“I think Petri was one of the most important, but also for us foreigners, that we learned so much of Italy looking at his films”. So Margarethe Von Trotta presents himself at the Porretta Film Festival, a small spa in Emilia where the great director wanted to present a world premiere The working class goes to paradise (1971) and has been hosting the Elio Petri Award for the best Italian opera during the event directed by Luca Elmi. Berlinese class 1942, daughter of a noble Russian emigrant in Germany, actress for Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff and then filmmaker in turn, was honored with a partial retrospective. To accompany her friend Felice Laudadio, awarded last year in Porretta Terme with a recognition to the career of cultural organizer, as well as screenwriter and producer of The Long Silence (1993), projected for the occasion and rediscovered in its dramatic relevance. During the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, at the historic Hotel Helvetia, an interview with the press took place and then a public meeting. That’s what he told us.
How does it feel to be honored in such a festival linked to Elio Petri?
I remember and especially love the films with Gian Maria Volonté: In Investigation on a citizen above all suspicion was the music of Ennio Morricone, which I then had as a composer in The Long Silence, and when I think of that film I see Volonté with its safe expression and I feel the music, I can now feel it in my head. I think Petri was one of the most important of the time, but also for us German directors, who we learned so much about Italy watching his films. If we can understand something about Germany with ours, I believe that with his work we can understand things that we did not see “live”.
The long silence, focusing on his wife (Carla Gravina) of a magistrate (Jacques Perrin) who risked his life during an investigation into a traffic of weapons protected by politics, went out in less room than expected and then disappeared. Recently restored, now returns to the big screen of Porretta thanks to this retrospective. Looking at it today, what effect does it make?
I admit I haven’t seen him again for thirty years, since he was gone, and finding him impressed me more than I could have imagined. Felice Laudadio had the idea immediately after the death of Paolo Borsellino, driven by an emotional reaction, and immediately proposed it because he thought I was the right person. At first I was not sure that a German could tell such an Italian story: at the bottom only here from you there was a season of attacks on the judiciary of such magnitude and violence. Then I realized that it was a couple whose components protect each other and especially the drama of a woman who represented others, united with the grief of mourning but also in the battle for truth. That’s what I’m interested in, and that’s what we told.
Did Italian cinema play a decisive role at the beginning of its film adventure?
Of course, but I must confess that a more important role the French films had. At the end of the 50s I went to Paris to study the language and came into contact with philosophy students who had gone mad about what was happening with the New Vague, with those young directors making films for the young. We went to the movies all day, instead of college. But the spark I owe you to Bergman’s seventh seal. It’s looking at it that this passion came to me, followed by a strong desire that I didn’t tell anyone but because in a 19-year-old girl it would sound stupid, and so I kept it as a secret. When I had the opportunity to enter the world of cinema, first as an actress, it was an unconscious but also wanted act.
She went to direct with The Katharina Blum case, along with Schlöndorff, only in 1975.
This is because if men could start earlier, I think of Louis Malle who made the first film at 25 years and Schlöndorff at 26, all however soon, for women that possibility came later. In fact, today, that I am old, I must continue to recover lost years in my youth!
Did the experience as an actress help her to direct the actors?
Yes, I know what they need, how much attention and also patience I have to have to get results. When I acted, the directions were straight and perentorious: They said, “Go there! Do that! Do the other!”. There was no attention to small things. The directors didn’t know how to do it because they never acted. Only Fasbinder had made the actor, so he knew how to move.
What do you think of contemporary German cinema?
Today, German cinema is normal. Not surprising. You can make movies in Germany, but there are no masterpieces. If I think of Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski, who won a prize in Cannes, I see in this girl a hope for the future. But it is an exceptional case, not a school or a movement like the group that formed me, Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and others.
Speaking of Fassbinder, we know that the movie on Rosa Luxemburg was her project..
That’s right, he wanted to turn it, but he didn’t. Then the producer offered it to me as his friend, thinking that I could maintain a certain quality we say “fassbinderiana”, but I read the script and feeling too bulky his vision I asked to rewrite it. They allowed me because the intention was also to turn it to a woman, which for the first time in my life became an advantage. I took care of what Fassbinder had written with a collaborator and realized that it was not working for me because it was a total melodrama, without a single word really pronounced by Rosa Luxemburg herself. His speeches were also written with simple words for simple minds, when she was a great intellectual, and this bothered me because I thought it was a lack of respect. How could you steal your word? Anyway, I needed to figure out what he represented for me. Then I asked two years to do research on a figure I knew only of fame, as a socialist militant, but not as a person. I made a lot in East Berlin to go to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism where more than 2500 letters were preserved, impossible to find in the West. Then I made the film and I remember the annoyance I felt when in Italy he went out with the title Rosa L., to hide the surname so politically connoted and perhaps mask it from red light films… I will never understand how a country with a story like yours can be so afraid of politics.
How do you place the four female biographical films you’ve made on your path?
Three of those four were proposed to me, only the one on Ingeborg Bachmann was my project, and after many insistences I agreed to realize them. The one on Ildegarda of Bingen, for example, was presented in Rome but has never been distributed in Italy because, they told me, the Italians can no longer hear about saints [laughs]. However, these women are all very important to the history of the world and my first reaction is always not to feel at the height of the situation. If I did it, it’s because then by entering their lives, always through the letters, they talked to me. I add that I also made a portrait of Ingmar Bergman, albeit with the usual fear.
They often ask her about her female protagonists. How do you describe men? I think of those of Years of Lead, evidently more fragile than women protagonists.
I think I tell stories where men are not protagonists. I do not represent them weak, just less present. I only grew up with my mom and then attended a female college, so I met the other sex very late. I always had, and I still have, the impression of not understanding men. Women do, and not for feminism, but because I am a woman and this is my life. I can say I don’t think much about the male condition..
The article Festival del Cinema di Porretta Terme. Interview with Margarethe Von Trotta comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
