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FAMILY AND ART IN FRANCESCA ARCHIBUGI S CINEMA (AN INTERVIEW)

he need to sublimate the familiar and ordinary in everyday life is a sentiment that underlies Francesca Archibugi s work. This 42-year- old filmmaker from Rome has received unanimous critical acclaim and awards for her several films: Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Left), 1988; Verso sera (By Nightfall), 1989; Il grande cocomero (The Great Pumpkin), 1993; Con gli occhi chiusi (With Closed Eyes), 1994; L albero delle pere (Shooting the Moon), 1998; Domani (Tomorrow), 2000. Archibugi explores friendship, love affairs and family relationships in the life stories of people of her own generation and the next. Inspired by François Truffaut s films about children, Archibugi has brought to life a polyhedral human universe. She casts her poetic gaze upon a mosaic of the smallest emotions, and examines the most diverse private worlds. She has an honest talent, and, while hovering between comedy and civic commitment, she offers audiences carefully orchestrated films dealing with a spectrum of sociological issues relating to the new Italian familyscape. The cinema of Francesca Archibugi is grafted in the complex galaxy of the Italian family. The evolutionary process of the family gives her the opportunity to explore the fluidity of this term, elaborate its multiple meanings and redefine parental figures and educational roles. Using the family as a societal cell, she represents various trajectories of life and places her young and adult characters in a symbiotic relationship of human apprenticeship. With an empathetic authorial eye, Archibugi s cinematic narrative portrays the relationships, emotions, anguish and frustrations of the post-everything generation. Acting as a psychologist, sociologist, educator and parent, Archibugi can be defined as the director of the growing-up Italian. She documents, analyzes, chronicles and celebrates the qualities that make children and adolescents cultural protagonists of our era. The following interview is an analysis of the director s film production in the context of the socio-cultural changes in post-modern Italy. It was conducted in Archibugi s apartment in Via delle Fornaci in Rome on March

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16, 2002. In spite of her numerous commitments and busy schedule while exploring new locations for her new film set in Lombardy, Archibugi without any hesitation made herself available for a one hour interview on a Saturday afternoon. She was very approachable, flexible and generous with her time. Warm and calm in her speech, while convincing and profound in her ideas, she was willing to engage in a discussion on her artistic choices and philosophical values. Her voice was modulated by a cheerful, self-ironic sense of humor, while the conversation was rich in content and critical in the analysis of cinema, society and morals. The interview was videotaped, transcribed and translated from Italian into English by this interviewer. The interviewer and Archibugi are indicated respectively with the following initials: L., Laviosa, Flavia; A., Archibugi, Francesca. ***

L. Children and adolescents are cultural protagonists in your films in the sense that they, people of few years of age as you define them, are often victims of family situations and they seem to act as moral judges towards the actions of adults, who are usually their parents. Are your young characters in the position of expressing a critical and moral judgment towards their parents? A. Do you have children? L. No. A. The main characteristic of the age of adolescence is to be critical towards parents. It is a natural stage, necessary to acquire one s own identity. When this does not happen, there is often something that does not work like in situations when, for example, there is an excess of emulation or no need to read adults actions critically. This is a psychological and anthropological thesis. This particular situation is usually a spark for me to narrate characters, and characters are better presented in moments of crisis. Charlie Chaplin said that there is nothing more boring in a film than a happy marriage, not because they do not exist or because there are no profound and true relationships between parents, but because when there is no conflict there seems to be nothing to tell. So, even in a situation of happy life, if I want to narrate a moment, I tend to choose one of crisis and conflict. In this way, children seem to be more critical or parents more fragile than they really are, just because I have isolated those characters in a moment of crisis in their lives. Let s say that it is a dramaturgic device. L. Parents, both fathers and mothers, seem to have lost their parental authority. Do you look at them with a moralistic eye, almost punitive? Are there moral overtones in your films? Or is your narrative gaze merely descriptive of realistic situations?

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A. It is difficult to say and it is difficult to do self-exegesis. I do not know exactly what a parent should be like. I am a parent and I do not know, so I find it difficult to say what a mother should do. It is easier for me to present characters who make mistakes and so the accent on them is colored with moralism, but for what I said before, it is precisely in a situation of conflict that there is something to say. It is not true that I am always on the children s side. Very often children do wrong things, but it is the spectator who is more inclined to forgive them, it is not me, and it is normal that it is this way, it is human. A mother or a father who makes a mistake gets all the blame, but it is not my gaze, it is the gaze of the spectator that does it. L. In one of your interviews, you mentioned that feminism has corroded the family, an institution that had been immota or motionless for centuries. So in your films families seem to be in movement . What is your opinion about these transformations and in what direction is the family going? How would you define family today? Do you think that this original word has become obsolete and archaic since the family has taken so many other forms? A. Let s say that not only feminism, but the entire women s revolution in 1900, even before the feminist movement, has affected the family, starting when women came out of their homes and entered the work force. Some believe that this was the greatest anthropological revolution in the century, more important than the October Revolution, to give you an idea. It was a real change in life and in the social structure, I think. Let s say that the family, as an institution without love, as it still was in 1800, when people lived together, raised children and continued to live their lives without communicating, gradually lost reason to exist, thank heavens! What seems to have happened violently in the center of the family is not a social pact anymore, but a pact of love that two people stipulate. Not without surprise, there are so many separations, so many divorces when this love crumbles, ends, changes. I think that the family continues to exist because it is the engine of the world. By family, I mean a young man and a young woman who fall in love, love each other, live together and wish, without even knowing why, to have children. In their love there is a very powerful energy that is the preservation of the species. So, I think that this will never end, but now to this union we ask something new that we did not ask before: happiness, that people are happy together, and if this happiness is not there, it is not right. Therefore it is licit, and it is becoming more and more natural, to break the pact. I think that this is only a positive change. Obviously children suffer a lot because breaking a pact of love between a father and a mother is a psychological earthquake. There are two parts of you that separate; before you were one thing made of two things, then you become a thing made of two separate things, and we need to take this into account. On the other hand, this is the direction and I think it is the right direction. It is also a direction

Flavia Laviosa 502 based on the fact that women do not succumb to male authority and that women are free to fall in love, and most of all have the right to happiness. L. It seems that adults are ready to different seasons in their lives, different stages and different forms of happiness. Are children, the new children, the children of this century and the end of the past century ready to accept these changes in the family and their parents choices? There have been generations in transition between children of parents who never separated and children of the first separated couples. Is there an almost natural evolution in the psychology of acceptance of parents separation? A. There have always been separations especially among the upper classes and the aristocrats. Wealth gave the right to freedom and happiness, it was certainly more painful and difficult, but we can read Anna Karenina. People separated, started new relationships, or asked for divorce. This is something that happened in the past, so there has always been the need for a couple that is not happy together to break up. This, however, was not an option for the lower classes. I think that the first children of separated parents suffered a tremendous shock also at an anthropological level because they were under a greater social pressure than children today. Now at school it is more common and easier to deal with the problem because there are friends in the same situation. Even though social pressure is not as strong, we can never underestimate the wound. The wound however is part of life, the wound is a form of mourning, like losing a parent and building a new identity. These are things that need to be dealt with because they change life. In any case, I do not consider childhood and adolescence a happy age precisely because a child is not equipped to face wounds, a child is much more vulnerable than an adult. For this reason, I do not consider it a happy age and I do not understand where the whole idea of a lighthearted childhood comes from. It seems that no one remembers the moments of bewilderment and anguish in front of things that seemed to be bigger than they really were, more frightening, more mysterious because children in general do not know them. L. There are both male and female characters in your films, but it seems that you have a preference for female characters. Is this my own impression, or is it a narrative, cinematographic, artistic choice? A. I think that it is an impression because, if we do an excursus of my films, in Mignon è partita the character of the mother is certainly more positive than the father s, but for example Mignon was more negative than Giorgio. She was manipulative, someone who pretends to be pregnant to be sent back to France. In Verso sera, there was a conflict between a daughter-in-law and a father-in-law. At the beginning he seemed to be always wrong, but he was the one who gradually grew and changed, while she was a character who, in one way or another, fell to pieces. Therefore, between the two, the character of and the one of , I am not sure which would be more positive. In Il grande cocomero, I made a monument

Family and Art in Francesca Archibugi s Cinema 503 to a man, the character par excellence. The greatest hero that I have ever described in my life is a man, Arturo in Il grande cocomero, a psychiatrist who devoted himself to others, full of personal problems, but sensitive and able to relate to an epileptic girl. Thus, I think that this is an impression. Charaters are all alike to me: women and men, young and old. I wish to reiterate the fact that the spectator tends to be lenient towards women and children and in this way he attributes this lenience to me. But it is not exactly the case, if one observes carefully my films. Then, in L albero delle pere, there is the classic example of a negative character, the mother. The fact that she was lovable, that she was loved by her children and her husbands, made her son and husbands better people because they were able to understand a weak person, a person who blackmailed everyone with the strength of her weakness, which is the most terrible form of blackmail. So, I think that it is not true. But I wish to repeat that there is an optic illusion that takes place because it is the spectator who is more lenient. L. You have made reference to your strongest and most important films. I read carefully your autobiographical interviews and in particular the one published in the collection titled Dalla parte delle madri. I wish to ask you, after reading that article and after viewing your films, if you are behind Mignon, Papere, and Stella? A. I am behind all my characters. I do my best to be a narrator and so I try to tell stories, to give unity to a psyche different from mine. Every character I invent is autonomous. However, you inevitably use certain mechanisms arising from yourself. So you assign and give characters parts of you, when you portray them, when you create them. I have always identified with the characters I created, I have not identified with the girls, it was not a story of my childhood, absolutely not. In other words, biography is always something beyond my films, it is a way of feeling that belongs to me, but not to the stories or my characters. L. In several previous interviews, and in particular in reference to the shooting of the film Mignon è partita, you said that you wanted to abolish the camera. Why this need to eliminate or, better, to give the illusion that there was no camera? Why this challenge with yourself? A. It was not a challenge, it was an aesthetic choice and therefore a poetic choice. When I graduated from the Centro Sperimentale, I loved the Japanese cinema and in particular Ozu s. I felt the grace of his stories that seemed to be narrated by themselves without any form of narcissism in the mis-en- scène and I wished to accomplish something similar. I always wanted my characters to live their own lives and have the illusion of entering the life and psyche of other people, rather than having a narration with a violent cinematographic style that would satisfy a certain kind of spectacular eye, but that in the end would keep the audience detached from my characters. So, this was a very personal choice, a stylistic choice. The beauty of cinema is

Flavia Laviosa 504 that there are so many ways of doing it, one can do what he likes. There are those who scratch the film and those who make grandiose Hollywood productions. If someone has something to say, he can reach his goal by using any style. L. Could you please explain the meaning of the title of your film L albero delle pere? A. In Italy pere are the fixes. The tree made me think of a genealogical tree. The tree gives a sense of family. So I wanted to tell, in a very impressionistic way, the story of a family that was so violently conditioned by drugs and by the mother s drug addiction. L. How would you define your cinematographic signature? A. This is really a difficult question. Actually I have no idea of the value of the things that I do. I feel that I am a person that is searching (in cammino) and I believe and hope that if something of what I have done remains at the end of my work, it will be a body of work and not only one isolated film. I produce several chapters of a human comedy and I do not know how to define myself. Each film is the child of the next film and this is my way to go through life. L. You have been defined as an emerging auteur of Italian cinema by Àine O Healy. Do you recognize yourself in this definition? A. I do not know, I cannot tell you. Well, I make films that are quite personal and I always find the money to make them. These two things are expressed in what Àine O Healy has said about me. L. In what way do you see yourself as the heir of a cinematographic tradition of Italian women directors of the 1970s and 1980s, like Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmüller? A. While I feel very strongly the female side in my life, I also feel that I could not be anything else than a woman. However, I think that art, in some ways, is genderless. The directors I like the most are not women. I think that in cinema there are a few explosive and strong personalities, while there are more explosive and strong personalities in literature throughout the centuries. Except for some directors like Jane Campion, Helma Sanders-Brahms, a German director and a few others, I do not think that there is a female Scorsese or a female Truffaut, even though Vardas is a great director, in other words I do not think that there is a female Ozu. I think that the great cinematographic art is still a male stronghold, but I have to say that, because I love films made by men. This is something that causes a personal conflict. It is different in literature: very often I happen to love female writers more than male writers. This is probably caused by the fact that cinema is a very difficult machine to move. It requires strength and great personalities, those who are more fragile and sensitive prefer to withdraw. Therefore, the people whom I would feel more attuned to, are those who do not get to direct a film,

Family and Art in Francesca Archibugi s Cinema 505 and they limit themselves to the solitary work of writing. I myself often regret being a director, it is not a job for me. I feel that it exhausts me from an existential point of view. I am sometimes surprised that I have managed to make so many films and I continue to ride this difficult and heavy boat, this vessel that is filmmaking. In my case, I have been helped, especially in my first films, by a producer who believed in me, who supported me in riding the vessel with me, and who respected me as if I were a great director. When I made my first film, I was very young and this is my explanation for the reasons why there are so few women directors that I like and admire, as compared to men: this is a particularly demanding job from a psychological point of view. It is most likely that a lot of creative personalities tend to fall back on writing which is anyway much more personal and requires far less emotional effort than the realization of a film. L. You have anticipated the rest of my questions when you have made reference to cinema as an art form that we cannot divide in male and female, at the same time the best directors are men and you have given me valid reasons. Going back to cinema directed by women, could we talk of a female cinema with women s values and themes and with a qualitatively different artistic gaze? Can we talk of a specific gender experience that is female in cinematographic aesthetics? A. You know, I do not think so in the sense that when someone is a narrator is a narrator. Probably the greatest narrator of female characters was Ingmar Bergman, the most profound, the most knowledgeable and also the most metaphoric. Let s say that I do not like films by women that tell women s stories with a female ideology (un ideologia donnesca). It seems to me that this is a terrible limitation of the gaze on life, because life is made of men and women, elderly people and children, rich and poor. Therefore, a narrator cannot live within his own skin, because the narrator is gaze, a gaze on others, obviously mediated by him/herself, the narrator is an individual, an artist who watches the world and his/her gaze is not neutral. Thus, I do not recognize the idea of female aesthetics in cinema, I do not see it and I cannot find it. There are women directors whom I like very much and who depict extraordinary male portraits. A great example is Jane Campion with her remarkable male characters like the one in her film Holy Smoke!, the character of Harvery Keitel was beautifully described. In the same way there are great male directors who present wonderful female characters with comparable strength. L. Your most recent film Domani received mixed reviews. You treated a very delicate theme and painful moment, the earthquake in Umbria. What is your reaction after its realization and distribution, and besides the journalistic, cinematographic reviews and the public s response? A. It is difficult to judge one s own films. Of all the films that I have made I have never quite understood why some went well and others did not, why

Flavia Laviosa 506 some were well received and others were not. It is always a mystery. I do my work always in the same way. I am aware of the fact that sometimes a film can be more successful than another, but I am unable to be critical if I do not have specific elements that are strictly connected with the nature of my work, so that I can say there I was wrong; this time I have to do it differently; this came out wrong . But these are forms of self-criticism that I do regardless of the outcome of a film. Even in my most successful films there are things that have left me dissatisfied and I think I could have done better. Therefore, it is very difficult for me to talk about my films and what they are in the world. I can talk about what they are for me because I made them or what moved me to make them, but how they are received by the world, I think is a mystery. François Truffaut used to say that one needed to start worrying when three films in a row went badly because we need to be aware of the mysterious nature of fate that makes a film go well or not. Films that were total flops in the course of some directors lives, gradually became their most important works. Let s think of 8 1/2 by Fellini which was fiercely attacked by critics and public as soon as it came out. Then La dolce vita had an extraordinary success; however, we probably remember Fellini as the director of 8 1/2. This is strange. Truffaut s film, which I like the most, The Two English Girls was considered his worst. I do not understand this, such a strong, passionate, intense film that was considered worse than Jules et Jim, for example. They were both adaptations of novels by the same author. There are mysteries in cinema. This happens because, even though cinema is an industry, each film is also a prototype. Therefore, no producer can really say that a successful film can be done in a certain way, otherwise cinema would suffer. While wine ends its process of fermentation in the bottle, beer ends its own in the glass because it needs to be poured in order to say that the drink is ready. It is the same thing for cinema in comparison to a novel. A novel is static, while cinema needs to be poured in a movie theater. Only when a film is projected in the theater, you understand from the audience s reaction, the strength of the film, if it has power and its need to live, its comprehensibility, in other words, its power of communication. L. Cinema is the art of 1900. It borrowed from all other forms of art. In your opinion, has cinema developed its own language, different from and independent of photography, theater, opera, figurative arts, etc.? Has cinema truly reached a level of expressive autonomy or is it still trying to find its own artistic language? A. Cinema acquired its own language when it was born. Cinema was immediately a new language that inherited from all other art forms, but that was not similar to anything else. Cinema is still exploring and will be exploring new forms for ever, like all other arts which have not stopped developing. Theater, much older, has not stopped searching, and in the same way painting and sculpture, even older, or literature are still elaborating new

Family and Art in Francesca Archibugi s Cinema 507 expressive ways. Cinema will never stop evolving. It was an established art as soon as it started with the Lumière brothers, and it was only waiting for its new poets to be able to grow. L. You are involved in the location scouting for a new film. May I ask you a question on this new project? A. I am shooting. This is really a special project. It is the first time that I work for television. A film for the Italian television in two episodes. It is a very personal adaptation of I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni. It is so personal that it is not even titled I promessi sposi, but Renzo e Lucia. So, this is my second costume drama and the second adaptation of a novel, after Con gli occhi chiusi by Tozzi. This film, Renzo e Lucia, is a way to analyze feelings and relationships in a different period. It is like portraying these feelings in a more abstract, less sociological, and in some ways, purer way. I am a realistic director, I have directed all my films in Rome, in a world that I know very well. So, now I feel the need of these incursions in the past. I feel the need for a self evaluation through this film. L. Where do you see yourself in the future? Where do you wish to be projected in an X number of years? In which way do you see yourself accomplished as a filmmaking and which direction will you take? A. I would like to become what I am now, in other words, to be able to make films and improve in order to go on narrating life. I do not see anything different in what I have been since I directed my first short feature film. To carry on working, sit at my computer every morning, when I am done writing, shoot, elaborate, edit, think, produce a film and see the public s reaction is what I aspire to. I am very attached to my work like an artisan. I would not want to become anything different, I would like to be better and follow the course of life. At the same time, my aim is not to change my status, and become for example a Hollywood director. I wish to be who I am and better myself. In twenty years from now, I see myself very much like the person and director I am now.

FLAVIA LAVIOSA Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachussetts