LILIANA CAVANI. LOSSES, KNOWLEDGE AND INSIGHTS
Liliana Cavani is the creator of a maverick and controversial cinema which is free from any dogmatism. She always points to the crisis— whether historical, social, spiritual or psychic in character— as a tool to interpret reality, which translates into a painstaking inquiry into subjective representations in which metaphors, symbols and visions take shape and design spaces. Her work Is the story of that uncertain exploration through the mystery of personal experiences, which lead the protagonists to be located inside and outside the walls of history and time in a continuos experimentation, among losses, knowledge and insights. Hers are movles dealing with stories of restless men and women who love and suffer without ever avoiding any kind of trial. An anthropology of unheroic heroes, of human beings who are at the same time conventional archetypes in a guided tour led by Cavani, who is immersed in the world, distorting truths and clichés, suggesting doubts that are reflected in the viewer with the same wit and visionary capacity that so often characterizes the lens of her camera.
Born in Carpi, Modena, in northern Italy, Liliana studied classical philology in Bologna and founded a film club in her hometown. After graduation, the film world became a possibility for her to work. In the Rome of the early sixties, she was the only woman in the course on directing at the Experimental Centre of Cinernatography, and a few years later she became its best fernale student. During that period Cavani began writing, inaugurating an epoch as an es sayist and publicist on culture and current events that she continues today.
After a series of documentaries of extraordinary strength and quality (between 1961 and 1965 she shot Storia del Ill Reich, L’età di Stalin, La donna nella Resistenza and Philippe Pétain: Processo a Vichy), in 1966 she directed Francesco d ‘Assisi for the Italian public television network (Rai). This film was the debut of a new creative filmmaker who caught everyone by surprise with her incisive and independent personality. Her profesional expertise and artistic talent were confirmed with Galileo, where she confronted, through a sumptuous formal construction, the relationship between culture and power. Galileo was commissioned by the Rai, which subsequently abandoned the project fearing it could be too anticlerical. In 1969 her first work that was not commissioned came out: a visionary account of Sophocles’ Antigone entitled / Canibali The Cannibals). Those were the years of discontent, of political violence and liberation, the more creative, pacifist and spontaneous aspects of which were absorbed by this unique work to be restored later as mythical images. After the resounding success of this film at the New York Festival, a major distributor offered to distribute her film in the U.S on the condition that the last fifte en minutes be changed to a happy ending. However, as expected, Cavani refused.
In one of her most beloved films, Milarepa, she gave us a beautiful portrait of the Tibetan yogi and poet of the same name. It was a decisive work in which the director showed the results of her investigation of mythopoesis (or myth-making), the collective creation of myths, tales or stories related to a community and the social function they fulfill in society: “What an extraordinary experience (largely forgotten) to see a truly beautiful film.,” wrote Pasolini (1). However, there were films like The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte), which Visconti defined as ‘heartbreaking, cruel and terrible […] made with unique wisdom and a great deal of balance (2) and Beyond Good and Evil (Al di là del bene e del male), about Lou Salomé’s, Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Paul Ree’s amorous experiment, which earned her the aura of an uncomfortable and shocking creator in part, because her films aroused censorship and, especially abroad, they fueled lively intelectual debates.
The Night Porter—a reflection on Nazism that turns into an analysis of love as an absolute psychic place— is the most highflown and srident chapter of a distinguished career marked by a cosmopolitan vocation visible and tangible in the contents, scenarios, historical and cultural territories which have been explored. Her films that were present in the major international festivals recelved the spectators’ approval, prompted debates, stimulated insights in the U.S.and Europe, especially in France, although also in Spain Arnoldo García del Vall dedicated a monographto her in 1980.
Her American period was given a boost by the resounding box office success of The Night Porter and by the constant echo of her work in specialized criticism, which reached its climax with her recognition by Princeton University, where Gaetana Marrone published The Gaze and the Labyrinth (3) -a retrospective of Cavani’s films. There was also an underlying internationality in the productive combinations of the actors and actresses in her films, in which she directed international casts (Pierre Clementi, Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Erland Josephson, Robert Powell, Marcelo Mastrolanni, Claudia Cardinale, Burt Lancaster, Mickey Rourke, John Malkovich…).
What stand out from the 80’S are La Pelle (Skin), a screen version of the novel written by Curzio Malaparte in the shape of a fresco on the liberation in Naples; The Berlin Affair (Interno Berlinese), inspired by the novel Quicksand by the Japanese Jun’ichirô Tanizaki, and the unforgettable second journey to the universe of Assisi, in which together with Rourke she created the definitive Francesco, with a very physical and passionate Francis. In 2002 the American production company Fine Line Features entrusted to Cavani Ripleys’s Game, adapted from the novel with the same title written by Patricia Highsmith, in which she directed John Malkovich. In 2005 with De Gasperi, l’uomo della speranza and in 2008 with Einstein, Cavani returned to the television word, a medium for which she made a film on gender violence, entitled Troppo amore.
The questioning of reality is a constant in all her work and nothing seems to reflect this better than the movement, which is, in fact, the foundation of her entire filmography: the movement of inquiry, often risky and never comforting, artistic choice, vocation. Movement considered as freedom to extend her gaze and awareness.
For all these different reasons, taking into account her status as an ever critical, independent and free filmmaker, for her ample, original filmography full of intelectual and aesthetic provocations, 2INEBI, the Bilbao Film Festival, awards her in full justice the Mikeldi of Honor Award in its 53th edition.
Francesca Brignoli
Independent researcher, Liliana Cavani’s cinema specialist
- (1) Pasolini, La pazzesca razionalità della geometría religiosa, «Cinema Nuovo», 229, magglo-giugno 1974.
- (2) Marrone, Lo squardo e i1 labirinto. Il cinema di Liliana Cavani, Marsilio, Venezia 2003, p. 208.
- (3) Marrone, The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Lillana Cavani, Princeton University Press, NJ, 2000.
