Identity crisis
By
Mohamed El-Assyouti
Pupi Avati, 65, is president of Cinecittà and of Cinecittà Holding (SPA). His most recent film, Il cuore altrove (A Heart Elsewhere), the only Italian entry in the official competition at Cannes, opened last month's Italian film week, held as part of the Egyptian-Italian cultural year. At a conference with the audience after the film's screening he spoke about Italian cinema, his own contribution and his latest film
"The rapport between Italian cinema and its public had reached an unprecedented low point. Until two years ago Italian films occupied just 17 per cent of the local movie theatres while American films dominated 83 per cent. But this year we have almost doubled the audience watching Italian films, which now fill 30 per cent of local screens. For almost 25 years Italian cinema and the Italian life were travelling along parallel lines. They never met. Today the Italian street and cinema have met and we have more faith that it is possible for this meeting to continue.
"There are two reasons we can be confident about the continuing success of the new Italian cinema. The first is the degraded emotional quality of American cinema -- a result of the very high budgets required by the star system and the special effects. The second is the boredom that the young feel towards TV. That the state finances 70 per cent of the films produced, and that every year 30 of these are not released for lack of a venue remains a serious problem.
"During the past decade 450 directors have made a debut feature in Italy. How many do you think managed to make their second? Only 39, which is less than 10 per cent. So there are 411 new directors in Italy out of business. This situation has to change. When the minister responsible telephoned and asked me to head Cinecittà, I asked him why. He said that he wanted to create a love affair between the Italian public and cinema. I'm still working on the love story.
"We have to start to look at the foreign market from a different vantage point and change our approach to other cultures -- our presence here in Egypt is a step towards that end.
"Until the end of the 1960s Italy produced 350 films a year. Today we produce 100-110 films a year. Italian cinema was distributed worldwide -- one reason being that Italy had a clear and specific cultural identity. Now our country is in crisis, especially when it comes to our relationship with the past. Italy has yet to find a European identity to replace its old one.
"It is telling that the Italian films which have won Oscars are those that adopt a nostalgic view of Italy, a vision of the country Americans continue to want even though Italy is no longer like that. Nuovo cinema Paradiso, Il postino, La vita è bella, Mediterrannio -- however important they may be -- are about the Italy of yesterday. The men are macho, the women feminine.
"Il cuore altrove is about the relationship between two handicapped people -- Nello Balocchi, a Latin and Greek teacher whose excessive timidity constitutes a psychological handicap, and Angela Gardini, a young girl who is blind. It is a story that could have happened today, last century, or a thousand years ago. My mother told me the story of a convent in the 1920s, where the nuns looked after blind girls and organised Sunday morning dance gatherings. To me the tale seemed absolutely extraordinary -- so dated and strange. I decided to set it in Bologna, my native city, in the 1920s. But I think it only takes a few minutes for the viewer to more or less forget the historical setting and concentrate on the dilemmas faced by the protagonists. While touring with the film I encountered many people who closely identified with the protagonist's shyness.
"Nello falls asleep when he begins reciting the first canto of the Aeneid. He hates Virgil, and would much rather be teaching Lucretius who, criticised for being anti-religious, is believed to have committed suicide at 44 in protest against the dictator Sulla's fascist state.
"After I wrote the script we began to audition comedians for the main part. The problem was that they played the character's shyness for laughs, and the results were grotesque. So then we turned to actors best-known for melodrama, but that made the character too sad, too pathetic. Then one day my brother, who is also my producer, suggested I look at a television programme presented by Neri Marcorè. I immediately sent him the script, and two hours later he called me back. But this is me, he said.
"I have made over 30 films, and in most of them I have depended on inexperienced actors. Their performances needed constant direction. But after the first three days of shooting Il cuore altrove I stopped giving the actor any direction: I just watched him be the character. It is the closest I have come to making a perfect decision in casting a lead role.
"The more deeply rooted a film within a specific culture, then the more likely it is the film will be well-received abroad. In Italy, of course, there are other problems: Italian is not a widely spoken language. So one faces the problem of how to communicate with a foreign audience, how to transmit to them the feelings inherent in your film. And I have to admit that, unlike many of my colleagues, I feel somehow humiliated by subtitles. It is a literary problem in the first place. You spend days seeking an expression that helps suggest an entire emotional world, and then the subtitles compress this into a phrase completely lacking the nuance after which you have been striving. You spend days waiting for the sun to shine in a certain way through the foliage of trees and then I look at the audience to find them staring at the subtitles. You spend days with an actor to get him to say a sentence in a certain way and then it is dubbed, for instance, and everything is lost.
"Italian TV, especially the state channels, played a major role in the Italian cinema of the past. It was state TV that allowed the major auteurs to continue to work -- from Fellini to Antonioni to Rossellini to De Sica, they all were hired by TV. Sadly, the quality of TV programmes has deteriorated, and the public appears increasingly bored by them.
"Yet TV as a media remains the meeting point with real Italians. When a film is released in movie theatres it does not encounter real Italians. Its audience is drawn from those who live in urban centres, who can afford to buy the expensive movie ticket. When the film is eventually screened on TV it receives a far more democratic airing.
"I worked with Pasolini on the script of Sal˜: 120 Giorni di Sodomi (120 Days of Sodom), his last film and it was a splendid collaboration. But then when he was killed I refused to see the film, because for me it, too, had died.
I want to conclude with an anecdote about Federico Fellini, which I tell often because I want us all to remember he was a marvellous person whose films attracted large audiences. I only make films because I once walked into a movie theatre and saw 8 1/2 and discovered what cinema was. In Fellini's last years, when his films were not so successful, I was a close friend and neighbour. I would be invited to see his films when they were still working copies. With several friends I was invited to watch his last film, La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon). Nobody had seen the film yet and before it began he pretended as usual to be scared and left. Giulietta Masina, his wife, was watching with us. In the middle of the second reel the phone rang, and she whispered: 'They laugh and cry. Everything is fine.' Afterwards he rang a second and then again a third time, wanting to know how we were receiving the film."
