Director Paolo Taviani dies

At the age of 93, the famous director Paolo Taviani died, surviving his brother Vittorio by six years, with whom they made many films that made the glory of Italian cinema.

Despite their actual age difference (Vittorio was born in 1929, Paolo in 1931), it seemed to everyone that Taviani, like Siamese twins, had grown together creatively almost from the first days of their lives. At the university in Pisa, where they both studied, they created a film club and made their debut with theater productions and articles in film criticism. At one time, the Milanese magazine Epoca described the already famous brothers as follows: “The sons of a lawyer from San Miniato, they look like provincials who have just moved to Rome, although in fact they have been living here for more than 30 years in modest apartments. Even their typewriter – an old Olivetti – was bought by their father on the cheap at the beginning of the war. Its carefully oiled keys still rattle out film scripts that become examples of excellence for directors all over the world.”

The Tavianis made their first film under the influence of Roberto Rossellini’s “Paisa” back in 1954 – it was called “San Miniato” and was a documentary reconstruction of the experiences of teenage brothers in their hometown during the war.

For a long time, the Taviani remained on the sidelines of Italian cinema – in the shadow of not only the patriarch Visconti, but also their peer Pasolini, and even the much younger Bertolucci.

The brothers exposed the crimes of the mafia (“The Man Who Must Be Destroyed”, 1962), reflected on the themes of the Chinese and Cuban experience (“The Subverters”, 1964), created entertaining projects of utopias (“Under the Sign of Scorpio”, 1969), updated the classics (“U St. Michael was a cockerel,” 1971, based on Leo Tolstoy’s story “Divine and Human”).

The most prestigious and expensive of their early projects, Allonzanfan with Marcello Mastroianni (1974), drew a line under the cinema of rebellion and protest. Taviani, far from the shocking extremes of rebellion, followed the path of left-radical hobbies honestly and to the end. And they recognized that the revolution, understood as a collective action under the leadership of charismatic leaders, leads to nowhere.

In 1977, the film “The Master Father” received the main award at Cannes. Taviani took a real life incident and turned it into a parable. Gavino Ledda, until he was 18 years old, tended sheep in the wilderness of Sardinia, did not know Italian, did not read books, and had not been to the continent. After the army, he broke up with home, went to university, and in an incredibly short time became a writer and linguist. This is a movie about the collapse of patriarchal power and the construction of an independent personality.

Having formulated their new concept of man, nature and history in The Master Father, Taviani developed it further in the films The Night of St. Lawrence (1981) and Chaos (1984). The brothers’ “Peasant Trilogy” became the last powerful surge of epic cinema.

“The Night of St. Lawrence” looks like the fruit of a collective folklore memory, weaving its own tale. As in a fairy tale and as in life, the characters in the film have to make a choice. As they leave, the Germans threaten to blow up the Tuscan town, and the population is ordered to concentrate in the church. Part of the community believes in the divine power of the temple and gathers under the wing of the priest, others, suspecting a catch, form a detachment and leave the city at night. Taviani is on the side of the skeptics in this debate: fate is blind, but intuition can help. There is also a purely personal reason. The prototype of the hero who leads people on a nightly adventure was the father of Paolo and Vittorio. They are with those who took risks; they feel sorry for those who are afraid to face death. The unity of people here is not ideological: it is completely accidental and absolutely natural in the fateful hours of history. Equally irrational is disunity within the community. Fascists and anti-fascists, meeting in a wheat field, either fight or play hide and seek – they have known each other since childhood, call their neighbors by name, and their desire to hug is only slightly weaker than their reflex to kill. Like slapstick characters, they shoot clumsily and die clumsily, causing the effect of laughter through tears inherent in great art.

“Chaos” – Taviani’s third masterpiece – is also closely connected with the “genius of the locality”. Based on Luigi Pirandello’s Sicilian cycle, it takes a bird’s-eye view of a microcosm of a village (called Chaos) at the end of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, invading microcosms of souls, each of them screaming. The epic structure of the film is nourished equally by Christianity and paganism, gothic and mysticism. And, of course, Pirandella’s dualism, which is so close to Taviani.

The autobiographical motif was unexpectedly refracted in the film “Good Morning, Babylon” (1987), where Taviani told about two brothers – the prodigal sons of Europe, who left it at the beginning of the last century for the temptations of the New World, in order to then return to square one in the murderous crucible of the First World War. There they will die, fanatically clutching a movie camera in their hands and continuing to film History. But long before this, the artist brothers, restorers of ancient temples, will make a sculpture of an elephant in Hollywood, repeating the outlines of one memorable Romanesque bas-relief. This fragile (even though it is an elephant), seemingly alive creature made of willow and movie posters pasted on top will shrink in the flames, lit at the behest of a zealous administrator. But the elephant will “come to life” and even multiply: eight of these magnificent animals will be recreated anew on the columns of King Belshazzar and will enter the textbook frames of Griffith’s “Intolerance.”

In 2012, when the Taviani brothers were already about 80, they won the Berlin Film Festival with the film Caesar Must Die.

Formally, this is a documentary about the prisoners of the most guarded Roman prison, Rebibbia, who are preparing a performance of Julius Caesar just a few kilometers from the proscenium of historical events. In fact, before us is an amazing experiment that sheds light on the relationship between life and art, which completely merge in the finale. All attention is directed to how the process of familiarization with Shakespeare’s tragedy releases a storm of suppressed emotions from the depths of a person, how it forces you to rethink your own life and experience.

Vittorio Taviani passed away in 2018. And Paolo continued to work – now one for two. In 2021, he presented the film “Leonora, Farewell,” dedicated to his late brother. It begins with a chronicle of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the main Italian writer of the 20th century, Pirandello, and then moves on to the scene of his surreal funeral, organized by the Mussolini regime, and post-war reburial in Agrigento, Sicily. In the second half of the film, we are transported from neorealistic post-war Italy to pre-war America – to Pirandello’s story “The Nail,” written there, about the crime and punishment of a teenage immigrant. For all its shocking suddenness, it absolutely fits into the main internal plot, into reflections on what remains of the dead when the soul finds peace, and how the artist’s legacy lives on after the curtain has already fallen. “Leonora, Farewell” remained the distillation of the philosophical experience of three artists at once: Pirandello and both Taviani.

Andrey Plakhov