In the wake of the success of Portobello, the new series by Marco Bellocchio produced by HBO Max and presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival that tells the case Tortora, Fabrizio Gifuni met the editorial staff and the students of the film school, explaining how he faces his roles, his history and his artistic vision, the relationship with the characters he has played and the role that, according to him, the cinema has (or should have) in a society as we live in.
“The work of preparation is a work in which the most important thing is to have time available for me” he said, talking about the immersive work of research, reading and deepening to prepare a given character. “This dive accompanies what I call an interiorization process, as if all this material starts slowly entering your body […] and is almost an alchemic process. ”, explaining that “the work on the character is just a kind of body to body“. According to Gifuni, in fact, “there is something that you give of your body to this ghost and something that the ghost’s body gives to you“, giving rise to a sort of third body in which the actor is at the service of the character and not in the foreground.
It follows a great work both on the look of the character, and on his voice, his way of speaking. “Language is one of the elements on which very soon attention is paid. ” he said. “The attention to the linguistic component is because I am convinced that the thought is formed in that [data] language” explained, and then to make as an example his approach to the character of Basaglia, which he interpreted in the miniseries Once upon a time the city of the matti… of Marco Turco not ignoring his Venetian being. For Gifuni it is not about maniacality, but of the fact that as “his thought [of a character] is formed in a language and therefore if you betray that language you are already telling another character.”.
The meeting continued with a reflection on the role of Aldo Moro, protagonist of Esterno Notte, always of Marco Bellocchio, and on that of Enzo Tortora and on the similarities and the thematic differences that he found himself facing. “The theme of the cage is undoubtedly there, are two existences that are suddenly deprived of freedom and are put in a place of compulsion,” he said. “What happens in those fifty-five days [for Moro], as well as what happens in Tortora in the last five years of his life is another life.” He then told how to turn into real prisons and in the classroom of Poggio Reale helped him to better understand and approach these issues.
Speaking of Aldo Moro, the comparison with Gian Maria Volonté was spontaneous. Both played the president of Christian Democracy twice, Gifuni in Romenzo of a massacre and Esterno Notte and Volonté in Todo Modo and in Il caso Moro. He then told how he was a reference model for actors’ work and his political and social commitment and his struggle for the rights of actors, but refusing any kind of comparison. “The great actors must stimulate your creativity, they must challenge you”, but they are “unique and unrepeatable”.
Returning to Portobello, Gifuni then told his relationship of friendship with Lino Musella and the specularity of the character of Pandico, interpreted by the latter, and Tortora, who has never considered himself a martyr. He has therefore emphasized the difference with Aldo Moro, who son of a Catholic formation, uses in his letters a language and a biblical imagination. He then told how during his teens he followed the process in Tortora on Radio Radicale, with attention both to the legal dynamics (of which he would shortly be enrolled in the faculty of jurisprudence), and to the more theatrical ones: “With an ear I listened to understand the legal mechanism […], with the other ear I listened to him as a theater man, because he was evident also not seeing, but only listening, that that was theater that was consumed on the skin of people.”.
“Everything is life” he said, underlining how his experiences affect in any case the reflection before the interpretation of a role. “I began to mature over the years this idea of ghosts that are the ghosts of our history and in particular on this idea of these two bodies, that of Pasolini and that of Moro“, recalling the theatrical show with Giuseppe Bertolucci. For Gifuni, the two “trace a kind of border line between two Italie” and help “decipher better the nightmare in which we have been precipitated in recent years.” It emphasizes the importance of cinema and theatre to better understand these ghosts. “I have a lot of confidence in the function they can perform, which is not a substitute function”, to replace the study of history. At the same time, however, “can ignite a curiosity for which those ghosts you go looking for.”.
“My relationship with ghosts makes me compare to him when one of these comes to visit, but I never go looking for him. ” he then stated, responding thus to the question on possible future roles that he would like to interpret, including that of Marco Pannella. “In that act of will”, in fact, “something breaks for me in contact with the ghost”.
L’articolo Give body to history: meeting with Fabrizio Gifuni proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
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