I am a cinema critic, but this is not a cinema book. It is a story, written in the third person. But hidden in it there is a first person who recounts, forgets and reconstructs memories of seventy nine years of life, and a first person who listens, provokes, asks for a special story, who introduces the case of a gentleman, Gillo Pontecorvo, who has been "also" a great film director.
The idea of dedicating a book to him that was not only or primarily a book about cinema, but much more about a remarkable personality and a full life, of meetings, passions and adventures, came to me after I had been a friend of Gillo for years. I had worked for awhile with him at the Cinema Exhibition in Venice under his direction. I had eaten e'xcellent pasta and beans prepared by his wife Picci. I had loaned him cassettes of films which otherwise he would never have dreamed of going to see. I had passed afternoons on the lawn of his house at Nazzano, half an hour from Rome, to watch him move a patch of yellow narcisuses from one part to another of the garden His mysterious and inscrutable aesthetic design, could keep him up all night hatching new ideas and sending him from Rome to the country in a blitz of two hours when he revealed himself a Capability Brown.
Gillo was for a long time reluctant to collaborate on this idea. I cannot imagine that he was diffident about collaborating with me, considering the friendship and trust he generally showed me. Neither, perhaps, was it a question, as one might think, of modesty; It was a question, I think, of deep self irony, which emerged as as the tone and leitmtif of all the memories that we together reconstructed.
I say reconstructed, because to drag memories out of Gillo was not easy. He was very much in favour of the title of this article.
It was not easy partly because many years of his life, whether through chance or coincidence, were so crowded with persons and events; partly because the illness that afflicted him in 1991 somehow caused him to isolate himself...
And partly also because, like Pinocchio in a land of toys, he amused himself by recounting the latest episode about himself. But in short, he had little wish to speak seriously about himself.
So it was a sweat. In the space of two years, when his work commitments and my own left us an occasional free afternoon, I would get on my motor scooter and face the traffic along the Tiberside, and go up (against my natural inclinations) Via Paolo Frisi, a quiet street in Parioli. I would arrive at his place just wishing to throw myself down on a divan, placing a tape recorder in front of my friend Gillo. But the sitting room of his house in these years functioned as headquarters first of the cinema Biennal, then as the Cinema Association of which Gillo was president. One divan was covered with a a old kilim and one with red velvet that Gillo considered to be quite unique, and therefore precious, and untouchable. These were always littered with important faxes, and postcards that it was unthinkable to move, of notes in pencil written in that unmistakable and illegible Pontecorvo handwriting.
And once, under a cushion on which I had awkwaredly attempted to lean there was even a gold goblet, beautiful but uncomfortable.
Little comfort, then, but a lot of entertainment. I would sit on the divan covered with kilim, while.
Gillo slumped in his armchair of red velvet. Above him were shelves of books and dusty photos of him with Picasso, with Sartre, with Brando, of him with a fish higher than himself, of his wife Picci with the children. When we were not distracted with friendly chatting, or heated topical discussions (yes, we had rows), or confidences so exhilarating as to be forgotten (some, however, d transcribed from tapes with discretion by delighted friends) we did, in a disorderly but highly coloured way, re-evoke seventy nine years of life (his last birthday was 19th November last year).
When a memory was incomplete, or a piece of the puzzle was missing, we had some glimmers of hope. First, we thought, next time. Second, ask Montaldo if he remembers. Third, ask Franco(Girardi) as above. Fourth, (for more public things), ask Tullio,(Kezick); Fifth (the most practical), ask Picci.
In the bourgeois peace of Via Paolo Frisi we sometimes heard the warlike shout of Gillo, "Picci". And Picci - who unfortunately was not always there - appeared sweetly and gently from her room, to put the pieces together again, supplying a date, the name of a street, sometimes giving perspective to a situation of anger or an excess of modesty.
When she was not there, the work was much harder. I recount all this to explain that really memories 'extorted from a distracted person do not constitute a biography, much less an autobiography entrusted to the pen (or computor) of another. This little book is, or purports to be, a portrait in which the subject posed in front of the artist, a testimony, a modern picaresque novel, even -- a rather ambitious idea -- a short moral tale. The story of a beautiful life, begun in leisure, in the grand house of the Pontecorvo family, pursued amidst the upheavals of war, political discoveries, commitment, revelation of cinema, passion, loves, of children, music, girlfriends all over the world, and in recent years, official responsibilities - the direction for six years of the Venice Film Festival, the Cinema Association. But a life lived always with light -heartedness, irony, enthusiasm, honesty, a boyish capacity to reinvent himself, the Francescan simplicity of a man who has known wealth and poverty. Of a man who has earned his living playing tennis and making films, who has fought in the partisan war and shot Caroselli. Who is indifferent about money, and has a coherent ideology which is more moral than political; He might seem a minor saint.
But he isn't. With Gillo, in ten years of friendship, which compared with his long life is not much, I had occasions to quarrel and tell him that his behaviour fell short of my expectations. But the gaiety of his personality testifies to the fact that a beautuful life brings happiness to those who live it and to those who observe it. The story of these seventy nine years of Gillo may, then, be partial or incomplete, but this is intended. As a third person I wished others to hear his voice - with a slant that is all mine.
In this biography I wished there to be a faery tale of a real life.
Through memories I wished to bring out a lesson that I think is important: that success, money, fame (things that Gillo had and sometimes lost) are not so important, but passion, enthusiasm, the capacity to live intensely the great and small things of life, from the struggle for freedom to the patch of narcisuses on his hilly garden in Nazzano.
Irene Bignardi
