At a time when anyone can proclaim the importance of anything, it’s audacious to try to say what can be seen in the work of a filmmaker who was unknown two years ago, who is still little regarded today, and who has the characteristics most likely to arouse the crass contempt of first-degree thinkers. By the latter I mean the innumerable cohort of intellectuals without taste, judgment or genius who populate cafés, magazines and certain cine-clubs, drunk on culture and politics, incapable of mastering a world they perceive through theoretical filters of strangely diverse colors and distortions, and even less capable of sensing life or its absence in a work of art. They think at the first degree, because they are only interested in the appearance of the work, the ambition of its themes, the complexity of its forms, its cultural references, everything that makes up this more or less richly decorated envelope that they never think of opening.
These very banal observations — at least, one would hope they are — must nevertheless be reiterated, since the misunderstanding continues, now that, after Fellini and Bergman, it is Antonioni and Resnais that we must endure. Our unfortunate contemporaries stubbornly confuse aestheticism with beauty, boredom with seriousness, intelligence with professors.
But this has been the case in all eras, and this preamble has no other purpose than to situate Cottafavi in his true place as a meteorite, ‘calm block fallen down here from some obscure disaster’. Not just another director to be delivered as prey to the devouring snobbery of the masses, not just the latest in a line of a thousand ‘geniuses’ to be discovered by a few excited teenagers, but one of the rare filmmakers worth speaking up for, to let some fraternal minds know about their importance.
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If we must insist on the possibility of a misunderstanding about Cottafavi, it is out of goodwill towards an oeuvre that by no means begins with La rivolta dei gladiatori, and which has absolutely no connection, other than the needs of the script, with problems of the order or Roman history and mythology, such as we might see evoked in laudatory articles (just as it was once believed that a self-portrait could be detected in Losey’s M). The truth is that the best of this work predates the Cinemascope period, in black and white films such as Il boia di Lilla, I piombi di Venezia and Traviata 53. Intensely focused on two or three characters, they operate in a register of acute passion that is more in keeping with the director’s preoccupations — as his own remarks make clear — a register whose existence can here be explained by the relative freedom that such low-budget, low-circulation productions paradoxically ensure.
This is why the infatuation of certain young enthusiasts for what its most gifted representative himself jokingly calls ‘neo-mythologism’ seems at the very least imprudent. One must hear Cottafavi speak, with the hushed irony that he wraps around himself like a mosquito net, about these big, noisy, colorful machines that he builds, as he puts it, in the spirit of children’s comic books (this was in reference to Ercole). Similarly, he was not a little surprised to receive both praise and blame for an ancient marivaudage entitled Le vergini di Roma, since he only filmed a handful of shots before leaving the set.
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Vittorio Cottafavi has not yet given the best of himself, although Il boia di Lilla needs another viewing, and may be wholly admirable. But this film has been off our screens for over two years, preventing us from verifying a judgement that is already dated. In it, an astonishing mise en scène was defined, precious and paroxysmal, that owed nothing to anyone, least of all to the neorealism then in ascendancy. A cinema of passion, torture, terror and love was invented before our astonished eyes, in sparse gestures, looks of stone, ice and metal, and deafening silences. One could subsequently find, mainly in I piombi di Venezia, and to a lesser extent in La rivolta dei gladiatori and Le legioni di Cleopatra (despite the intermittent interest their author had in the latter two films), the same reflexes of acute sensitivity around certain young women, treated with the utmost cruelty, whipped, branded with hot irons, devoured by wild beasts, crushed, bitten by snakes, to the extent that there can be no question of coincidences — the true subject of all these films lies in the suffering of the flesh, its anguish, and its death. In each shot, a tragedy of the order of the physical is established, a radiant world becomes a gallows bristling with spikes, in which the creature struggles, pinned down, frozen in horror. But the tragedy is interspersed with moments of happiness, which might better be described as joy, or, more physically still, as pleasure, a pleasure as heightened as the pain it erases, so true is it that this sensibility only exists in torment or exultation, in all cases violently electrified. Only in Cottafavi’s films have I seen sunlight photographed in such a way, determining a rawness of blacks and whites, the latter almost chalky, that is so perfectly suited to scenes in foliage or by water. A rawness that indeed indicates in Cottafavi’s present technique an amateurism that is less commendable, even if some of the results enchant us, because we do not subscribe to the principle that has been in vogue for a few months according to which a shaky camera is necessarily a sign of genius and a grayish photograph of current events has more style than precise lighting that gives life and brilliance. But Cottafavi, as we have said, is inventing cinema: we must forgive an autodidact his clumsiness, his juvenile preciosities, awkward framings, occasionally jammed découpage — the engine coughing and starting up again. Let’s not forget that Fritz Lang began to master his mise en scène around his fiftieth year of age, the twentieth of his career. What matters here are the times he has pierced most deeply through the crust of habit and the red mask of the Prince.
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At the beginning of Il boia di Lilla, the heroine’s face freezes when she hears the gallop of horses, as she murmurs: ‘The musketeers…’. In I piombi di Venezia, a duke is dueling. He has just been injured. He ends up offscreen, but returns, his face and body stupefied, already encroaching on death: he walks into it, as if discovering with immense astonishment his own end, gradually engulfed by it until he falls. In Fiamma che non si spegne, still not distributed in France, a scene shows a young woman who learns that her husband is about to be killed. She understands this through an exchange of glances, through the weight of the silence that greets her as she enters the house. She retires to her bedroom. We don’t see her face at first, but she turns towards the camera with tears welling up. And we witness the slow and ineluctable invasion of a soul by grief, filmed face to face in this room, in this absolute solitude, as if, having broken in, we were looking with a kind of sacred awe at something that no one should see.
These examples illustrate a key element of Cottafavi’s mise en scène, the notion of invasion, which dominates moments of crisis. He is the only filmmaker who systematically exploits the onset of crisis, instead of immediately moving on to its established expression. All attention is fixed on the transition from the calm to the storm, the infinite second when the individual is caught in an intimate transformation that deprives them of their freedom and lucidity, directing them entirely towards a single end and, so to speak, mineralizing them in their passion. It is this petrification of the individual that the camera discovers, giving us the vertiginous sensation of violating a secret, of entering a forbidden zone, like what is written across a woman’s face at the moment when pleasure seizes her and carries her away. Similarly, scenes that are decorative in the noble sense, in which the sublime is no longer of an intimate but of a collective and spectacular nature, and which use the symmetry of gestures and décor to the fullest possible extent, result in a liturgy of preparation: whether revolt or capital punishment, these events are preceded by an establishment of the system from which they will ensue like a geometrical consequence; an establishment that holds almost all the attention. For example, at the end of Fiamma che non si spegne, a soldier is about to be shot. The entire sequence is based on the geometry of the soldiers’ movements in relation to fixed volumes — the white cliffs, the parked trucks. The internal invasion is mirrored by the same external movement, and the world gradually takes on a single meaning that fills it gradually until it overflows, until it gives birth to the event.
Such a mechanism is that of tragedy. This is a far cry from the futile approach of ‘behaviorism’, in which all gestures and all events are equal in the face of a maniacal exploration of time and space. If we consider how this tragedy revolves around love, the secret tearing of passions, around certain women’s faces, within a world of princes, we will recognize that Vittorio Cottafavi is on the side of Racine — something that will seem singular, paradoxical and exemplary.
Présence du cinéma, 9, December 1961, pp. 29–32.
Traviata 53 (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1953)