Winner of three awards at the International Critics Week at the Venice Film Festival, If ever, it is Giulia Cosentino’s new short film that talks about how everyday objects can charge themselves with new meanings. Through a reflection on the concept of ancient and contemporary kit, the short film addresses our connection with things and how they can tell our story, our dreams and the tension between desire and social expectation.
Intervista a Giulia Cosentino
La genesi del corto
Tell me about Se mai’s genesis, how did you get the idea of short film?
It was the time of one of my many movings and I was far from my things. With the fact that I’ve been around for a long time, I often thought that I lacked specific objects that were not particularly important or necessary, and from there I began to question the immaterial value that these things had in my life and how much I lacked as a personal identification. From this idea of working on the immaterial value of objects I imagined a story of a move and I did it through a story that concerned a separation because having thirty years it often happened around me also with friends and friends, so I linked together that need to talk about objects to what was instead a generational crisis.
At thirty years you fight for the first time with adulthood really, with what you have become and with those choices that determine then the next years of your life and after thirty years you start to actually consider what you want and what you do not want and this always creates a little confusion and loss and reflection and often puts in crisis couples. Above all, I believe that from the female point of view, it is a crisis because it is the first moment when we question ourselves about the possibility of having children or not, if it is a choice, if it is actually something that we want to carry out. Until that moment it is a question that has an answer in the future, far away, and instead it comes in a somewhat more preponderant way because it is defined as adult people.
Did you say in other interviews that the archive here came as a landing point rather than a starting point, considering that it is your first real fiction work as you worked in communicating archive and fiction?
It came as I learned in the sense that I had written a fiction film, the story of this day of translocation and this comparison through objects and therefore memory. The work on the photographs was already present and also the fact that I wanted to work on the idea that there were couples of other people and make history a little more collective.
It then seemed natural to continue the speech on the social roles that I carry out also from the other films through a reflection on the objects and on what was first the kit, I myself have one. So I wondered how this thing had influenced my life, obviously far away. I thought that the fact of having grown up with the idea of one day using sheets, towels within a stable house condition that I will never probably have with the life I’m facing, that it is the precarious life that the world has imposed on us, could be an echo that somehow at an imaginative level and therefore that the cinematographic language and not only with the dialogues on the subject could arise a reflection.
So I did a archive research on what existed in the Italian archives on the groom’s kit and I was a little surprised that not only did they exist as I could imagine amateur films of people who resume their own kits or their daughters’ kits before the wedding so their exposure, but even there were fiction films made in the Fifties and Sixties that they had as their theme the opposite. So in finding these films I really opened a world and it seemed interesting to use the archive this time not as a rewriting but also as a starting point and counterpoint to what I was imagining to shoot.
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Il lavoro sul suono
It is also very interesting to work on sound and on all the various sound tracks. There is an incarnation of the object, certainly linked to the theme of things, the teapot, the open diary… the objects have their own voice. Tell me about the work you did here and how you chose the sound sources you used
Already in writing I had identified some objects that in some way for me could speak and that they could also tell the temporal arc of the love story, a very beautiful love story, of comparison and of growth especially because I had no intention of telling a story of negative love or seeing possession or abuse apart from one of the two. Those who are lucky enough to live in the twenty years are love stories of growth, the idea of growing together can lead to a moment of life in which you no longer correspond, but they are stories that have a huge value in our lives.
These objects are normal objects, which are part of this growth together, are everyday objects, the teapot because bought in a market, as it could be the fork because found at home, the lights of Christmas because they concern a moment in which one does one thing together, the normality of the objects is the one from which I started and already in writing spoke, so I already had this idea that the temporal plan of the memory was only auditive, as if the things had.
It is as if they were just a bit of memory, as when we remember a conversation with someone, when we feel the smell of something or music that immediately pervades the body with a feeling of nostalgia and just resentment in that state of things, in that present. I think that somehow tactility can do this too, to take an object in hand sometimes brings us back to conversations, to a different dimension of who we were.
I worked in this direction both on the text, because it is something we immediately chose to do with the production delegate Francesca Bennett, and with the help of director Benedetta Barroero on dedicating a day only to the audio. We did three days of video shooting with the film, then the room department went away and we stayed with the sound and the actors and we did days as if it were just set but without camera, obviously turning in the bed the scenes of the bed, turning to the market the scenes of the market, going to the university to turn the scene of the agenda, as if it were a set but only of audio because even for the actors it was important to give back moments.
Il raffronto con i lavori precedenti
Like many of your previous works, I think of The first times but above all He and I, continue with the exploration of the tension between choice and patriarchal expectations, this time totally applied to the contemporary. Today it seems that women can realize themselves fully autonomously but sometimes they feel the weight of those who came before and could not do so. Some answers your protagonist, but the question is: do you think this freedom is a little illusory?
I don’t know how much you spend in the movie, but for me, yes, it is also personally. It seems to me that of course we live the possibility to choose that however is always relative considering that we never speak of class conditions that is one of the basic conditions for the choice in the life of those we want to be. We don’t all have the same chances, and I don’t just talk about gender issues, but just about economic issues, which is something that is always going on in the background, but it’s probably worth going back to class.
But not only this, the point is that obviously also the expectation of doing it, of being self-employed women, of having success as individuals so as people who have a value and therefore are recognized also by society as autonomous and independent, then it involves unintentionally also renunciations on the emotional and sentimental plane, I do not speak only of romantic love but also from the point of view of family love, as if then that social expectation of being.
There is always this teaching according to which you must love yourself before you love someone else who is something I don’t think much about, of course you have to work on yourself but I think that working on yourself means working through the eyes of others and through the good that we can give others otherwise we become crazy splinters and we won’t be able to do collectivity. So what I was trying to deal with in the film was precisely this further pressure that we young women of the present in Italy and in the west than to return even a little ‘ this ability of independence that sometimes does not belong to us.
What I would like to pass from the film is that everyone can be what they want and I believe that then the teaching of feminism and transfeminism is the idea that we have to accept for who we are in our desires. The question is how do we get to know what we really want? I don’t know, that’s a question I wonder how many other movies I’m gonna have to deal with, but I don’t have an answer, but it’s the thrust that led me to this movie.
Il tema del femminismo
This speech also reminds me of the short-lived feminism of the third wave, where career was a focal point. Surely economic independence remains a pillar, but is also interesting the reflection that the protagonist does in some way on capitalism: is it not also a push to hyperproduction? The tension between desire and conditioning according to you is overcome?
I hope so and I don’t think it works. We are now thinking about the consequences of what the third wave proposed to us and which does not seem to work entirely. Many of our colleagues a little bigger than us in choosing career at all costs do not seem to have had a positive feedback in their staff, it is more a collective speech in which we were again stuck, that of the “women in career”, those who did it, the exceptionality, who is that resists more to match the male model in which you can be good and therefore recognized in your professional lap.
I don’t know how much this thing works because then other things are missing that I don’t know what they are, it’s not that I think that making children is the answer of course, everyone needs to understand what their living space is. There are those who choose politics, those who activism, friendship or nature, each declines it as they want but I think it is failing both for males and for females the speech to make it at all costs. What is missing is a speech of being related that perhaps is the way we can live our lives on this planet.
In this sense I speak of inheritance, inheritance also for other women, the fact that my film can speak to younger directors is perhaps the most beautiful thing that can happen for the film and for me, not because I have to teach him something, indeed, but so that someone can even overwhelm him. That’s what I’m saying even when I work with the archive, the inheritance must be taken to be somehow reworked according to the models we have today. I don’t know if I responded, but I don’t think the capitalist model is for me.
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Yes, this girlboss model could be functional at some point in history, but now it seems to do more damage than anything else..
Yes, I think many of our older friends had to give up a lot of things to prove they can handle. I also realize in my work as a director that the expectation of my presence is different, I am still a woman with a lot of female aspects that I love so much of me, so even more emotional, pass me the term, but that anyway they are part of my person and obviously it also involves that I work differently.
I know that it is different to work with a man director who has his own awareness and probably lightness in making some choices compared to all the expectation that a director can have, is right there the difference that we can invest in time to try to improve. However there is a diversity and in this diversity it is important to explore what it means not to apply a male model.
It seems to me that at some point you raise the question of the kit as a burden that seems very emblematic, once it was psychological and bulky as predestination, here instead it is a literal burden, also physically heavy in the form of packages, envelopes and suitcases to move from one side to another. In a contemporaneity made of continuous movements and instability, what new value do things buy?
For me they have a huge value but I understand that then they are things that can be found. Perhaps the idea is more to be able to let go of some things, while the kit was the kit of the bride, made of things that have a huge value and for which they spent so much money people before you, things that were still sewn, worked, so they have just a material value as object in themselves and then they go to occupy the space “house” also in the perspective of having to manage it, to wash them, to have to take care of this idea.
In our lives clearly objects take a much more temporal value, we change houses, we change relationships, we change friends and we change offices so many times, so we almost never bring back the same things, our computer lasts to the maximum when it is good ten years, which is perhaps the object I hold most in hand and that most I need in my life since I study. So anyway they obviously have a different value, I don’t have an answer on what it is but it definitely has changed a lot, and perhaps in this there is also a freedom in being able to let go of things because we can also define ourselves in new ways.
The question is that we grow and change too, and we contradict who we were before, not to deny who we were but to be curious about who we will be and what we take back.
It is good to have the incredible fortune of having someone who stays at home and so to be able to return to the houses where there are objects that we have been, but it is not always so, here we also talk about a class speech that has changed completely, but that feeling there I think is evolving. At the same time in a world where everything is replaced when it breaks this thing changes, I am a person who continues to fix things because I like to have the same, I do not want to lose them, but I realize that it is not always so and that however many of the people around me instead tend to replace them with a lot of ease. Perhaps the reflection also came from why I have this attachment? I don’t know, but it is. And I believe that also the fact of coming from an experience for how marginal of kit has however influenced with the perception of things around me.
La regista Giulia Cosentino
The domestic space is dear to feminist cinema, you also speak of references to Chantal Akerman, not only Jeanne Dielman but I also think of the empty house of Je, you, the, elle… the house, the kitchen before were in some way totally feminine appannation instead now rebuilds a grammar of the couple. How did you relate to this history of cinema somehow moving its paradigm?
Look, for me, they’re films that obviously form me before I’m a director as a person, so I don’t think you can ignore who I am and how I look at the cinema if I exclude these films from my story of person who saw films, they’re too important, so even involuntarily they may influence as a watch.
For me the idea was that the objects had that value inside the house, but at the time when we move them they do not have the same value. The condition of that cage that is a golden cage, the place of course in which you feel serene and quiet in which you can make here such intimate speeches where you get to relate to such deeply personal topics, the feeling of home is an impatiable feeling, so for me also has a positive value the fact of being a house built in two differently from a house in which you have been inserted.
Rachel and Paul have a common house, you see that there are a lot of things about her and a lot of things about him, it is a house that surely shines of a communion of intent, it is not a negative house. That is the fact, for her to leave that condition so lucky and beautiful also creates a little difficulty together with the breakup of her personal crisis of having to imagine somewhere else. For me to see the house in an imaginative way assumes the value of containing so many things and return this brightness.
That’s why we filmed the film pretty much all day because it was winter. Catania, where the film is filmed, in winter it has the lights very much on the rose so that increase that feeling of nest and serenity and the house I chose it for a lot of time because I wanted it to have a relationship with going out, there is the sea near, the station below, you see the port… so there is a talk about what it means to stay and what it means to go and this fracture between who you might be elsewhere.
The house is beautiful
I loved it, but then it was practically empty, we completely furnished it, there was only the bed!
The scenography does a lot, but it seems super lived..
Thanks, Marta Morandini and Maria Carla Spartà are very proud then with a short film budget that is obviously not a movie budget… we made notes, we ripped things, took different glasses, I mean we really took a lot of time! The white belief in the film that is one of the few things we bought at the market, the others are almost all lent, then it was given to Maria Carla, all things we have a little divided. Many things were our own, there are a lot of my things, Marta, various friends, of my friends of Catania because I am of Catania so I just asked everywhere things on loan. The move to the end to return things to everyone in the end was complicated..
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It really seems to me a good collective work, as if the kit built by the scenography in this way was a generational kit in itself..
Yes absolutely, it seems to me an excellent reading. Many things that are in the house for example are of my friend Emma Baeri, a historic Catalan feminist to whom perhaps I owe the routing to feminism and who has just opened the door to me, a house full of beautiful things, with all the kite of his political and sentimental life and gave me space to take objects that then are part of the film. In the bedroom hanging on the left there is a tapestrie that then is a patchwork made by Emma, part of her feminist series on the poems of Emily Dickinson, patchwork she did with pieces of cloth found. It’s a little bit the same idea of reuse that I do with the archive, to recompose a bit of a scenography with objects that you find that though they are not perfect they can communicate.
I am also interested in the concept of the productive community of work. Here you fund stories that have revolved around you, photographs of different couples, which I think contributes to underlining the generational and intergenerational character of the work. How do you manage this plurality in your work?
I am very committed to it, in the sense that I have worked for many years and still work in different roles in the films of others and there I care a lot to marry the look of the film, not so much of the director/director, but it is very hard to find people who have your own instinct or a different instinct but that leads you to a better result. Perhaps that is the most important challenge when you make movies, understand what it means to be a director or a director not to impose himself on his own track but at the same time maintain his own vision. Because of course you listen to the very good people who give you different ideas and still let you feel a little bit influenced by the eyes of others, instead it is beautiful to be in that middle way that instead is profitable to elevate the idea of the film with the eyes of others.
For me working with others is really important, I need to know that everyone is believing in the project, I feel a bit demanding in this. I am very careful, however, to respect it myself, so for example I sent the postcards to all those who did not manage to come to Venice. I still think that you need to return this because it’s a huge energy when someone marries the film, it’s just a gift of life, because it’s not just a practical job, not just doing things because you have to do them.
For example, the relationship I have with the sound climber Marzia Cordò that I carry back from Le primi volte, is however fundamental because the work we did on the sound came from discussions we had before the shooting and however it is strange to work on the sound assembly before you staged a film. But for me the relationship with her is a creative space, professional but also human in which I can express myself and in which I know that I have in front of someone who limits me in good, which nevertheless makes me evolve in the artistic project. It is very difficult for me to create the community, but it is also necessary for the film. For me in the movies it feels right if there was a good teamwork.
I know if things just came out, but you already have new plans coming?
Yes, I am working on a long film that speaks of inheritance and always of course feminism, but of generational inheritance between mothers and daughters. I really like the idea of translating the issue of roles not only in contexts of couple and love, but on mothers and daughters.
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