The interest for the Taviani brothers’ most recent films does not stem from the mere fact that people who are in their late eighties are still working on films, which is physically quite a demanding job, but rather because people still expect great films from them
In 2012, when Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire) appeared on our big screens, the great strength and value of the film were quite surprising even for a number of fans of Italian cinema. Namely, many thought that its authors, brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, are old masters of the history of film, not just in their home country but in Europe as a whole, and very few assumed that they were not just active in their eighties but that they are capable achieving such artistic peaks. Partly the reason for this lies in the fact that in the last twenty years their films did not play in our theatres as well as because until Caesar Must Die their other films in the new century were somewhat less successful than those in the last decades of the 20th century.
The brothers co-directed their first feature film A Man for Burning (Un uomo da bruciare) with Valentino Orsini in 1962 and their first film alone Under the Sign of Scorpio (Sotto il segno dello scorpione) in 1969, and in their home country, especially after directing Allonsanfàn (1974), they became known for their leftist tendencies. Nevertheless, they were not dogmatically and ideologically engaged authors but they rather used historical topics in their films through which they criticized the contemporary social system. However, due to such attitudes or the distributors’ judgement that those are not films with huge commercial potential, these films were rarely shown on international screens. In 1977, they won the Golden Palm in Cannes for their film My Father My Master (Padre padrone), in which personal drama suppressed their political views into the background, and it brought them international affirmation and a represented a turning point in their careers.
Their film The Night of the Shooting Stars, (La notte di San Lorenzo, 1982) confirmed their status of great masters and won around twenty awards, as well as the Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The story is based on events from real life: the escape of hungry people from fascists who are trying to survive until the end of the war which is coming to its end in Italy. The Taviani brothers directed their short feature debut about this same event San Miniato, July, 1944 (San Miniato, luglio '44, 1954). San Miniato is a town close to Pisa where the Tavianis were born, and in the feature length The Night of the Shooting Stars they elaborated on the same story with great and innovative directing style; a mother reminisces the story and tells it to her small daughter on the night of St. Lorenzo’s tears in August when each year there is a rain of meteorites that resemble shooting stars. In Italian folklore it is the night when all wishes come true. These „St. Lorenzo’s tears“ offered a chance to the authors to create a fairy-tale like, fantastic framework that sheds a new light on horrific and violent war scenes and thus they created a complex film that masterfully intertwines surreal, realistic and subjective elements.
Even though they proved themselves as excellent directors as well as screenwriters and authors of original stories for their films, the Taviani brothers often adapted important literary originals for films. One of the most impressive adaptations is the film Chaos (1984), an omnibus based on five short stories from the Nobel prize winner Lugi Pirandello’s (1867-1936) collection Short Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) and its presentation in this program ads to the celebration of the 150th anniversary of birth of the great Italian writer. He is one of the most important European playwrights of the twentieth century as well as one of the greatest authors of short stories of all time. The chaos from the title does not refer to a noun but it is the name of the force that preceded gods. It created chaos, it is rebellious and unpredictable when it comes to using its power and it is in that light that Pirandello perceived Sicily, which bears no resemblance to the one from postcards for tourists, as well as its inhabitants who are partly defined by life forces that draw their power and energy from the ancient times when Chaos ruled. The Taviani brothers were sparked by these elements to create an extraordinary, unusual and very original world of outstanding visual beauty in which the characters’ dramas take place and draw from their power from a long tradition of that unique environment.
The Lark Farm (La masseria delle allodole, 2007) is based on a literary original, this time a contemporary one: novel by Antonia Arslan (1939) from 2004. Arslan is a professor of Italian literature at the Padua University who wrote and published several books. Even though she was born in Padua, her family comes from Armenia and they managed to avoid the massacre that the Turks carried out on the Armenian people in 1915. She translated to Italian works by several important Armenian writers and afterwards wrote about this crime that in many European countries is characterized as genocide. However, Turkey never acknowledged it and its government regards every mention of these events as an unfounded attack on their country. This event is in the focus of Arslan’s first novel The Lark Farm which the Taviani brothers adapted for film. They were inspired by the novel to carry out their own analysis of destinies of individual people who were the targets of this ethnically motivated crime. Even though they publicly stated that their film is not aimed against Turks but that it is rather a portrayal of how hatred and ethnical crimes occur, the screenings of this film were often under attack of Turkish communities which even led to violent protests, such as the one at the Berlin Film Festival.
At the same festival Caesar Must Die triumphed by winning the main prize – the Golden Bear. In a combination of a documentary and fiction it portrays how a relationship towards crime begins with its perpetrators, murderers, drug dealers, who are staging the play Julius Caesar by Shakespeare in a high-security prison in Rome. Some of these criminals find a path towards a different, more humane understanding of existence in the great playwright’s words, and others identify echoes of their previous deeds in this bloody tragedy, or Shakespeare’s scenes lead them to establish new relationships, from friendships to conflicts, with other inmates while working on staging the play. The brothers are superior directors who managed to create remarkable and suggestive characters and a world in which reality and fiction, crime and art, violence and humanity stretch their boundaries in an unbelievably impressive and complex manner. Great success of this film instigated the authors to make new breakthroughs in the seventh art and afterwards they directed the visually attractive Wondrous Boccaccio (Maraviglioso Boccaccio, 2015), wonderfully thought-through adaptation of Decameron, the masterpiece of Italian renaissance prose from the 14th century. This year the Tavianis are finishing their film A Private Affair (Una questione privata), based on the posthumously published novel by the Italian writer Giuseppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) who, during WW II, joined the Italian partisans and wrote this novel about his experience. The interest for the Taviani brothers’ most recent films does not stem from the mere fact that people who are in their late eighties are still working on films, which is physically quite a demanding job, but rather because people still expect great films from them. (Tomislav Kurelec)