mechanics: how cinema, as a malleable medium, could locate itself in the layeredness of the 21st century. Together, they explore “The Future of Survival”, a conference and three public encounters curated by Lee that connect audiovisual innovation to social and environmental responsibility.
by Emerson Goo
Emerson Goo: Our conversation today is about the Cinema Futures conference that you’re putting on at Locarno. You have a unique job title, Professor for the Future of Cinema [sponsored by the Festival and the Università della Svizzera italiana]. What does that mean in terms of both research and pedagogy, teaching the future of cinema?
Kevin B. Lee: Cinema has been this dominant cultural form for pretty much the last 120-plus years. It’s interesting to ask why there would be this position “for the future of cinema.” What changes, what transformations are we talking about? What challenges now face cinema that need to be understood and addressed? It’s actually not that new of a situation. This is something that has happened again and again throughout the history of cinema. As early as the 1920s, with the rise of sound, or the 1950s, with the rise of television, or the 1980s, with the rise of home entertainment. So we’re not doing anything terribly new, but at the same time, there is a lot of newness around cinema that should be addressed. I teach a class on preparing for the future of cinema. We get into things that are very prominent now, such as streaming, digital cinema, globalization. We get into things that are very much in development, like artificial intelligence and a growing concern about the environment and what cinema’s relationship to climate change might be. We get into cinema’s relationship to society with [issues of] representation and equality, both on screen and behind the screen. There is a very rich array of subjects to explore, and to me that’s the main guiding principle – how is cinema relevant to the world that we live in? It’s not just entertainment. It’s not just something that you do to escape from the world, but a means of re-engaging even more deeply with the world. The Future of Cinema curriculum that I’ve devised [for my students] is pretty much a template for what we’re gonna get into with the conference.
EG: I noticed that there is a videographic, or video essay workshop component to the conference. There are several workshops, one is called an “ambulatory audiovisual exercise”. Why include this hands-on component in the conference? What do you hope it will generate not just as an end product but also through the process of participating in it?
KBL: If you know anything about my background, you know I’ve made hundreds of video essays over my career and that’s been a defining feature of my scholarly and research practice. For me, theory and practice go hand in hand and it’s what I believe in and practice in the university. It might also be one of the reasons why the Festival and the university invited me to the professorship, because they’re interested in how academic research and education can intersect with a creative practice and with the films that get shown there. Chiefly though, there are three main areas [of discussion]: digital innovation – like AI and so on – social sustainability, and then environmental sustainability. These video essay workshops let the participants put these ideas into practice, to realize them in an audiovisual form. How can we engage with these ideas within the larger environment of a film festival? You mentioned the ambulatory workshop – that is basically a fancy academic way of saying, hey everybody, you have the afternoon to walk around the Locarno Film Festival and think of how you can use your own personal recording devices, your smartphones, to film something, use your device as an instrument to articulate or give expression to those ideas in the festival environment. If you’re going to a festival like Locarno, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to spend the whole day inside of a conference room. There actually is a very concrete outcome for all of this. We have partnered with NECSUS Journal, which is the leading cinema and media studies journal in Europe, to publish the video essays from the conference sometime next year. And we hope to show the video essays in Locarno next year as well. It’s meant as a form of academic publishing, both in a journal situation and in a film festival situation.
EG: I brought up the ambulatory exercise because when I think of how I engage with people in my daily life as a Deaf person, I often use a speech-to-text app on my phone to communicate with [hearing] people. My phone is always recording, and it’s made me very conscious of the sound of the world: the environmental sounds that might be impinging on speech, and thinking about [positioning] my phone, holding my phone up to someone and using it as a recording device. And of course, speech-to-text is one of the areas of my life where I utilize AI. So many of my day-to-day conversations that I have are recorded by Google in their [Live Transcribe] transcription app. I feel conflicted about that because it’s a very important accessibility device for me, but I always think about how the speech in these conversations, even the one we’re having right now [over Microsoft Teams], is being given to these corporations that are processing it, [constructing] this idea of what proper English is supposed to sound like. Being from Hawai‘i, I speak Pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole English), and Pidgin doesn’t get picked up [by the app], let alone Hawaiian. That causes a lot of problems for me. In a way, AI has become such a big part of my daily life as a Deaf person.
KBL: It’s not even just about disability access. I remember when I was living in Paris for a while, and I couldn’t totally follow films and I ended up not watching any French films because there were no subtitles. I ended up watching foreign-language films like Hong Sangsoo [films] that
were subtitled in French, and I would use the Google Translate app [in the theater] to do live subtitling in English. That was kind of a wacky experiment, it wasn’t really accurate, but it was interesting, to say the least. It was a very unique way of experiencing his films.
EG: This conference is a very carbon-intensive event, right? And AI and the whole film industry, the systems of film production that are standardized today, are very carbon-intensive. There have been so many films made about climate change. But have you come across any filmmakers thinking about how to make film production itself more climate-responsible, and actually taking the climate as an instrument in film production and responding to it?
KBL: Wow, that’s a big ask. I think you just came up with the idea for the next great film! A film that actually has a relationship to the environment and a consciousness of its own energy use baked into its premise. It’s not quite the same, but it makes me think about this documentary about Brian Eno that premiered at Sundance last January [Eno, by Gary Hustwit]. It’s an AI-generated documentary and each time it screens, the AI works with the existing materials and produces a film that’s different from all the other screenings of the film. I can imagine [a film] like that where the whole premise of making the film awakens the audience to the possibilities of environmentally conscious filmmaking. I don’t think that film exists right now, but it would be great to see it. In the meantime, I think there is this emerging consciousness around a more ecologically responsible film practice. In my own teaching, I have taken a lot from Beny Wagner’s work on metabolic cinema, where he thinks about the concept of metabolism, which is the transference and use of energy, in so many different aspects of film production and film viewing. He starts from the energy that you get when you watch a film, your emotions, your inspirations, all these affective responses, the things that you go to watch the movies for, and then ties that to the energy produced and consumed in making the film, the material resources, the energy, the electricity, the effect on land, the effect on labor, all the people that go into making the film and how their energy and labor is valued, and also the energy spent in making the film available – distribution, exhibition, streaming, and so on and so forth. And to think of all of these dimensions as an integrated system of energy transfer and energy exchange – this, to me, is next-level thinking. If artists can account for their filmmaking practice along these dimensions… it sounds very restricting in a way, because it’s like, “I can’t do this because of its energy consumption, or I can’t do that because of its effects on labor and what I can ask people to do.” But I think if one takes these parameters as creative prompts, one can come up with a whole new way of thinking about cinema that connects it to our world. That’s something I’m really invested in discovering through the conference.
EG: What you just said about constraints being creative reminds me of the Small File Media Festival [at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia], where the goal of the festival is to make movies that have smaller file sizes. You might think the movies are just [conventional films] with a low-quality image, but some of them get very creative with how they interpret that constraint.
KBL: I’m glad you mentioned the Small File Media Festival. Laura Marks organizes that. That’s really progressive thinking, and it’s useful to get us to think in different ways about cinema and our media consumption habits. That ties to why I believe so much in video essays, because video essays are not just about cinema, but how to think with cinema, that cinema can be a tool for not just communication, but [also] for reflection. We live in an age where there’s just so much to consume and the sense of such limited time to be able to both watch and to think. What I feel is the enduring relevance of cinema is that cinema insists on the value of time differently than social media and normative practices of everyday life. Cinema is an exceptional state of existence where you’re in a state of concentration and you can experience things more deeply. You can reflect on things more deeply, and you can remember things more deeply. That’s how I define cinema’s relevance to contemporary life, and it feels like it’s more necessary than ever.
EG: People always talk about the death of cinema, but in the conference program, you repeat the word “survival” a lot, as in the survival of cinema. It frames cinema as something living that needs care and inputs and outputs, certain things that you need to survive. What do you think cinema needs to survive the future?
KBL: The keyword “survival” came up last year when we organized an advisory board of leading film and media scholars to come to Locarno and discuss what we could do to organize the conference. The word that kept coming up was “survival”, not just in terms of cinema’s survival, but also our survival. As we reflected on the world that we live in… it’s like, how are we gonna survive artificial intelligence? The social stability of our world is under tremendous threat with the rise of autocrats and right-wing ideologies. How do we survive the current state of our societies? And then with climate change, how do we survive the future of the environment? How are we going to survive the future? How, then, can cinema be a tool and a resource to help us think about how to survive these futures? Cinema’s future is partly dependent on its ability to help us survive the future. That’s how survival became a keyword for the festival. What are
the new innovations for survival? That’s the basis for the three main public events related to the conference – with Paul Trillo who’s an AI filmmaker and one of the very few people who’ve had access to the Sora text-tovideo generator from OpenAI, and Suneil Sanzgiri, who has used a whole array of filmmaking tools, both analog and digital, to explore topics of migration and planetary survival of peoples around the world, and then Susan Schuppli, who uses digital tools and filmmaking to expose instances of environmental injustice. These are the three themes – the digital, the social, and the environmental – manifested in the talks.
EG: Most of these conference participants are from or based in the US and Europe. And that does limit the range of perspectives that can be brought to the table...
KBL: I’ve had to extend myself beyond my own immediate sphere of who I know [to organize this conference]. I primarily know video essay scholars because that’s the center of my research practice, and I had to reach out to a number of people with whom I’d never spoken before just because I believed they would bring the necessary perspectives to really broaden the overall scope of the conference and address this question of the Future of Cinema. A lot of the people taking part are people that are actually on the syllabus of my future of cinema class. It’s kind of amazing to have the people whose work I teach attending the conference. That said, I don’t have anyone based in Asia, teaching in Asia, or working in Latin America or Africa. I think that’s partly due to the geopolitics of higher education and the fact that there’s just this concentration of intellectual capital in the global north, and the conference to some extent reflects that. But at the same time, we can reflect on that and think, how could we do this differently?
EG: I was in Taiwan recently for the Taiwan International Documentary Festival and one of the things I liked about it was that it was almost totally free of American and Western European films. They really prioritized films that come from underdeveloped and rural communities, that have a resourcefulness to how they’re made, and that address problems that people are facing in those areas of the world. I think a lot of these movies sort of achieve a vision of what cinema could be like in the future, where we don’t need or have as many resources, and we’ve de-grown the economy a little bit. I think about how we can make cinema in a way that’s responsive to the rhythms of the environment, to the rhythms of life and agriculture and things [we need to survive]. A good example of this in China is the Folk Memory Project that Wu Wenguang started. And Zhang Mengqi [one of the filmmakers in the Folk Memory Project], who makes movies about her village, not just about the history of the village, but also asking the villagers what they think the future of the village is going to be like, what they think the future of China is going to be like.
KBL: That could be a model we use for the videographic part of the conference. We can go around and interview people and the festival and ask them what their ideas for the future of cinema or the future of Locarno could be. I’m wondering if Wu Wenguang ever documented one of his screenings [at a festival] and actually interviewed the audience members for their reactions on the screenings. Kind of like what Jean Rouch did with Chronicle of a Summer (Cronique d’un été, 1961). There are many ways of using cinema to animate a community and have it reflect upon itself and what it’s doing, so I hope we can do the same.
EG: What do you hope the community in Locarno gets out of this conference, and what questions do you want to provoke in them?
KBL: The first thing that comes to mind is feedback I got from one of my students when we finished the future of cinema class this semester. She wrote in her feedback that because of this class, she sees cinema everywhere, in everyday life, in how our society is operated, how we relate to each other, how we see each other, and value each other. And again, taking this idea of the energy of cinema in the world being mobilized and moving, it’s no longer about moving images, but images that move through the world and which can channel energy and resources and labor throughout the environment, and through ourselves as we view them. It’s this expanded way of seeing that cinema is not just something you go to a movie theater and experience but something that is just connected to so many elements of our contemporary life that matter. I know that sounds a bit grandiose, but I think we must take a stand for cinema’s importance in our world and make the best case possible and present the boldest visions possible for the sake of cinema in the world.
◼ The Conference is for invited specialists only, but the Future of Survival project features three public evening events from 13.8 to 15.8. Visit the BaseCamp website for further information.
Qualunque sia la formula che vi fa battere il cuore, noi sosteniamo chiunque desideri una consulenza previdenziale e finanziaria personalizzata. Per una vita in piena libertà di scelta. 8 mm pilastro 3a?
la cultura in prima fila
Emozioni uniche al Locarno Film Festival con la Posta.
WOMEN’S PRISON: AN EXERCISE IN IMAGINING ELSEWHERES
By Cici Peng
“Solidarity is a doing word,” Lola Olufemi writes in her 2020 essay collection Feminism, Interrupted. Those words resonate throughout Lewis Seiler’s Women’s Prison (1955), which begins with an aerial shot of a penitentiary – its walls, and structures of enclosure. The voiceover declares: “State’s prison, all prisons look alike from the outside, but inside, each has a different character […] The system is wrong but it goes on and on and on…” Oftentimes, prison is situated as the “elsewhere” where society’s unwanted are relegated: Angela Davis writes about the “ideological work that the prison performs” – how it “relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society.”
In Seiler’s film, however, the inside of the prison is the center of the filmic universe. It’s the outside that’s a mythical space – we see the moon shot from behind iron bars, and we hear the women murmuring about their lovers in half-waking dreams. We are situated firmly within the prison walls, following the lives of an electrifying ensemble – a former stripper-actress, Dotty (Vivian Marshall), is a master impersonator; a returning blonde bombshell, Brenda (Jan Sterling), is met with cheers from her fellow inmates. Then there’s Helene (Phyllis Thaxter), a first-timer, shaken up and scared. The film chooses to focus on their lives under incarceration without dedicating any runtime to determining whether they are “guilty” or not. Instead, we see a life “after” the outside – examining the ecosystem of prison which is a site of both captivity and commune.
The film questions ideas around justice and punishment through its primary figure of authority – that is, Amelia van Zandt, played by the brilliant actress and director Ida Lupino. Van Zandt seems seduced by her own
authority; she runs the prison with an iron fist and tortures the inmates, justifying it as “discipline”. The concept that justice is “served” when a guilty party is sent to prison is a relatively contemporary one. In the 16th and 17th century, criminals were punished with public humiliation – from whipping to pillorying to capital punishment. Ironically, modern prisons were made to “humanize” punishment.
What does incarceration mean today? I cannot think about prisons without thinking about Palestine. Captivity is the central experience of life under occupation. According to a UN report, one million Palestinians have at one time been incarcerated by the Israeli state, including children. In 2021, more than 100 Palestinian children faced up to almost 20 years in prison for throwing stones. What does justice look like for them?
In Women’s Prison, when the doctor accuses Van Zandt of torturing Helene, Van Zandt declares: “I am rebuilding human beings”; her justification for torture. On July 29, 2024, a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s party justified the rape of Palestinian prisoners in a meeting with lawmakers, loudly claiming that anything was legitimate when it came to “terrorists” in custody. Inside the prison walls, there seems to be no laws.
Women’s Prison reminds us that so much of the work of incarceration is policing collectivism. Here, the “bad” women are doing their own “rebuilding”, by imagining new forms of solidarity. Labor is punctuated by play – Dottie quotes Shakespeare while doing the laundry; the women gossip while cleaning. From there, collective solidarity transforms easily from play to organizing.
When the inmates organize a hunger and labor strike in opposition to Van Zandt’s brutal abuse of one inmate, Van Zandt asks
the matron to name their “ringleader”. The warden responds, “They all spoke.” Unable to imagine a world ruled without a hierarchical power structure, Van Zandt is struck into silence. The camera pans over all the inmates standing still, faces resolute. “We want the people outside to find out what goes on in here. We want them to find out what you call discipline!”
Women’s Prison begins the first step of an abolitionist cinema – instead of identifying with an individual, we identify with a collective. This lack of a single focus was previously criticized by critics, yet this diffuse sense of perspective radically disturbs a desire to identify with a single character – a mode that often favors saviors in Hollywood: the cop, the superhero, the detective. Instead, here we have a handful of women armed with sewing machines and hidden knives.
However, Women’s Prison could have gone further – rather than demonizing the authoritative singular ‘bad woman’ in Van Zandt, how can we imagine a cinema that exposes a system that is entirely rotten?
Mariame Kaba is a prison abolitionist who writes about the collective dreaming process required for abolition. Cinema and image-making are often dreaming processes – they can be seen as performances and rehearsals for collective liberation.
Watching Brenda, Dotty and the gals, I’m reminded: solidarity is a doing word, and it requires all of us See the full program here
CICI PENG is a participant in the Locarno Critics Academy, the Festival’s workshop that prepares emerging critics for the world of film festivals and professional writing about cinema.
◼ Women’s Prison screens today, 14.8 at 14:00 at the GranRex
Piazza Grande Restaurant by Ticinowine
The Piazza Grande Restaurant by Ticinowine is one of the Festival’s exclusive locations, welcoming groups of partners, delegations, and private events for the 11 evenings of the Locarno Film Festival, with locally-sourced meals provided by Luini6. This elegant and modern setting, allows you to experience the best of Locarno just a stone’s throw from the Piazza Grande. Capture your best moments from Locarno77
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GAUCHO GAUCHO
Un meraviglioso viaggio nella comunità cowboy della regione di Salta, in Argentina, Gaucho Gaucho (2024) è lo straordinario film del pittore e regista Michael Dweck e del direttore della fotografia Gregory Kershaw, che in quest’intervista ci parlano di come siano riusciti a filmare un mondo così struggente e fuori dal tempo.
by Laurine Chiarini
| Got the chair? Go to vote!
Nel 2020, The Truffle Hunters - Cacciatori di tartufi, la precedente collaborazione di Dweck e Kershaw, era destinata a Locarno. Quello però fu l’anno in cui entrarono in vigore le restrizioni relative al Covid nel mondo intero, riducendo considerevolmente il Festival, e così, purtroppo, il film non raggiunse mai le sponde del Lago Maggiore. Nonostante ciò, l’interesse del duo per il legame tra le comunità locali e le loro terre è rimasto invariato. La moglie di Dweck è Argentina, motivo per cui il pittore ha cominciato a visitare il paese a partire dai primi anni Novanta. Nel 2021, i due uomini cominciarono a fare ricerca sul campo, trascorrendo svariate settimane a contatto con diverse comunità gaucho nel nord dell’Argentina, vicino al confine con il Cile e la Bolivia. Il duo ha detto a Pardo: “Eravamo attratti dalla mitologia dei gaucho, che è simile a quella dei cowboy degli Stati Uniti. Abbiamo quindi cominciato a cercare le vere storie umane che sono diventate parte del mito. Ci siamo dovuti immergere nelle vite di queste persone”. Lo stesso poster di Gaucho Gaucho riflette una fascinazione per il mito, con un design che rende omaggio ai primi film western di Hollywood.
Conosciuto altresì per la sua fotografia, Dweck si descrive come un “narratore visivo”. L’universo di Gaucho Gaucho è trasceso da un’infinità di sfumature d’argento, chiamate dagli stessi registi il beautiscope: “È una parola di nostra invenzione che descrive il nuovo set di sfumature che abbiamo utilizzato per restituire la bellezza sconfinata di quei luoghi”. Guarda caso, la fotografia analogica o a rullini può anche essere chiamata argentica. Argentina e argentico hanno la stessa etimologia latina: argentum. Si riferisce ai cristalli di alogenuro d’argento alla base dei procedimenti di emulsione della pellicola usati per acquisire l’immagine. Filmare in bianco e nero oggi può essere una scelta commerciale rischiosa, ma Dweck e Kershaw non hanno avuto alcun dubbio. Epici ed aridi paesaggi a perdita d’occhio, case fatte di fango… e, quando le donne intente a cucinare gettano la farina in aria, se ne possono quasi intravedere i granelli. “Le texture erano magnifiche. Il bianco e nero rivela una miriade di dettagli impossibili da intravvedere in un mondo a colori”.
Così come il bianco e nero, anche la musica è una componente formale che ci aiuta ancor più ad immergerci in questo mondo. Un brano dell’opera di Bizet I pescatori di perle crea un raffinato contrasto con i suoni della natura della scena seguente. I due uomini, entrambi appassionati di musica, hanno ascoltato rock argentino durante le prime ricerche dei luoghi dove filmare. Si ricordano di come, in modo naturale, “quando hanno cominciato il processo di editing, avevano già raccolto una grande playlist”. Il gusto eclettico dei registi e il loro orecchio per i ricchi paesaggi sonori sono un complemento perfetto alle immagini del film, un modo per trasmettere sentimenti al di là delle semplici impressioni. Questo fa di Gaucho Gaucho “un paesaggio onirico che invita gli spettatori a distaccarsi in modo impercettibile dalla realtà, e a concentrarsi sulle sensazioni che ogni singolo istante evoca piuttosto che sulla realtà concreta che rappresenta”.
La scena iniziale offre un grande esempio di onnicomprensività, quando la sagoma che vediamo è perfettamente ferma e la sua forma esatta è indistinguibile. Alcuni fili d’erba ondeggiano nel vento, poi un cavallo, sbuffando, si sveglia, si sposta, e così fa anche il suo gaucho, che fino a poco prima stava dormendo in sella. “Girare questa scena è stato un po’ un miracolo”, ricorda Kershaw, “sapevamo che le persone dormono sui loro cavalli, ed era un’idea molto affascinante. Questa scena coglie esattamente quello che stavamo cercando, un momento di magia che non puoi prevedere”. Il battito cardiaco dell’uomo corrisponde quasi esattamente a quello del cavallo; questo è il momento in cui viene raggiunta una fiducia completa reciproca, quando l’uomo e l’animale diventano quasi un tutt’uno. Quando gli abbiamo chiesto come erano state organizzate le giornate di ripresa Kershaw ci ha spiegato che “parte della bellezza del processo di girare un documentario è che sei continuamente sorpreso: cominci a filmare con un’idea di quello che potrebbe essere, che poi invece si trasforma in qualcosa di molto più bello”. Quando la meraviglia è a portata di mano, la pazienza è la virtù più grande che un direttore della fotografia possa avere. Dweck e Kershaw hanno dedicato mesi a costruire delle relazioni con le persone che stavano filmando, per guadagnarsi la loro fiducia. “Volevamo immergere lo spettatore nella bellezza che ci circondava. Ma abbiamo cominciato dall’osservare da vicino le vite di queste persone, ad ascoltarle e a guardarle”.
I due si sono uniti alle famiglie, sedendosi alle loro tavole per cena, il punto focale strategico di tutte le conversazioni. Non hanno mai sentito il bisogno di dirigere i loro soggetti. “Siamo un piccolo team di quattro persone. I nostri protagonisti hanno potuto vivere le loro vite, senza che il nostro processo di produzione li disturbasse”, dice Dweck. Nella maggior parte delle scene girate all’interno le inquadrature sono statiche, consentendoci di avere un equipaggiamento tecnico ridotto al minimo. Quando gruppi di gauchos galoppano nella pampa sconfinata, sono seguiti dalla cinepresa che riprende i loro movimenti senza soluzione di continuità, talvolta in slow-motion, in modo che lo spettatore possa ammirare la bellezza dell’uomo e dell’animale che lavorano insieme in perfetta armonia. In una sola occasione i movimenti diventano frenetici: una telecamera a bordo segue lo sgroppare furioso di un cavallo durante una jineteada gaucha, un rodeo dove i gauchos devono restare in groppa ad un cavallo non ancora domato quanto più a lungo possibile. Questo momento cruciale è l’unico in Gaucho Gaucho in cui l’uomo domina l’animale con violenza.
“Stavamo filmando un mondo che non solo era fragile, ma anche in via di estinzione”, mi dice Dweck. In Argentina la siccità dovuta al surriscaldamento globale minaccia seriamente i metodi tradizionali dell’allevamento dei bovini. “Quello che abbiamo visto era molto diverso da ciò che ci aspettavamo. A differenza di altri luoghi, i nonni e i genitori vogliono che le tradizioni sopravvivano. Incoraggiano davvero i più giovani ad imparare come le cose sono fatte”. Nel film compare anche la sola donna nell’universo maschile dell’allevamento bovino gaucho. Incoraggiata dal padre Tati, Guada, 17 anni, è determinata a diventare una gaucha. Solano mostra con entusiasmo al figlio di cinque anni i trucchi del mestiere. Il vecchio Lelo si lamenta con il guaritore del villaggio dicendo che vuole sentirsi di nuovo giovane. “Osservandolo siamo entrati nella sua mente”, commenta Dweck. “Non esiste un altro mezzo che, come il cinema, possa celebrare in grande scala la bellezza e la passione di queste persone straordinarie e condividere la nostra visione di ciò che una vita pienamente realizzata può essere”. ◼ Tradotto da Tessa Cattaneo
◼ Gaucho Gaucho screens tonight, 14.8 at 21:30 at the Piazza Grande
Green Line
by Pamela Biénzobas
SELECTION
COMMITTEE
Forty years have not been enough for Fida to come to terms with her childhood traumas. Forty years have not been enough for the world to learn any lessons, either (save perhaps for the fact that we will never draw any from history), as the allusions to present-day conflicts in Green Line are as numerous as they are appalling. After many shorts and medium-length features, French director Sylvie Ballyot’s first full-length documentary film finds her collaborating with Lebanese writer Fida Bizri (who served as Ballyot’s co-screenwriter in some of the filmmaker’s previous projects). In Green Line, Bizri returns to Beirut to revisit her childhood during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), and to try to make sense of those events.
With the candidness of the young girl she once was, grown-up Fida asks questions – blunt, probing, but also as curious and as unbiased as possible to every side involved in those horrors. She does so not in search for rational explanations that might appease the adult’s understanding, but for honest answers to some of the perplexities the child wrestled with back then, a girl who belonged to a generation that grew up amid atrocities, and lived in a capital that was once divided by the titular “green line” and teemed with snipers.
Her impressive candidness and receptiveness allows Fida to obtain something extremely rare. Apart from her own voice and some sporadic archive material, including fiction, the film is mostly based on people’s testimonies. A couple of these are from those who were caught up in the war as civilians, or who struggled to provide humanitarian assistance to the victims. But most testimonies come from former fighters representing all warring parties – whether they belonged to the factions that were supposedly instructed to protect people like her (as a resident of a city that was being carved up in a way she had little awareness of), or to some of the enemy factions in a conflict that still defies explanation. To the schoolgirl Fida was then, all sides were just as menacing and dreadful, and their guns and bullets just as life-threatening. And it is that same girl who now questions them (but never censors or judges them), demanding that they instead look her in the eye and speak about their involvement in the war.
A few play innocent, while most – a handful of men and a woman – take responsibility for their actions, unapologetically, provocatively, hypocritically, or with (apparent) remorse. Ballyot carved miniatures for Fida to use throughout her quest, together with maps and models of the city’s buildings. Not to illustrate the events to her audience, so much as to use them in a rather therapeutic way with her participants, helping them to open up as they try to explain facts and often to justify the unjustifiable. As Green Line revisits the Lebanese Civil War through the eyes of a child, it inevitably evokes the country’s armed conflicts with Palestine and the political complexities around them; it also speaks to the millions of children trying to survive today under bombs and bullets in the same region and all over the world.
Lost and Found (Ice Cream Is Better than Men)
by Eddie Bertozzi
SELECTION COMMITTEE
Formally, these four shorts might very well stand at opposing sides of the cinematic spectrum: the narrative, the contemplative, and the experimental. Yet each of them in its own distinct way deals with the concept of loss – of one’s homeland, a sense of safety, the warmth of human relations, a chance – as if this notion were at the core of our social, political, and existential condition today. None of these films surrenders to empty nihilism though, but carves out room for awareness and hope.
After winning the top prize at the Cinéfondation with Needle (2013) and premiering her feature debut They (2017) at Cannes, Anahita Ghazvinizadeh confirms once again the soft grace of her cinematic voice. By following the struggles of a Middle Eastern refugee who is resettled in the American Midwest, My Life Is Wind (a letter) touchingly explores the burden of leaving home and the emotional loss that comes with it. But it doesn’t forget hope.
Sasha Svirsky continues his exploration of the limits and possibilities of digital animation in his latest, hypnotic short, Dull Spots of Greenish Colours. This is experimental animation at its most powerful: a complex and thought-provoking sensorial journey that calls into question information technologies and their role in today’s wars. Brace yourselves for a wild, furious ride.
The depth and subtly devastating emotional power of Thai director Pom Bunsermvicha’s cinema reach their apex in The Nature of Dogs, an extremely rewarding slow-burner that quietly observes the gradual dismantling of family bonds. Little seems to happen; everything already has. As the characters move from scene to scene in a seamless flow of entrancing images, we are left floating in the realm of the transcendental.
Hanami
di Daniela Persico
SELECTION COMMITTEE
Ci sono luoghi che sono già in sé una storia. Capo Verde, con la sua unicità di terra vulcanica circondata dalle spiagge scure e lucenti, è un posto mitico, attraversato da racconti cinematografici potenti. La giovane regista Denise Fernandes parte dalla conoscenza di quel territorio, aspro e magico al contempo, per raccontare una storia di crescita e di migrazione.
Con i toni poetici e rarefatti della fiaba, Hanami si apre su un amore che darà vita a una bambina, Nana, da parte di una giovane madre, Nia, pronta ad attraversare quel mare che circonda l’isola inseguendo il sogno di una vita altrove. Nana cresce con la nonna: è curiosa, vivace, sognante; anche se trascorre le sue giornate spensierate giocando con i coetanei, tutto le parla dell’assenza che grava sulla sua esistenza. Sua madre sembra celata dietro le fiabe delle sirene che le racconta la nonna, nel mistero della nascita delle tartarughe che raggiungono da sole il mare, nell’arrivo improvviso di uno straniero capace di cogliere il senso delle cose. Nana cresce, restando in attesa.
Diviso perfettamente in due parti dal ritorno della madre sull’isola, il film intesse il filo sospeso di un amore viscerale e atavico. Qualcosa che dovrebbe essere familiare e spontaneo, coltivato giorno dopo giorno, qui diviene solo puro sentimento privato della presenza dell’altro. In questa intuizione si costruisce anche lo sguardo della regista che privilegia i campi lunghi, la distanza dai propri personaggi, il loro confrontarsi con il mondo come specchio delle proprie emozioni spesso contraddittorie. Nana si forma nel grembo del vulcano, dove viene portata a causa delle forti febbri; lontana dalle mani premurose delle cure materne, Nia è una creatura sinuosa, quasi marina (come nei sogni della figlia), che si confronta con le onde e porta con sé l’altrove. In questo duo, figlia e madre, terra e acqua, restare e partire, si fonda la dialettica di un’opera prima che riluce di una grazia composta, illuminata dalla freschezza delle giovani interpreti. Un duo di struggente bellezza, che è l’apice del gruppo di donne che circondano con affetto la piccola protagonista, passata di mano in mano da bambina e accompagnata da una comunità così forte da essere difficile da lasciare.
Read Laurine Chiarini’s interview with Denise Fernandes (in English) on p. 6
The Form, young Iranian actress Melika Pazouki’s directorial debut, is a bold and true blast. Rarely has female desire been portrayed so bluntly and honestly in Iranian cinema. There’s no trace of guilt or shame in this story of a teenager and her first sex date with a perfect stranger. She’s claiming her freedom to pursue desire and pleasure. And she needn’t get it from a man – ice-cream will do just fine, too.
Stills from Hanami
Agora
by Savina Petkova
A dog and a crow dream the same dream. The contents of that dream are what guide Ala Eddine Slim’s third feature, Agora, which is part of this year’s Concorso Internazionale. Such a curious premise feeds the film’s eerily hypnotic qualities and allegorically addresses the politics of displacement. Slim is a Tunisian director who is already well-known on the festival circuit thanks to his debut The Last of Us (Akher Wahed Fina, 2016), which won the Lion of the Future award at Venice, while his next film, Tlamess (2019), made waves at Cannes. Both of those films tackled social issues against backdrops of forests and nature, but Agora is a more urban tale, set in a nameless town.
The dog and the crow dream of the mysterious reappearance of people who have gone missing. One by one, we see three figures emerge from what seems like nowhere – a road, the sea, a quarry. Unresponsive, ghost-like, but definitely still flesh and blood, their return troubles the townspeople. Yet, the investigation spearheaded by a local police inspector named Fathi (Neji Kanaweti) and a doctor, Amine (Bilel Slatnia), begets more questions than answers – even more so when an external officer (Silver Bear winner Majd Mastoura) is sent to supervise the process. But how and why these people went missing in the first place is somehow less important than the consequences set in motion by their return. Truths are obscured, crops and fish start to die, and the word “curse” gets thrown around a lot.
For what seems like a very human story, Agora benefits from its unsettling framework of animal dreams. All of the film’s landscapes are in effect dreamscapes, and from the very first scene, they are haunted by a bewitching use of stark blue. In this case, the dreamworld is actually less dreamlike than waking life; the latter is more alive and vivid; its dynamism informed by dynamic, floating pans and Steadicam tracking shots. The film’s urban settings foster human mess, but on their periphery, a deep blue dusk embraces the sleeping crow and dog. To represent that peculiarity, Slim expands on a visual device he used in Tlamess, where most of the dialogue was exchanged somewhat telepathically, as conveyed via close-ups and subtitles in place of audio. Agora is made up of nonhuman sounds and human silences; together with his regular cinematographer Amine Messadi, Slim conjures a world steeped in allegory, with the occasional surreal touch.
Agora’s narrative is already refracted through the lens of a dream, but even in its linear oneiric logic – an oxymoron that in this case makes sense – it’s the recurring theme of dislocation that speaks to the film’s political stakes. Upon their return, those who had been missing are denied belonging a second time: what’s left for them is to roam in a forever-displaced state. Bearing in mind that all of this appears in the dream of a dog and a crow, there’s no real place left for those humans at all.
Crickets, It’s Your Turn
by Hugo Emmerzael
What starts as a romantic chance encounter transforms into a different beast altogether in Olga Korotko’s sophomore feature film, Crickets, It’s Your Turn. Presented in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente, Korotko’s feminist genre-bender stands out in the ways it tackles toxic masculinity – a subject that’s still seldom explored in contemporary Kazakh cinema. Coincidentally, recent Kazakh film Dästür (Kuanysh Beisekov, 2023) dealt with similar themes, including sexual violence and patriarchal repression, and became a somewhat unexpected box-office hit for local audiences. But where Beisekov’s film goes fully into genre territory, giving the audience perhaps a more gratifying depiction of female revenge, Korotko takes a more elusive and, ultimately, rewarding approach by carefully mapping out the inwards journey of its heroine Merey. The film is a testament to Korotko’s ambition to bring more strong female characters to the big screen.
Courageously portrayed by Inzhu Abeu in her debut performance, Merey is a dreamer and an artist – a photographer who tries to capture the beauty of the world around her. She’s also a bit of an Einzelgänger (or, in English, a lone wolf), as seen in the film’s gentle opener, in which a group of partying youngsters frolics around her while she’s mostly just focused on getting her perfect shot. When she bumps into the charming Nurlan (Ayan Batyrbek, another debutant) there, it could be the beginning of a cute ‘boy-meets-girl’ story, but Korotko’s confident direction gradually steers the narrative into the realm of nightmares. An ill-fated birthday party with Nurlan’s friends in a secluded villa results in a terrifying act of sexual violence that completely reconfigures the viewer’s understanding of what Crickets, It’s Your Turn is about.
Korotko’s film was always intent on showing patriarchal society weighing down on Merey. When she’s at her most vulnerable, she imagines pestering men in a white room, laughing to themselves like idiots. These flashes of heightened reality still have a sense of playful innocence around them – a way for Merey to gain control over her own narrative – but after her rape, this playfulness disappears completely. Instead, Crickets, It’s Your Turn becomes a haunting psychodrama that almost starts to play out on a metaphysical scale. In the film’s finale, when the action shifts to the outdoors, Aigul Nurbulatova’s cinematography suddenly begins to involve the Kazakh landscape: visually connecting Merey’s suffering to the natural environment, Crickets, It’s Your Turn suggests that the gendered violence Merey has experienced has deep roots that need to be tackled. Perhaps that’s where the title of the film finds its strongest resonance, as Crickets, It’s Your Turn ultimately challenges the society-wide silence and complacency that still enable these acts of violence.
Green Line premieres at 16:45 at Palexpo (FEVI) Hanami premieres at 18:00 at PalaCinema 1
The seventh Pardi di Domani program screens at 14:30 at La Sala Agora premieres at 14:00 at Palexpo (FEVI) Crickets, It’s Your Turn premieres at 11:30 at PalaCinema 1
A Portrait of Locarno as Remembered by its Guests
In the weeks leading up to the Festival, we reached out to some of Locarno’s most illustrious former guests and asked them to share their first memories of the fest – whether that meant impressions from their world premieres or casual walks around the lake. The result, Beginnings, is a treasure trove of anecdotes and recollections; a polyphonic mosaic of the Festival assembled by those who’ve shaped its history.
Radu Jude, 2023
“The real history of cinema,” Jonas Mekas once wrote, “is invisible history: history of friends getting together.” I guess this should be true about everything in the world of cinema – including film festivals. Yes, there were many films, new and old, that I discovered or rediscovered in Locarno (the films of Hong Sangsoo, Teddy Williams, Sylvain George and Abbas Fahdel, just to give some examples), but for me the most important thing is that I have made a lot of friends there, people who have given me inspiration or simply some courage to go on.
Deragh Campbell, 2023
Not Expecting too Much from the End of the World
The premiere of Lucy Kerr’s Family Portrait conflicted with my sibling’s wedding in Halifax, Nova Scotia and so I set out to make the second screening the morning after the wedding, flying back from the coast of the Atlantic to Montreal, over to Paris and then Milan before taking the typical train to Locarno. It was an unusual hangover in that I felt dopey and affectionate, cradling myself from flight to flight. Previous to my sibling’s wedding, my best friend and I had spent two idyllic weeks in Cape Breton, staying with friends, hiking and swimming in rivers and the ocean. I arrived in Locarno and appeared at the villa where the remaining cast and crew were staying. I hadn’t seen most of them since we’d all been together in Hill Country in Texas, on the Guadalupe River where we shot the film 10 months earlier. They received me gently and we ate a beautiful meal at the big kitchen table. Afterward, I sat on the balcony with Rob Rice and I expressed my sorrow that I’d missed (not only our premiere but) all of the screenings of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect too Much from the End of the World. Rob assured me that I’d missed something that would be truly important to me. Moments later, he got an email from the Festival stating that a screening of the film was added for the next morning. He booked me a ticket and arranged to meet me at the theater when it finished to take a walk and discuss it.
I emerged into the daylight from the cinema and saw Rob and we began walking into town. I gave fitful impressions of the film because I kept laughing at the snatches of enormous mountains and the lake that I’d see between buildings – I’d gone into the film before I’d taken in any of the surroundings. We discussed something about Radu Jude’s irreverence and how the clash of materials gave the impression of spontaneous meanings. I was happy to have seen the film there, on new water with my friend. That night at a party we saw a palm tree catch fire out of nowhere.
Crimes, Sexuality, and Morality
By Lucia Leoni
For this year’s edition of Pardo, we invited historians Cyril Cordoba and Lucia Leoni to take us daily on a tour through the Locarno Film Festival’s history, chapter by chapter.
Since 2009, the more “festive” aspects of the Festival have been greatly enhanced, thanks to the efforts of two artistic directors, both film critics. Under Olivier Père (2009-2012), who was formerly in charge of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, Locarno would get its first red carpet, bringing an element of glamour to the proceedings. His successor Carlo Chatrian (2013-2018) would champion the development of La Rotonda, a flagship venue at which visitors could mingle. Most importantly, in 2017, the Festival inaugurated the long-awaited PalaCinema, another major edifice located at the heart of the city, comprising three new movie theaters and offices. The completion of the PalaCinema represented the fulfilment of a dream – to have a “cinema palace” in Locarno – as old as the Festival itself.
However, controversy has never been far away. In the last 15 years, certain programming decisions have sparked heated disputes, their core about clashing ideas of what role cinema should play in society. In 2010, Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie, a gay pornographic horror film, sent shockwaves through Locarno. The movie was publicly condemned as morally disturbing by the publisher Armando Dadò – an important figure of Ticino’s cultural life – who went so far as to call for the Festival Director Père’s resignation. Festival President Marco Solari memorably debated the issue with Dadò on regional television.
Conservatives weren’t the only ones criticizing the Festival. In 2014, the LFF invited Roman Polanski to present his latest film, Venus in Fur, and give a public lecture. With the memory of his arrest at the 2009 Zurich Film Festival – for evading his 1978 sentence for the rape of a 13-year-old girl – still relatively fresh in the cultural imaginary, the Locarno invitation set off a new tide of condemnation, and Polanski bowed out of the event at the last minute. Festival Director Chatrian, committed “to the principle of free and unfettered artistic expression,” lamented the filmmaker’s decision, while president Solari declared “the spirit of Locarno” to have been “trampled underfoot”.
Today, the Festival still has a ways to go in terms of placing marginalized voices in positions of power. Since 2005, the LFF has had only one female director (Lili Hinstin, between 2018 and 2020), while Maja Hoffmann became its first female president just last year, in 2023. Yet diversity and inclusion are now among the guiding principles of Locarno. Next to official sections such as the Cineasti del Presente and the Open Doors Screenings – both of which embody the Festival’s mandate to platform emerging cinema – Locarno is also demonstrating its commitment to actively defining “the future of cinema and audiovisual arts”. Such is the explicit mandate of the professorship that Locarno runs through the Università della Svizzera italiana, and the implicit mandate of other, relatively new initiatives like the Critics Academy, a workshop for young critics, and BaseCamp, a hub for young artists. Though the Festival’s personnel, programming, and projects continue to change and evolve, after almost 80 years, those original values of youth and innovation still guide and distinguish Locarno at the global scale.
Join PIAZZA NOSTRA, a new initiative launched to collect people’s experiences of the Festival ahead of its 80th edition in 2026! Do you have any memories or anecdotes from Locarno you’d like to share?
©Conjuring Productions, Insufficient Funds, NSF
“Se non vi piacciono i film di Samuel Fuller, non vi piace il cinema”
Martin Scorsese
Per celebrare la nuova versione restaurata di Strada senza ritorno, proiettata oggi al Festival con il titolo Street of No Return (1989), Pardo vi offre un tour della filmografia del suo regista, l’inimitabile Samuel Fuller, vincitore del Pardo d’Onore 1993.
di Giovanni Vimercati
“Quando il produttore Jacques Bral mi propose di adattare Via senza ritorno di David Goodis”, ricorda Samuel Fuller nella sua autobiografia, “mi venne subito duro!”. Con questa locuzione, allusiva e molto raffinata, Fuller gioiva all’idea di rincontrare un vecchio amico, anche se da morto. Il regista di Mano pericolosa (Pickup on South Street, 1953), Il corridoio della paura (Shock Corridor, 1963), Cane bianco (White Dog, 1982) e di altri capolavori eccezionali del cinema americano aveva infatti conosciuto Goodis a Hollywood nel dopoguerra, prima che l’alcol se lo portasse via neanche cinquantenne. Goodis, anche lui scrittore pulp emigrato in California nel tentativo di vendere parole scritte in cambio di gloria e denaro, un sogno che non riuscì a realizzare, si conquistò immediatamente l’affetto di Fuller che per gli underdog aveva sempre avuto un debole. L’adattamento del romanzo per il grande schermo fu un modo per onorare uno scrittore il cui talento, a detta dello stesso regista, non fu mai riconosciuto abbastanza – Tirate sul pianista (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960, di Truffaut) è anch’esso tratto da un libro di Goodis. Una coproduzione Franco-Portoghese, Strada senza ritorno fu girato on location in una Sintra avvolta da una nebbia cyberpunk. Il film racconta la storia di una pop star di successo (Keith Carradine) che s’innamora della ragazza di un gangster, interpretata da Valentina Vargas. Il simpatico malvivente (Marc de Jonge), contrariato dal loro flirt, con una coltellata di chirurgica precisione gli taglia le corde vocali ma non la giugulare, rovinandogli così la carriera musicale e, di conseguenza, la vita, per sempre. Senzatetto, il nostro triste eroe passa il resto del film, con un filo di voce appena udibile, a cercare la sua amata per vendicarsi dell’infame torto subito. Sommersa in un film, al contempo ruvido e onirico, c’è anche una sottotrama politica, un’urgenza etica a cui Fuller raramente rinunciava. Eddie, l’ex fidanzato della ragazza, noto per i suoi legami con la malavita, fomenta l’odio razziale in un quartiere della città per spianare la strada alla speculazione edilizia. Il film si apre infatti con una scena di guerriglia urbana che nel libro era ispirata a dei disordini avvenuti nella Chinatown di San Francisco, ma che Fuller ricostruisce avendo in mente la rivolta razziale di cui fu testimone ad Harlem nei primi anni Trenta quando lavorava come reporter per il New York Evening Graphic. Come sempre, la violenza nei suoi film non è mai gratuita né tantomeno banale. Samuel Fuller, che aveva visto gli orrori della Seconda guerra mondiale, ha sempre messo in scena la violenza senza alcuna catarsi. Cruda e disadorna. Rimasto orfano da parte di padre a soli undici anni, il piccolo Samuel si trasferisce a New York con la madre e il resto della famiglia. A dodici anni diventa newsboy. Vende quotidiani per le vie di Manhattan, acquisendo così dimestichezza con il linguaggio della strada dove le parole vanno misurate e usate con accortezza. È il primo gradino di una progressione di carriera oggi impensabile. Il giovane Fuller risalirà la filiera della carta stampata fino a diventare giornalista di cronaca nera a soli diciassette anni. A proposito della sua esperienza giornalistica Fuller dichiarerà: “Circondato da giornalisti d’assalto alla ricerca di notizie imparai moltissimo, soprattutto sul lato oscuro dell’umanità”. Tra i suoi mentori al New York Evening Graphic ci fu Rhea Gore, firma di punta del quotidiano newyorchese, nonché madre del regista John Houston e nonna di Anjelica Houston. Un giorno, l’affascinante signora, riuscì a fare assumere il figlio al giornale, ma la cosa durò poco, giusto il tempo per Samuel Fuller di conoscere John Houston. Anni dopo, in un bar di Hollywood, i due brindarono al direttore che licenziò Houston e gli permise così d’intraprendere una carriera cinematografica, lasciandosi alle spalle quella di giornalista per la quale non era affatto portato. Al contrario di Houston, Fuller deve molto alla carta stampata. La prosa secca e telegrafica, che perfezionerà alla macchina da scrivere, sarà poi la stessa che trasporrà in immagini, con l’aiuto della macchina da presa. La cruda realtà della strada e la sua morale spietata segneranno indelebilmente il Fuller regista che attingerà spesso da questo universo, specchio veritiero delle pulsioni che turbavano l’America del boom. Senza beatificarli, Fuller mette in scena gli emarginati: prostitute, piccoli criminali mossi dalla necessità, detenuti e individui sfuggiti dal controllo della società dei consumi. Le sue sono rappresentazioni vivide e concrete delle contraddizioni di un’economia implacabile e binaria che divide senza scrupoli i vinti dai vincitori, gli sfruttati dagli sfruttatori. La nuda realtà della vita che le scene del crimine newyorchese offrono al Fuller cronista si ritroverà nel suo cinema non solo in termini di soggetto, ma anche di intensità espressiva, d’impellenza etica ed estetica. L’evoluzione dal giornalismo d’assalto al cinema passò per i romanzi pulp che Fuller iniziò a scrivere dopo un viaggio nel cuore malato dell’America all’apice della crisi economica. La verità, che in qualità di cronista aveva inseguito come un segugio, non gli bastava più, e i soldi nemmeno. I produttori di Hollywood offrivano ai fabbricanti di parole paghe molto più alte degli editori. A Hollywood fu Gene Fowler, una vecchia conoscenza dal mondo dei giornali, a mostrargli il primo assegno a tre zeri. Ai tempi una cifra impensabile per uno scrittore. A Hollywood Fuller conosce Frank Capra, “una brava persona”, e comincia a scrivere sceneggiature, uncredited, per Otto Preminger (lo confermerà lo stesso Preminger nella sua autobiografia). A dispetto delle promesse mirabolanti e dei generosi assegni, la vita da sceneggiatore a Hollywood non fu facile e la gavetta, anche per uno scrittore scafato come Fuller, fu lunga. E si vede. Le sceneggiature nei film di Fuller, soprattutto quelle della prima tranche produttiva che va dal dopoguerra ai primi anni Sessanta, non fanno una piega, sono contraddistinte da meccanismi narrativi ad alto impatto psico-emotivo, e dialoghi dritti al punto. I fiumi d’inchiostro versati su carta confluirono con i fiumi di sangue che Fuller vide in prima persona durante la Seconda guerra mondiale. Di famiglia ebraica, mosso da genuino spirito patriottico, del conflitto che sventrò l’Europa e ridisegnò gli equilibri geopolitici del mondo Fuller dirà: “La guerra è follia organizzata, non è fatta di eroi ma di soldati che cercano di sopravvivere”. Durante i combattimenti Fuller continua a scrivere e dai suoi diari trarrà anche un film autobiografico imprescindibile, personale e terapeutico, Il grande
uno rosso (The Big Red One, 1980). Ambientato durante lo sbarco degli alleati in Sicilia, è un film umano sulla disumanità della guerra, a cui Fuller lavorò a intermittenza fin dal 1959. L’esperienza bellica sbatte in faccia al futuro regista, che sprovveduto non era, tutto il peggio che l’uomo è in grado di fare, ma anche la forza bruta e solidale delle relazioni umane nei momenti più bui. Nonostante l’orrore – Fuller filmò il campo di concentramento di Falkenau – il regista non riuscì mai a odiare fino in fondo, e nei suoi film si rifiutò sempre di disumanizzare il nemico, tedesco, italiano o giapponese che fosse. La guerra andava combattuta, ma non si sarebbe dovuta mai più combattere. Almeno così sperava. Avendo combattuto contro il nazismo al fianco dei sovietici, Fuller non si capacitò mai dell’assurdità geopolitica della Guerra fredda. Con l’America attraversata dall’isteria Maccartista, fu anche accusato di simpatizzare per il nemico comunista nei film Corea in fiamme (The Steel Helmet, 1951) e Mano pericolosa. A neanche dieci anni dalla fine del conflitto girò un film in Giappone, La casa di bambù (House of Bamboo, 1955), dove un ex soldato americano ha una storia d’amore con una donna giapponese, interpretata da un’attrice giapponese e non da una bianca travestita da orientale, pratica allora assai diffusa. Fuller inizia dunque la sua carriera di regista con almeno due vite alle spalle. Tormentato da una sindrome post-traumatica che lo perseguiterà per anni, Fuller rimise mano a un soggetto che aveva scritto prima della guerra, The Dark Page Tornato a Hollywood, Howard Hawks gli disse che l’aveva venduto a un buon prezzo. Fuller ammetterà che la cosa lo deluse ma che gli servì anche da lezione: mai cedere i diritti del proprio lavoro a terzi. Il conflitto innato tra i creativi da una parte e gli uomini d’affari dall’altra, binomio fondante dell’industria cinematografica, non si risolse mai del tutto nel corso della sua carriera, ma questa conflittualità si rivelò feconda e Fuller seppe navigarla con l’eleganza e la sapienza di un marinaio. Le strade di New York prima e le trincee della Seconda guerra mondiale poi, furono una grande scuola di vita. Il primo film di cui firmò anche la regia fu Ho ucciso Jess il bandito (I Shot Jesse James, 1949), prodotto da Robert L. Lippert, pioniere del drive-in e del multisala, che ripose fiducia nell’esordiente Fuller e venne ripagato con un ottimo risultato al botteghino. Il film venne venduto anche all’estero. Un certo Jean-Luc Godard, allora giovane, recensendolo scrisse che i primi piani di questo film possedevano “un’intensità oppressiva che non si era più vista al cinema dai tempi del Joan of Arc di Dreyer” (anni dopo, Godard volle Fuller come comparsa in Pierrot le fou, 1965). Apprezzato in patria e venerato in Europa, i critici dei Cahiers eleggeranno Fuller a maestro, creatore di film scevri da ogni intellettualismo eppure eruditi e profondi. Lo considereranno fautore di un “cinema diretto, incriticabile, irreprensibile” –come dirà di lui Trufaut – “realizzato da un regista che non è primario ma primitivo, il cui spirito non è rudimentale ma rude, i cui film non sono semplicisti ma semplici”. Insomma, tutto quello che la Nouvelle Vague non è mai stata. Nonostante la sua fisiologica indipendenza nei confronti del mainstream hollywoodiano, i film di Fuller funzionano anche al botteghino, tanto che negli anni Cinquanta gli vengono offerti dei film importanti, con budget e cast stellari che però lui rifiuterà sempre, preferendo l’autonomia al tappeto rosso. Verso la fine degli anni Sessanta, proprio quando il suo spirito ribelle s’incarnò nel cinema non allineato della New Hollywood, il lavoro cominciò a scarseggiare. L’epoca che Fuller aveva, per molti versi, anticipato lo vide in disparte, nomadico, improvvisamente non più rilevante nel mercato americano. Negli anni Settanta, il regista prende coscienza dell’influenza che esercita sulle nuove generazioni; durante questo periodo, stringe amicizia con Jim Morrison, aspirante regista, prima della sua prematura scomparsa.
Fuller viaggerà in Spagna prima e poi in Germania, dove girerà un film per la televisione tedesca e incontrerà Fassbinder e Wim Wenders (Fuller reciterà ne L’amico americano, Der amerikanische Freund, 1977, di Wenders), entrambi suoi grandi ammiratori.
Fuller amava il cinema di Fassbinder, apprezzava la schiettezza con la quale il regista tedesco sbatteva in faccia ai suoi connazionali il loro passato senza infiocchettarlo, proprio come fece lui stesso con gli americani in Cane bianco, uno dei film più radicali mai realizzati negli Stati Uniti sul tema del razzismo, un fenomeno che, il film lo ribadisce con coraggio, può essere solo eradicato, non riformato.
Nel 1973, Fuller aveva adattato per il cinema un libro di William Bradford Huie sul Ku Klux Klan, ingaggiando come attori Lee Marvin e il suo amico e vicino di casa, John Cassavetes. Tuttavia, all’ultimo minuto, la Paramount affidò il film a un altro regista, Terence Young, che stravolse completamente la sceneggiatura.
Fuller riuscì finalmente a girare Il grande uno rosso con Lee Marvin, grazie all’intervento di Peter Bogdanovich, che Fuller avrebbe voluto come produttore anche se, alla fine, fu Gene Corman, fratello di Roger, a produrre il film.
La versione originale del regista, di quattro ore e mezza, fu tagliata e rimontata in un film di poco meno di due ore. Nonostante il successo di critica al festival di Cannes, Fuller rimpiangeva la mancata distribuzione nella versione integrale da lui voluta (la Warner Brothers comprò i diritti della versione completa qualche anno dopo). Forse solo lui era in grado di fare un B-movie epico e antieroico come questo, un film sull’inutile inevitabilità della violenza, un film che era e rimane, come notò il regista nella sua autobiografia, “il progetto più importante della mia vita.”
◼ Street of No Return screens Thursday, 14.8 at 15:00 at PalaCinema 1
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S M G E A
Gaucho Gaucho
by Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw
August 14th, 21:30, Piazza Grande
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Gaucho Gaucho — Illustration of the film by Nick Dahlen