Actually, even if it’s a part of the Racconti d’Italia series, for which Cottafavi already shot the excellent Il mondo è una prigione (1962), this is not really a TV show but a film, shot in 16mm, wholly in real locations, and it interests us even more given that it’s the first cinematographic work gifted to us by Cottafavi that proves the talent many have blindly attached to him since the extremely original, but not very personal, Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (1963).
The aspects of Carlo Cassola’s short novel that interest us, so that we may compare it to the film, are essentially three:
1) The slow unwinding of irrelevant facts between which there runs and emerges an interior sorrow;
2) an internal time that guides these facts according to a slow rhythm, always;
3) a structure that protects the story from any improvisation, marked by its division in short chapters.
Cottafavi did not attempt an adaptation, but used the novel as a suggestion. He laid out its expressive problems according to visual modules, making it so that Guglielmo’s pain rises from the execution of actions. We can’t say Cottafavi’s actions are the translation of Cassola’s words, but only their correspondent, if such aesthetically similar comparisons between cinema and literature have any sense.
1) Cottafavi, facing the facts, remains objective, refers cinema back to its neorealist origins, has the courage to not work too artfully on his characters, leaving to things the power of revealing themselves: not that he waits for the moment when reality gives the whole of its own (poetic) sense, but rather that he lets things emerge little by little, that Guglielmo’s bitterness and despair surface from the quotidian continuity of the plot, without Cottafavi’s gaze betraying a mise en scène predisposed to that end. If we find this sorrow in close-up in the film’s key scene, in the bedroom where Guglielmo sees his wife’s portrait and a series of forward tracking shots (which recalls us Cottafavi’s 1962 Le notte bianche) places us within his soul, and also in the end, so bare, this sorrow surfaces through his wood-cutting, his work and his rest in town, as if to give us the ‘tone’ which renders significant not only one but several characters, a situation and a life: the self is inserted into a common drama (cf. Fiore, the coalman). There is, in short, a secret reflection of Guglielmo’s pain on things and others, which Cottafavi knows how to show, even in the interiorized aspect of the process: and that is the most authentic loyalty to Cassola, the kind of ‘loyalty’ that would have pleased Bazin.
2) Cassola’s slow time finds no match in Cottafavi. Where Cassola is harmonic and penetrating, Cottafavi is rough and incisive; Cassola’s story is interiorized, and this justifies its stylistic approach, but Cottafavi has placed his trust in notions freed from any embellishment, filtered by a neorealist eye that retains only the naked substance of the action and reveals its poetic-expressive value: one thinks of the character of Germano, who on the pages of the novel was inclined towards lyrical digressions and who on the screen is as crude as the earth, tough and human; one thinks also of the farewells and the returns. We can’t help but refer the direction of the ‘actors’ to the film’s crudeness. Cottafavi boldly worked in two directions: in one sense, to adjust Gian Maria Volonté to the non-professionals; in the other, to eliminate the non-professionals’ uncertainty and lack of technique in order to preserve their presence and expressive truth. The most common danger that blocks the success of a non-professional’s performance is that of technical errors: the truth potentially contained within the non-actor is destroyed by a false ‘performance’, so that the spectator ends up noticing the failed attempts at a ‘performance’ more than the truth that should pour out of certain faces and voices without the need for intermediary techniques. This recently happened in many moments throughout Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962). In Il taglio del bosco, this danger is reduced to a minimum (there are some hesitations in the female characters), just as Volonté’s technique is reduced to a minimum, while there remains the truth of faces and dialogues (often improvised upon traces of Cassola’s). From a technical point of view, we may notice the almost complete absence of dissolves, an equally dry avoidance of montage effects (‘poetic scissors’ make less and less sense in modern cinema) and of voice-over (even on the rare occasions when we hear it, it does not serve to integrate the expression of an interior reality, which is always entrusted to a pure visibility), the treatment of individual scenes in order to eliminate every ‘preparatory’ and ‘conclusive’ element and retain only their essence: in short, there remains the fact as a visual and realistic element, stripped bare of strictly narrative values. This was a bold and extremely coherent operation by Cottafavi, who thus operated a modern ‘return’ to neorealism, above all that of the Rossellinian kind (but we need not forget the element of sound, which makes us think of Visconti’s achievements in 1948’s La terra trema).
3) As to my third observation, the novel’s structure doesn’t seem to have been preserved in the film, even if we may observe the structuring aspect of scenes such as those in the bedroom and with the coalman. The crudeness of the direction persists also in the film’s structure, that is, in its non-structure: but we can’t say one thing necessarily implies the other. We believe, rather, that the stylistic values of the film, whatever they may be, are always reconnected, through some superior expression, to a structure that gives them a general architecture, preserving them from the limits due to improvisations, and confirming in these the presence of reason.
Tv: Il Taglio del Bosco, in Ai poeti non si spara: Vittorio Cottafavi tra cinema e televisione (Edizione Cineteca
di Bologna, 2010), pp. 284–285. Originally published in Filmcritica, 137, September 1963, pp. 571–573.
Il taglio del bosco (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1963)