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QUANDO DAL CIELO (Wenn aus dem Himmel) | Fabrizio Ferraro, Italien 2015 | © Viennale

AT FILMS: An Interview with Fabrizio Ferraro

17 Oct 2021

AT FILMS: An Interview with Fabrizio Ferraro

A closer look at your seven films screening in the Viennale program reveals the interaction of your filmmaking with other art forms – whether with painting in SEBASTIANO, music in QUANDO DAL CIELO, sculpture in COLOSSALE SENTIMENTO, Walter Benjamin's philosophy in GLI INDESIDERATI D’EUROPA or poetry in LA VEDUTA LUMINOSA.

First of all, let it be said that art in general, everything that is to find its expression in some form through human hands, is ultimately a way of fighting against the finiteness of life. This state of hopelessness, which is the same for everyone in every era, inspires us to create something that will outlive us, and often these very things become the life inspiration for a person who is close to death. The same is true for me. Building a relationship with the traces that other people have left behind keeps me alive and gives me the opportunity to look at very concrete things – like how we breathe or walk, but also how we deal with clichés, typical buzzwords of our time, and other things.

Film as a medium has a great quality: it allows knowledge or cognition to be reformulated, to be remembered. “Learning is remembering,” according to Plato. Apart from the need to define a limited space that contains something closed, object-like, cinema is characterized by a processuality that serves precisely to relate things to each other anew, so that a free space, a certain openness is created, whereby the relationships between the elements and also the artistic forms of expression are redefined.

As for SEBASTIANO and Mantegna’s image with its corresponding representation of the saint, the film tries to make the work disappear because, once completed, it also becomes the separating element between us and the world, and in an almost reassuring way. So, on the one hand, there is the disappearance of Mantegna’s image with all that it says and contains, and on the other hand, there is St. Sebastian (now outside this pictorial representation), who then becomes interrelated again with everything else that occurs in the film.

COLOSSALE SENTIMENTO is about a work of art that was rejected at the time of its creation and is transported to its original destination. This is not just a case of transporting something, but a kind of recreation of this work that reappears on the scene at another time and place, which is accomplished by both the workers and the film itself. This is not an intellectual, conceptual thing, but something very concrete. One could say that COLOSSALE SENTIMENTO redefines the time of the Roman baroque, through remembering Francesco Mochi’s importance as a sculptor, but also the installation of his work in its already mentioned destination, the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. In order to thematize today’s times, there is no need for social analysis or a true-to-life depiction of the current situation, but rather to point out connections and situations that bring cinematic reality into play and can also be found in other works, because otherwise one runs the risk of making “blind” cinema.

SEBASTIANO | Fabrizio Ferraro, Italien 2016 | © Viennale

In your films, reference to the present and confrontation with the world are realized through the means of cinema: through camera angles, the sound, the rhythm of the images. It doesn’t matter whether it’s about Berlin in the third millennium or Walter Benjamin on the French-Spanish border ...

Everything is reformulated: There is no separation whatsoever between inside and outside, between what can and can’t be seen in the picture; there is no clearly delimited set, but everything constantly alternates. Thus, spatial and temporal boundaries are demolished, they disappear completely and condense into the path that a group of people travel together during the time the film is realized. There is no past and no present, nor is there just one single space – it is, rather, times and spaces that belong very concretely to the respective work and don’t run linearly but coexist in one and the same moment.

An example of this would be the Aurelian Wall in SEBASTIANO, where a stone from 200 AD can be found next to a script from the 1960s and another from a slightly later period. Film as a medium has the great ability to condense everything.

Over the years, I have come to realize that everything is “in the picture,” quasi an on and an off at the same time, because the illusion of life, which cinema can be seen as, constantly entails a motion into and out of the shot.

This other, condensed time also allows you to treat Walter Benjamin and Hölderlin in the same cycle about the “indesiderati,” the “unwanted.” What does “unwanted” mean to you?

Each era has its own truth and consequently also its own conformism. This also goes for the anticonformism of the 1970s, as in contrast to today, all those who didn’t want to submit to the spirit of rebellion were ostracized. This exclusion is based on a mechanism that turns the truth of one’s own time upside down, because truth also changes over time and every historical epoch is considered better by the people of that epoch than the one before it. All those who are marginalized during their own time go searching elsewhere. We often notice later that this search had its own truth and strength, which was perhaps even greater than the one in the dominant culture. This mechanism of exclusion is the same each time; every era has its “unwanted,” regardless of the changing means and technological innovations. Anyone who ventures into rather unknown territory without sounding everything out in detail beforehand, and brings into play the conflicts of life, its difficulties, which are ultimately always the same, is pilloried. Because everything that is not only a confirmation of what is already known and doesn’t offer comfort, any security, is, rather, avoided.

I try to make films that capture fragments of life, even if that means making choices that I know in advance will not be accepted. But that’s a risk that must be taken if the work is to have its own form that isn’t subject to the trends and values of the time. It doesn’t matter if that means remaining marginalized.

Image of movie Les Unwanted de Europa

The “passeur,” a smuggler or human trafficker, is a central figure in CHECKPOINT BERLIN, where this motion into and out of shot you mentioned before is somehow there.

Absolutely! I believe that the passeur stands precisely for this bringing into connection of both sides. It establishes contact between several spaces and consequently the different truths of time; it’s a figure that connects what we consider to be separate. In a certain way, it also has something religious about it, reminds us of the spiritual. However, this term, which was taboo for years but now seems to be very common again, refers to a rift, a gap, like a cave or cinema as an art form itself. And in this rift, everything is hidden. The passeur in CHECKPOINT BERLIN moves along the thin strip of the Wall, the so-called death strip, which belonged neither to East nor to West Berlin, where nothing seems to be, but everything is, because it is exactly in this undefined space that everything condenses. The passeur enjoys privileged status – like a corpse, as various writers and painters have also emphasized. In this corpse, which appears dead to us, there is all life, which is simply there and lies before us in its perfection, but at the same time it brings us into contact with something completely unknown. Despite its motionlessness, we know that it’s a body that is still changing, and there’s a strong parallel to film as a medium.

You yourself cover a lot of areas in your films, from the script to the camera to the editing, sometimes also the sound design, and you always follow the production process directly or from close up. This gives you a lot of control over your work …

No, I’m doing it precisely to leave room for the “uncontrolled.” My team, with whom I’ve been working for years, and I are just trying to get something rolling that isn’t subject to control. We work more like a jazz band, that is, there’s a horizon, an idea, but it’s never laid out like a road that has a specific starting and ending point. It’s the stumbling blocks, the encounters and clashes along the way that make up the harmony of the work. The diversity of a creation lies more in coincidences and the unforeseen and less in the original ideas, even if we’re often inclined to see it the other way round. For this, you have to be attentive and to constantly sharpen all your senses.

CHECKPOINT BERLIN | Fabrizio Ferraro, Italien 2020 | © Viennale

The places and things in your footage always have a presence of their own, the settings are fully-fledged protagonists. You could say that there is no background.

Exactly, there is no background because everything is constantly turned upside down, which means that once such a creative process has begun, everything is constantly in flux, i.e. everything goes blow by blow and develops without ever finding a point at which to pause. Unfortunately, in most films, the screen is seen as a background onto which ideas and conversations are to be projected, as if they were following a compass and a precise route, with a destination in mind ... But such a concept only makes it as far as the screen at most, which is also a wall, and that’s where it ends.

If, on the other hand, you allow freer development, trust your instincts and are present with all your senses, everything is constantly in motion. Even a person who isn’t moving at the time, or in fact everything that is present in any way, will then be part of an exchange, a confrontation, or be at one with the whole environment. A living work, even if it’s from the 1930s or 1950s, will continue to change and still amaze us today; if it’s a speech, on the other hand, it will reveal all the limits and truths that this speech has set for itself from the start. The very process of seeing/watching is a constant flight in which we’re in search of something, whether we’re in a dark cinema theater or on a mountain in the Pyrenees.

As mentioned earlier, you’re responsible for a lot of the phases of the creative process yourself, but you’re still keen to emphasize collective authorship. Your films emerge from a “we” rather than an “I.”

It’s important for there to be a group in which there’s an exchange, where there are different opinions and where, in different ways, you try to interact harmoniously with your environment. This environment has to get involved in the game that makes up such a cinema.

Marcello Fagiani, Fabio Parente, Marta Reggio, Felice D’Agostino, and Marco Teti are all people who come from different backgrounds and feel and perceive things in different ways. They then get involved in the game of cinema that never gives answers but continues to ask questions – of both the authors and the viewers. Our sets are anything but a film studio, there are no predefined roles, everything is in a constant state of change. Over the years, other people have joined us, like the producer Luis Miñarro, but they are always people who get involved in the game.

If you had to determine an order in which viewers should watch your seven films presented at the Viennale, would you say it’s best to see them in chronological order?

Yes, that’s probably best because each film is complemented and expanded by the next. Some things can’t be brought to a conclusion in one film alone and are then taken up again in the next, but perhaps they aren’t concluded there, either, and then come up another time. This is because a form of cinema that constantly wants to ask questions but doesn’t provide answers always raises new questions and opens up new perspectives.

Fabrizio Ferraro

 

Cinematography: THOUGHTS AND IMAGINATION