Paolo Benvenuti is one of the greatest contemporary Italian directors, yet his masterly opus has until now remained almost unknown to international and Italian audiences alike. Becoming active in the late 1960s, Benvenuti found his first source of inspiration in the popular culture of Tuscany, after which he choose history as his primary subject matter. Benvenuti sees Italy as a country that dismisses history. For Benvenuti, making films based on thorough historical research, questioning the cinematic presentation of history and inviting the audience to actively interpret the meaning of historical facts is a culturally and politically relevant stance, an act of resistance against a cultural climate that invites oblivion and revisionism.
Content aside, Benvenuti is a real master of rigueur and visual composition. Never following cinematic vogues, Benvenuti has been painstakingly pursuing his own brand of timeless cinema. Like no other Italian filmmaker in the past two decades, Benvenuti has consistently moulded his palettes and compositions after the immensely rich tradition of Italian painting. Each and every frame of his films is thus bestowed with the immaculate beauty of a tableau vivant, respectfully paying homage to its model, yet claiming a life of its own.
Son of the reputed cinematographer Mario Benvenuti, Paolo was born in Pisa in 1946. He initially devoted himself to painting, completing his studies in the Arts. In 1968, however, he plummeted into an inspirational crisis. At that point, he discovered cinema. In May 1968, he followed a seminar organized by Adriano Aprà and Dario Menon in Reggio Emilia, discovering American and Italian underground cinema as well as Vertov’s Man with the Camera and Godard’s The Chinese (La Chinoise). Later that year, he took another seminar organized by Aprà and Menon in Venice, where he became acquainted with the masterpieces stored in the archives of the Venice Film Festival: Mizoguchi, Dreyer, Bresson, but most of all, Rossellini’s Europa ’51.
These two eye-opening seminars convinced Benvenuti and other young artists from Pisa to organize a film-making collective. They decided to call themselves Gruppo Cinemazero, as they intended to start ‘from zero’ in order to revive the pureness of the Lumière brothers’ cinema. In the heated political climate of ‘68, they could not help becoming the local voice of student protest by their filming of demonstrations, strikes and confrontations with the police. At this time, Benvenuti anonymously directed two shorts, Il balla balla and Off Side (Fuori giuoco).
The group also organized a Rossellini retrospective in Pisa, with the revered maestro in attendance. The encounter with Rossellini was a key event in Benvenuti’s apprenticeship to film-making. Benvenuti recalls he once asked the maestro how he would choose where to place the camera. Rossellini replied that he always chose the point of view that maximized information for the audience. To this day, Benvenuti keeps this teaching as a touchstone of his cinematic approach.
In 1971, Benvenuti directed the documentary On the Pisa Mount (Del monte Pisano). While exploring the Tuscan countryside, Benvenuti came across the remnants of the local rural culture. Amongst a group of peasants and shepherds, he found the last treasure-keepers of its main cultural expression, the maggio. An indigenous form of drama in verses, the maggio was staged every year in the month of May (maggio in Italian), from plays written by the farmers themselves.
This discovery led to the making of Medea, Benvenuti’s first major work. The film presents the rigorous staging of an original maggio, starring some of the old farmers from the town of Buti who still mastered the maggio tradition. Medea was invited to the Forum of Berlin Film Festival, and spawned a revival of the maggio.
The success of the film brought Benvenuti to a second key encounter. Jean-Marie Straub saw Medea and asked to meet Benvenuti and the peasants from Buti. Deeply fascinated by the rural culture of Tuscany, Straub decided to relocate to Italy and work with the farmers. Between 1972 and 1975, Benvenuti worked as Straub’s assistant, most notably on Moses und Aron.
Working for RAI television’s experimental programme in 1973, Benvenuti directed A Fragment of Vulgar Chronicle (Frammento di cronaca volgare), a film Benvenuti today regards as too heavily influenced by Straub. Nevertheless, this was the first time Benvenuti based his script on rigorous historical research, namely the war between Pisa and Florence (1494-1509)
In 1976, following the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Benvenuti conducted a round of interviews to feel the pulse of the public on the subject of Pasolini. However, the result, Pasolini: Morte di un poeta badly displeased the sponsors, who made the film disappear.
After two more films for TV centred on the tradition of maggio, Il cantamaggio and Children of Buti (Bambini di Buti), Benvenuti found his true voice in a rapturous short, Il cartapestaio (1979). Filming the creative process of a master of papier mâché sculptures, Benvenuti established one of the tenets of his cinema from then on: emotion.
Around that time, after reading Mario Brelich’s L’opera del tradimento, a provocative investigation into the character of Judas, Benvenuti started thinking about his first feature, Judas’ Kiss (Il bacio di Giuda). He would have to wait a decade before making it, though. In the meantime, he shot another short documentary, The Day of the Regatta (Il giorno della regatta) (1983), and did extensive research on the Gospels in preparation for his script.
Finally, in 1986, he received state funding of 250 million lire to make his début feature. However, Benvenuti could only complete Judas’ Kiss in 1988, when the film was invited to the Venice Critics’ Week, and RAI and the state distributor Istituto Luce decided to sponsor the post-production. Despite great critical praise, the film was only released the following August. This was Benvenuti’s first in a series of unfortunate, missed chances to meet the Italian audience.
In 1992, Benvenuti completed his second feature, Confortorio, based on historical research into the execution of two Jews in the Papal Rome of 1736. Invited in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, the film never found a commercial distributor in Italy – a fate that was shared by Benvenuti’s following feature, Tiburzi (1996). Made to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the brigand Tiburzi, the film is anything but commercially appealing: devoid of all the action that one could expect from a brigand’s biopic, it dissects social and political issues related to the central character and reflects on the representation of history through cinema.
Thanks to unanimous critical praise, Gostanza da Libbiano (2000), the hauntingly beautiful rendition of a trial for witchcraft, did marginally better and found limited release. However, this rigorous and thought-provoking masterwork deserved much more, if only for the monumental performance by Lucia Poli.
In 2003, Benvenuti was invited to the Venice competition with Secret File (Segreti di stato), a film that violently divided Italian critics. Based on historical research first suggested by Danilo Dolci, a political activist mostly remembered for his non-violent struggles against the Mafia, Secret File investigates the 1947 massacre of Portella della Ginestra and exposes the political workings of the Mafia and American secret services, the dark founding pillars of the Italian Republic. For once, Benvenuti had a producer and a distribution backing him, but the film could not enjoy its succès de scandale. Benvenuti claims, in fact, that shortly after a question about the film was raised in the Parliament, the distributor decided to pull it from the movie theatres.
With his sixth feature, Puccini and the Young Girl (Puccini e la fanciulla), Benvenuti returned to independent production modes. Completed last year on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Puccini’s birth, this enchanting and subtle film shedding new light on the composer’s love affairs is perhaps Benvenuti’s most experimental work to date, as well as the first he co-signed with his wife Paola Baroni (who has been a collaborator since Gostanza da Libbiano). Avoiding the use of dialogue, the narration develops only through the reading of epistolary correspondences and through a complex musical texture meant to convey the emotional backbone of the picture. The chromatics and the compositional architecture, on the other hand, are the result of close research on the vistas of the second generation of Macchiaioli artists active at Torre del Lago, where Puccini owned his villa.
Paolo Bertolin is programme advisor for the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica. —IFFR
