Conversation curated by Corrado Serri CCS
Alessandro Serra is among the most highly regarded Italian theatre directors on the international scene. Founder of the company Teatropersona, he has directed productions such as Macbettu, an adaptation in Sardinian Logudorese of the Shakespearean masterpiece, winner of the Premio Ubu for Best Production of the Year, La tempesta, Il giardino dei ciliegi, and the more recent Tragùdia, Il canto di Edipo. With Macbettu he has brought his stage vision to Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australia, garnering unanimous acclaim from critics and audiences alike. His theatre, shaped by light, matter and silence, has established him as one of the most original voices on the contemporary stage.
Those who have not yet attended a performance by Alessandro Serra might wonder why the Collettivo Chiaroscuro website, where we focus on cinema and cinematography, is hosting a conversation with a theatre director about light, darkness and cinema. The idea came to me a few years ago, the second time I attended one of his performances. La tempesta, at the Teatro Bellini. A few minutes after the curtain rose, the fury of the elements was evoked on an empty stage through a very simple gesture: light passing through a suspended sheet, vigorously moved in front of a hidden off-stage source, the solitude of Ariel beneath that improvised sky, which would later reveal itself to be a sea. In truth, even before imagining this conversation, my first mental note was the desire – not entirely innocent – to one day find an opportunity to steal that trick. Alessandro would later tell me that the sheet which had struck me so much was moved by two actors, not by stagehands as I had assumed. A production necessity, a lack of means, or something more subtle: the idea that light and actors share the same emotional function? I have already anticipated too much of what follows. The words you are about to read are those I had the privilege of exchanging with Alessandro.
Reading your writings and your interviews, I was struck by the frequent and sometimes unexpected references to cinema. For instance, in the in the conversation Lighting Light(s) #2 with Cristina Grazioli, you set out ideas that bear similarities to the working methods of a cinematographer.
‘Light, for me, is pure instinct; I perceive it before objects, I feel it, it stirs my soul. I am referring to the perception of sensible reality: light is not seen, but it makes things visible. In this sense, it has the same function as the actor.’ (Quote)
When you speak about light, you remind me of Janusz Kamiński when he says, ‘As a cinematographer you can only be as good as the director allows you to be’.
You state that, for you, light is inseparable from directing; it is one of the elements that make up the writing of the scene, which is why you could not delegate it to someone else, and that it carries the same emotional function as the actor. Could you tell me something more about this idea?
I can confirm that I could never design the lighting for a work that is not my own; ultimately, my work is nothing more than dramaturgy applied, with a minimum of technical expertise, to every aspect of staging: set design, lighting, sound, costumes, and everything that contributes to making a theatrical work organic. Unlike cinema, lighting in theatre is not strictly necessary — one can very well do without it — but once we decide to use it, it cannot merely illuminate the stage; it must act, shape, narrate, move. It can become a powerful tool for avoiding imitation of reality and beginning instead to sculpt the ideal: the perfection of a sand rose shaped by the wind, the flawless unfolding of a flower or of a gesture in dance. Not life, but its reflection: light can manipulate the visible to reveal the invisible. Janusz Kamiński is a great artist; speaking about light in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, he said — I’m quoting from memory — that if it were up to him, he would flood the sets with smoke and haze. In that case, the beautiful screenplay allowed it, and the film is so opalescent and magical, at once science fiction and fairy tale. I think somewhat like him: if it were up to me, there would be dust everywhere — not so much to cast those often gratuitous shafts of light, like something out of a Gothic cathedral, but rather to make objects reverberate and tremble, allowing images to transfigure, with colours and forms flowing into one another. In other words, to create atmosphere, which literally means ‘sphere of vapour’ — a ball of smoke. It is a physical fact, but above all a metaphor for a state of mind that becomes perceptible and visible.
Atmosphere, whether smoke, haze or water vapour, is one of the tools we use most on set, one of the most difficult to master and the one that most requires time to be created, so that it settles the way you want it. And yes, at times we do overuse it. When you say that in cinema lighting is necessary, unlike in theatre, are you referring to the fact that even when we use only natural light, very often – or perhaps not often enough – we still try to shape it, to control it, often to subtract from it? Even simply deciding to shoot a scene at a particular time of day is a poetic intention of the light we choose to capture. I will not go any further into the differences between theatre and cinema – that is not what I wish to discuss with you – but yes, when we switch on a light, it must tell a story and not merely illuminate.
Early yesterday morning I was walking beneath an arcade in Udine on my way to the station. It was raining, and a small shaft of morning sunlight reflected off the marble paving, casting light onto a homeless man having breakfast at a café table chained to the wall. All of this was accompanied by the sound of an accordion playing Deborah’s Theme from Once Upon a Time in America. Before I even had time to wonder where the music was coming from, I caught sight, at the far end of the arcade, of a backlit silhouette — another homeless man playing the accordion. And he played it beautifully. These are the kind of compositions life creates, even though the score was written by Ennio Morricone; all we have to do is keep our eyes open and let our souls listen…
That is why the directors I love most are those who find form without forcing it and allow life to flow… Yasujirō Ozu, Béla Tarr… I was not alone; all it took was drawing my companion’s attention to it — a perfect scene, almost too perfect with that music. I had my camera with me, but I preferred to watch the film rather than photograph it. And yet my first instinct was to protect the highlights on the paving without losing the backlit figure. The arcade prevented any flare; the 28mm lens was just right. But the camera remained in the bag.
In one of the audio commentaries on the DVD of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the actor Sean Astin, who plays Samwise Gamgee, asks in a slightly teasing tone the cinematographer Andrew Lesnie where a certain, unmotivated light in a scene set inside a windowless tower is coming from. Lesnie has the perfect answer: ‘Same place as the music’. Could you tell us what ‘writing with light’ means to you?
Through light I am able to shed literature and attempt to reveal the diaphanous essence of the text. The writers I love most succeed in infusing perfect atmospheres into scenes and dialogues, indicating the type of light, its source, and sometimes even its colour temperature. In great works, light is never merely functional; it is always spiritual and, in some respects, psychological. It does not represent that psychic state – it is that psychic state. Writing with light means this: illuminating interiority so that the spectator, through what is visible, may perceive the essence. In the interview you mentioned with Professor Grazioli, I described the second act of Il giardino dei ciliegi and the transition from the blinding light reflected by marble gravestones at sunset, to the blue of dusk, to darkness, and finally to moonlight. We know that each of these luminous states contains within it different qualities which I do not hesitate to define as magical. Great authors always turn to light to activate an atmosphere: painters, poets, storytellers. In any short story by Anton Chekhov, with just a few words, an enchanted room begins to take shape:
«From the windows, half-blocked by snow, the wan light of day peered in. Grey twilights reigned in the room, and through them the stove and the sleeping child stood out clearly. … she had been born not for wealth, not for earthly greatness and earthly love, but for a quiet life, withdrawn from the world, twilight-like like those rooms… ».
What is a twilight life? What is a twilight room? One must take the indications of authors seriously – not literally, so as to avoid illustration, but seriously. I mean grasping the inner nature of that light: what are grey twilights? Twilight… the blue hour, that suspended moment in which many artists place magical and enigmatic events. In the city, it seems as though traffic slows down; I feel as if I see people walking in slow motion, and in the countryside it is even more striking: animals emerge from the woods, stop, and look at you. Fernando Pessoa writes that he has no need of twilights because he possesses an infinity of them within himself; at times, he writes, he becomes twilight itself. In Waiting for Godot, light is pure metaphysics:
‘You are not from here,’ says Pozzo, ‘you do not yet know what twilight is like in our land.’
Ma prima del crepuscolo c’è il tramonto, un tramonto al contrario, invece di calare sorge…
ESTRAGONE
‘It would seem to be rising again.’
VLADIMIRO
‘Impossible (…)’
VLADIMIR (in a reassuring tone)
‘It is evening, sir, we have reached evening. My friend here is trying to make me believe otherwise, and I must admit that for a moment I allowed myself to be influenced.’
Light helps me to show what cannot be expressed in words. In Il giardino dei ciliegi there is a scene in which Lyubov Andreyevna is left alone; she has just learned that the family estate has been sold. There is a chair against the wall — she sits down and weeps. We hear her daughter’s voice trying to comfort her, but she remains alone, with her pain. Then suddenly she stands up and leaves, while her shadow — her aura — remains there, seated on the chair. After a few moments, the shadow too rises and follows her. They leave together, and the room remains empty.
The scene is in the third act, but it anticipates the psychological atmosphere of the fourth, when the family will leave the house: an emptied house, the furniture piled in a corner. How do you construct such a scene? How do you make this state felt without representing it?
It once happened to me that I had to leave a house where I would spend one last night — a house I was leaving willingly, without regret, one of the many places I have lived. I sat on a swivel chair in the centre of the room and began to turn slowly, observing the bare walls. I was struck by the marks left on the wall by a couple of small pictures that had been removed. Nothing remarkable — just two small traces of life, and enough to bring you to tears. When I began working on the fourth act of Il giardino dei ciliegi, I remembered that feeling and tried, through light, to find something similar. Nothing. Then, I do not quite know why, I asked the actress to sit down and leave: let’s try it like this, just for the sake of it… an experiment that stretched over days of work with the other actress who played Varya, on the other side, acting her shadow… a marvel!
And only now do I realise that Varya is the only one who has never left, and it is in the fourth act that she will choose to squander the very last chance life offers her, and remain there.
You reminded me of the novel Embers, in which, at the beginning of chapter 14, for pages and pages, Sándor Márai describes the moment when night has not yet dissolved into day.
In what sense does light, for you, have the same emotional function as the actor?
The actor is like light: it is not seen, but it makes things visible. If we were to flood a black box – or the entire universe – with light, without an object for it to fall upon, we would see only darkness. Astronauts testify to this when they look into empty space: without an object to reflect it, light is nothing but darkness. When those who have been blind from birth regain their sight after a corneal transplant, they do not know how to see; they must learn through hearing: ‘Now that I have heard it, I can see it.’ It is the same thing Oedipus says to the inhabitants of Colonus: ‘I see you with my voice.’ In my own small way, I would say that the two activities are inseparable; I play with light as if it were sound, and vice versa.
I will quote another of your statements, which aligns with what, for many cinematographers, is a fundamental principle: ‘When a spectator notices the beauty of a particular lighting passage in one of my works, it means that I have failed there. Light must not be seen.’
Light must not distract. It must reveal, but not reveal itself. The best cinematography for a film is that right, not necessarily the most beautiful. It must not distract from the story. Films are not remembered for their beautiful images – or not only for them – but for the emotions they leave behind. This leads me to think that cinematography cannot be something separate from directing; it must adhere to it. Just as you say you are unable to separate the lighting design – as well as set, costumes and sound – from the experience of directing. When you conceive light within your stage writing, do you ever censor yourself in light of the statement I quoted?
In cinema, it is the director who looks, and the spectator can only see as he sees. Clearly, within this apparent limitation lies an infinite space of meaning and imagination. The act of looking is always an inner act, since the image is not what is seen. The image is not the visible: it is the spectator who creates it. They perceive it and create it with an intimate part of themselves, not with the brain. The mind follows the story; the soul gets drunk on it. Only image and sound communicate with the soul, whereas literature speaks to the mind. Cinema and theatre need literature as a catalyst to transform lógos into phōtos and phōnē, that is, literature into image and sound (for me the two are inseparable).
The fact that there are beautiful shots, daring camera movements, fine cinematography or a magnificent score means nothing; contemporary cinema and theatre are too often primarily mental and literary. Camera movements must reveal, not call attention to themselves; one must not show twilight, but rather make the actors and their surroundings twilight-like, as though they were one. Light possesses a superhuman communicative force that tears through lógos and plunges into the psyche; for this reason, it can only be atmosphere: the visual equivalent of emotion or of narrative. If a scene takes place in a room, the light that envelops everything must be the visual equivalent of the story. And so must sound and camera movement. If the actors are right, then everything is perfect.
The cinema I love is that in which what is told coincides with the form through which it is told. What matters is that form never takes precedence. There are two directors I greatly admire, apparently very different, yet in fact both masters of cinematic language: Max Ophüls and Béla Tarr. Let us take, for instance, two dance scenes: the first, by Ophüls, opulent, filled with mirrors and lit candelabra (Madame de...); the second, by Tarr, set in a tavern (Werckmeister Harmonies). In both scenes, the camera dances. It is well known that both directors used music during shooting to give rhythm and pulse to camera movements, to actions, and even to the actors’ performances.
In the dance scene filmed by Ophüls, the music that pervades everything is an enchanting waltz that accompanies the two lovers, turning the candles into sparkling stars reflected and refracted in the mirrors. Everything is mirrored, everything glimmers — even the sequins adorning the collar of Vittorio De Sica’s jacket. Everything is of perfect refinement, without ever becoming mannered: the candles going out one by one, until the scene is plunged into darkness by a musician who covers a harp in the foreground with a black cloth. And the screen turns black.
Tarr, by contrast, uses a heartrending piece of music, after which the protagonist arranges people around a tavern as though they were planets, dancing the harmony of the spheres around one of them, who moves his fingers like rays of the sun — all of it beneath a bare light bulb illuminating a profoundly human solar system, conjured in a tavern. In cinema I can choose to show a face worn by wrinkles standing out against a flaking wall, worn like that person’s very life. To do so, I might stop the lens right down and flood the scene with light; or, with a fast lens wide open, I can choose to blur the background and fix the spectator’s gaze solely on the face, without telling them that the room too is worn like that face. This is dramaturgy: if that wall is the psychological equivalent of that face, then light and aperture allow me to transform the scene into an image.
In theatre the process is more rudimentary, but in essence the language is the same, and the keystone, for me, is always light. If I light a granular wall frontally, it becomes a background; if I light it from above, it becomes narrative and emotional matter. If, through motorised fixtures, I make the light tremble imperceptibly, then it becomes yet another dimension – and it is not impossible that the spectators may feel that the room itself is about to move.
There is an inverted parallel between acting in cinema and in theatre, and the use of light in the two contexts: acting in cinema can whisper, because we have microphones. Light in theatre can be more symbolic and spectacular, because it is asked both to extend and complete meaning, and to inject a sense of realism for the audience. In cinema, the opposite occurs: every time we move away from a realistic use of light, we enter a minefield, where the risk is that light will take over the story; hence one of the commandments instilled in us in cinematography schools: the right cinematography for a film is the one that is not noticed. A debatable commandment, like all commandments. Light exists in relation to darkness. And it is precisely about darkness that I would like to ask you. Generally speaking, we can say that in theatre one always begins from darkness, although in truth theatre can exist anywhere – as you yourself say: in a shabby square, in a room under the most banal neon light, or at Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus. Al cinema abbiamo queste condizioni solo quando giriamo in teatro di posa, che nel cinema italiano recente è più raro per motivi di budget, perché nella maggior parte dei casi è economico girare in una location reale. When we shoot on location, we often face the opposite problem: removing excess light, shaping natural light, getting as close as possible to the tabula rasa of darkness. What is darkness for you? What kind of darkness do you like in cinema?
The task of our art is to build darkness and silence. Today, in theatre, it is very difficult to create silence and impossible to achieve true darkness. A tremendous loss, a brutal mortification of the language. In art as in life, darkness is being extinguished and silence is feared. Everything is loud and crudely lit, in a little theatre of glittering cut-out figures. Emergency exits in theatres blind the eye and hinder vision, just as the decibels of the sound system overwhelm attention and prevent listening. One is simply assaulted by sound and dazzled by illuminated signs, to the point that at the slightest reduction in sound or light, voices rise from the stalls in protest: ‘Oh God, we can’t see anything, oh God, we can’t hear anything! Voice!’ they shout. ‘Ear!’ replied a great actor, on the spur of the moment.
And yet it is in darkness that the seed germinates; the slightest intrusion of light would kill the egg and burn the roots protected by the darkness of the earth. It is in the deep heart of the world that diamonds are formed. And photographic images… film requires absolute darkness in order to be exposed. One does not seek light within light: if you want light, you must go and look for it underground, in the dark, because it is there that the sun of Apollo rises. It was the katabasis, the descent into a realm close to death, from which one could return to life restored to health. The forest is always in shadow, even by day, with small pockets of light. Magic is made in the dark, at night. The light of magic is that of the moon – a natural, feminine magic, not mental and sun-drenched like that of the male god.
And light requires darkness in order to be projected and experienced as intended by its authors.
The darkness I love in cinema is the one that allows me to see into my own depths. The brother of darkness is black — which, strictly speaking, is not a true colour. If colours are the way our brain interprets different wavelengths of light, then black, technically, is the absence of light: it occurs when an object absorbs all wavelengths and reflects none back to our eyes. And yet it receives them all, holds them within itself — absorbing all that light. This is why black objects heat up more in the sun: black accumulates energy. White is all colours together, and black is the energy of the void. Moreover, the first phase of the great alchemical work is the nigredo, the black work — the descent into the darkness of childhood. Without black, there is no inner vision, only a surface play of perceptions.
The black of Rembrandt does not represent emptiness or the absence of light, but an intensely charged presence: it is an abyss that holds within itself every possible colour. Black is not a nothingness, but an excess. We do not cease to see colours because they are absent, but because they are so many and so thoroughly fused that they merge into one another. It is a blindness that does not arise from darkness, but from an overwhelming, dazzling fullness. I love colour, but in cinema it is most often false and poor. The black and white of certain remarkable films is far more colourful. I have just rewatched Harakiri: in that black I see the most brilliant red and gold imaginable. I see it because I imagine it; I imagine it because the cinematographer created an image that is deep and dense with information.
I would shoot only in natural environments; we would need to move beyond the obsession with perfectly managed lighting and embrace, in a dramaturgical sense, the mutability of light and of life: if a cloud passes and obscures the sun, it is the cloud that decides, not the director — for me, that is cinema.
There are those who embrace these changes – Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven is the first that comes to mind; but even more simply, I think of the final shot of 1917, intentionally filmed under an overcast sky for reasons of continuity in the one take with which the story is told, in which, in a position and composition symmetrical to the film’s opening shot, the sun, for the first time, touches the protagonist’s face, once the mission is complete. We know from the words of Roger Deakins and Sam Mendes that it was a happy accident, which they were quick to recognise and embrace. The sun appeared only for the first of the many takes filmed, and that is the take that was used in the final cut.
The Quay Brothers create stop-motion To shoot a single minute requires hours of work, and the sun moves, pulses, fades, reappears – so their photography vibrates: it is an enchantment. The fact that they work in London, a place where sunlight is scarce and always filtered through clouds or passing haze, grants them the privilege of happy accidents, which the filmmakers discover only after the film has been developed.
Another thing that has been lost: the waiting for the image. I hope cinema will save itself by returning to impressing and documenting life; documentaries are a very high form of art, and it is a pity that they must bend to the rhythms of television.
On the other hand, you yourself mentioned Carmelo Bene earlier, when he said that television is a great invention that has never been used.
Vertigo, the bookshop scene: the two characters enter and, while the bookseller recounts the story of a desperate woman, the light imperceptibly fades. In doing so, the director leads us into the unconscious – that is, into darkness. Light coincides with the narrative. I do not know how many spectators notice it (I only realised it when rewatching the film on Blu-ray), but as the dialogue continues, the light gradually diminishes until it reaches semi-darkness. Then the two leave and continue speaking, with the darkened bookshop behind them, which is suddenly lit by a glow.
In essence, it is a perfectly ordinary scene: the shop lights are off because it is not yet dark. So it is entirely logical that the light should fall during the dialogue, because outside the sun is setting – or perhaps clouds have gathered (the proof being that it is growing dark outside as well). And it is equally natural that, once outside, that glow appears: inside, the bookseller has simply realised that the sun has set and has switched on the lights. The following scene, moreover, is a beautiful twilight. Everything flows smoothly, as in real life. And yet we know it is not so. We know that Hitchcock has used light as a hidden journey into the story of that woman. The further back we go in time, the darker it becomes.
Here lies cinema in its essence: the essence of life, its image. This is what art concerns itself with. Cinema, more often than not, does not do this and remains on the level of a spectacular representation of reality. I love Hitchcock because he made cinema with cinema. Everything there is artificial, certainly, but the result is a supernatural light, artificially created. What I do not love is affected lighting placed there merely to show how beautiful light can be and how skilful the director or cinematographer is – forcing dramaturgy into the service of a lighting effect, not to mention camera movement. The evolution of a director in a spiritual sense, in my view, corresponds to a chastity of movement: very few cuts, the perfect shot, and letting life impress itself.
Max Ophüls… that is something else. We are at such a high level of refinement that everything is right, everything is necessary precisely because it is natural, effortless, with nothing to prove, as Totò would say. The camera seems to move of its own accord, as if driven by a wind that caresses the actors with an unnatural grace.
I asked you about darkness because it is a subject I am particularly interested in. Today, aided by the presence of increasingly sensitive digital sensors, we have at times arrived at an overuse of darkness, which has become a yardstick for measuring the cinematographer’s skill: the so-called ‘machismo darkness’ spoken of by the great cinematographer Ed Lachman in an interview with the other master Roger Deakins. In one of your interviews, you complain about the intrusiveness of emergency lights, often too bright. It is exactly the same frustration that we cinematographers sometimes experience during screenings, even at the most prestigious festivals.
Emergency lights, air-conditioning fans, fire safety requirements — they may seem like details, but they matter. With Tragùdia, as you know, there is a prolonged darkness following Oedipus’s blinding. The spectators sink into that same darkness and listen to his cries and amplified pain. But true darkness is almost never possible, and so we have resorted to lowering a black curtain. It works, but it is clearly not the same as sinking into darkness, even for a few seconds, because the eye begins to adjust to the dark.
The spectators in Budapest and Sarajevo were fortunate to experience Oedipus’s darkness, because in those cities complete darkness in the theatre is still permitted. In Turin, however, the safety officer would not let us shield the small emergency lights — those little bulbs, the kind you’d find on a nativity scene — which were aimed not at the steps, where they might at least have served a purpose, but directly at the stage. And yet, after the performance, the stagehand who had been in the audience said to me: “That moment of darkness is incredibly powerful.” I was slightly offended: “Are you mocking me? It was bright as daylight!” His reply: “As soon as the lights went out, I felt the urge to be in darkness, so I closed my eyes.” That is theatre. And that stagehand is an artist.
I am not an expert in cinema, but since Blu-ray came along I can finally watch certain films properly — films compromised by production interference in the edit, or by distribution in formats and venues that undermine the image and sound. Take Vampyr by Carl Theodor Dreyer: today its beauty seems almost unimaginable. It is said that the cinematographer Rudolph Maté shot the film with a piece of gauze placed in front of the lens.
Plausible. Indeed, certain. It was a widespread practice at the time. And even today, despite being able to choose from dozens of glass diffusion filters, or even simulate diffusion with digital plug-ins in post-production, some still use this method – for instance Janusz Kamiński, whom we mentioned earlier, in Catch Me If You Can used Christian Dior #10 stockings glued behind the rear element of the lenses.
Let it be clear that there is nothing ideological in me: I have nothing against plug-ins and nothing against digital; I shoot with a digital full-frame camera, but I sometimes use vintage lenses for their uniqueness and material quality. To use a stocking instead of a filter requires engaging with matter and with the unexpected, waiting for the unforeseen to manifest itself – the chance element of which Francis Bacon speaks. Something you do not decide, do not think, but that happens – and you seize it. In that moment, one is visited; one becomes a witness to the cosmos, which may, for an instant, align itself, and you must capture it. And to do so, technique is required.
If you decide to make a film about a man who resolves to carry a ship to the top of a mountain, and in order to shoot the film you actually take it there, then what happens between the first take and the final cut is the marvellous dynamic unpredictability of the holistic universe – in Werner Herzog’s case, ‘the conquest of the useless’. On the other side, there is the plug-in. Matter is a sacred obstruction that sabotages the mind and opens the soul. One must lose oneself in the darkness and the mist of Vampyr, in that nightmare of soft, suffocating light. Those who think that mist is merely an aesthetic device are mistaken. The nightmare takes substance in the mist – and the same applies to sound.
I recently rewatched Kwaidan by Masaki Kobayashi, which is a symphonic work both visually and musically, not to mention the colours that paint the film like an ukiyo-e print. Likewise, the recent and remarkable The Zone of Interest is a masterful musical composition. In both cases, if the playback system is inadequate, you are not truly watching that film – just as in theatre, if you replace a sublime actress with a mediocre one.
In your conversation with Grazioli, you mention a moment in AURE in which a change in the direction and colour temperature of the light on a door causes its scenic function to shift, so that it becomes a doorway to childhood.
If a skilled cinematographer had been tasked with shooting that scene and convey this inner transition, they would have done something similar. You used light for narrative and evocative purposes, employing even a simple device, which is an application of the Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe In that moment, light does not describe but transcends. Is it fair to say that you use light as a narrative and emotional device, rather than a scenographic one?
AURE was perhaps the performance in which I began to use light with greater awareness, despite the limited means at my disposal. The set consisted of three white doors — old, with a beautiful patina — emerging from the darkness. In the final scene, the maid entered the room, now emptied of its inhabitants, placed a candle on the table and covered it with a large glass vase; then she quickly closed the doors and left, leaving the room empty, with the white doors reflecting and diffusing the lone candle’s light. The audience was, in truth, witnessing the agony of that room — that is, of its inhabitants. That candle was a miracle, in those last moments of wavering light and breath. There were evenings when it went out and then came back to life for a few endless seconds.
The relationship between candles and cinema is rich with anecdotes and inventions. I think of Kenji Mizoguchi, who in Ugetsu creates sublime images framed by Japanese interiors, with light caressing the walls and the actors’ faces; then there is the famous scene in Barry Lyndon (and the legends surrounding the Zeiss 50mm f/0.7). Today, anyone with a reasonably good camera could shoot that scene without difficulty. One might wonder why filmmakers no longer do…
Returning to the candle, the difference between cinema and theatre is simple: in theatre, a single candle is enough — the rest is done by the spectator’s retina and imagination; the less you see, the more you truly see — if you are willing to. The same applies to body microphones: the more you hear, the less you truly listen, because it bypasses deep listening entirely. In cinema, by contrast, the scene is created by the cinematographer — the Zeiss lens mounted on Kubrick’s camera, or the lights hidden behind columns and wired to a rheostat to make them flicker, as Mizoguchi did.
Another example of light as narrative in AURE: the master of the house remains alone, closes the door behind him, and leans against it, as if sealing his solitude. So he looks at the room and at the door in front of him, walks towards it and, as he approaches, crouches down until he is peering through the keyhole, beyond which I had placed a PAR 16 with a very narrow beam. As the actor advanced, the light in the room faded into darkness, effectively creating a close-up of the actor’s face and then of his eye, illuminated by the light coming through the keyhole. But that is not all. The actor passed one hand between his face and the keyhole, then the other, finally in a fluid, syncopated movement. The hands became little flames. And the scene shifted onto a non-naturalistic plane, one of pure transcendence. Those flames were the luminous call of the following scene… a woman dressed only in a crinoline, emitting light like an abat-jour.
In your productions, light has a simple construction, perhaps born out of the limited means of your early work, which, both conceptually and in practice, has remained unchanged to this day. If I may draw yet another parallel with my own profession, working with limited means helps you to be quicker – the first quality producers tend to value – and to be more effective with minimal artificial light. Has that simplicity, over time, become a conscious aesthetic choice? Could you tell me about your process of collaboration with your lighting technician?
The relationship with the lighting technician is based on a deep sense of harmony and, above all, on speed of execution. Since I have had the possibility of working with someone seated at the console, managing motorised fixtures, lighting has become even more enjoyable and I have been able to push myself further. We usually begin with a very simple basic lighting plan, leaving room to experiment with certain special sources: lamps, bulbs, torches, strobes, LED strips, and so on.
During rehearsals, there are days when I try to set specific scenes, but the most valuable aspect is that, while working with the actors on stage, I can ask for a particular scene to be shaped with a certain angle, colour, intensity, and above all a precise timing with which the light enters or fades. This greatly enhances the organic quality of the light, which is born and shaped together with the actors, the set and the sound.
In Tragùdia, for instance, after Oedipus defeats the Sphinx and receives the crown from Creon, there is a scene in which he moves towards the back and crawls through the smallest of the three entrances to the royal palace. The light accompanying this action is a strobe with a very extended timing, paired with a dark, electronic sound. That sound, in fact, is the internal circuit of the strobe itself. When we switched it on, I heard it, and while the lighting technician was programming the pulse, I placed a microphone on it. The result is the sonic manifestation of the electronic source of that luminous phenomenon.
The lighting technician and the sound designer are always ready – more or less enthusiastically – to indulge every one of my rather mad sensory experiments.
For centuries, theatre combined its evocative power – embedded in the text and required of the audience – with performances that took place in natural light. Theatre began to use artificial lighting only relatively late in its evolution.
In William Shakespeare, light is always an external manifestation of inner psychological states. In each of his works, light does not represent the story – it is the story. Othello is always in darkness, gold and black, like the most sumptuous of Rembrandt. All the principal scenes unfold in the dark, and the only source of hope are the torches. A darkness that envelops everything and that, in the end, is even invoked by the Moor himself: ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light’. By contrast, Romeo and Juliet is a hymn to light. Juliet is herself pure light – a young woman who teaches the torches of Othello how to shine.
‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.’ Juliet is a source of light, she radiates it. ‘But what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.’
It is a great challenge for anyone called upon to stage this work. How can it be done? How can one make the actress emit light without it becoming overtly spectacular? To be clear, our Ariel bathed in light is spectacular because the scene itself is spectacular (Ariel is set free and flies away). In Juliet’s case, everything must appear both ordinary and supernatural (in a purely Shakespearean sense).
These expressive opportunities are a rich challenge precisely because the language has evolved and theatre can be something other than mere representation. The fact that technology allows us to play with mystery is truly a gift. William Shakespeare did not use lighting (he only began to do so towards the end of his career, with The Tempest), but had he had access to motorised fixtures, he would certainly have used them. What I mean is that the darkness lit by torches, in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, actually took place in broad daylight. At that time, spectators imagined the darkness; today, they can imagine the light. It is always a game of convention and imagination, designed to activate the spectator’s participation and to avoid mere acting and representation.
If you were to ask me today how it can be done, I would not know how to answer – and that is precisely the beauty of it: I have not the faintest idea, and moreover I know that it is not necessary for Juliet to emit light. Yet I also know that it would be a precious path for moving from a plane in which infatuation is represented to one in which love is expressed. After all, William Shakespeare took a rather trite, moralising tale and transformed it into the very essence of love – a love that is immediate, like a flash of light that overwhelms the senses.
How it is done, I would discover on stage, together with the lighting technician and the actors, and perhaps, after days of attempts, I might find – purely by chance – that a particular little dress, bought at a flea market, reflects the light in such a way as to create a halo around the figure wearing it. That, for me, is above all what stage writing is: stirring matter until something reveals itself before our eyes. Catching the shadow of an aura and immediately tracing its contours, once and for all.
In particular, I would like to ask you about the genesis of the opening staging of The Tempest: ‘I have dimmed the noonday sun,’ says Prospero. This line carries an immense epic and imaginative power: any cinematographer reading it in a script would have their knees trembling!
Even more so if they were to read the script of King Lear, in which both the sun and the moon are darkened: ‘‘These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction – there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child.’ In staging King Lear, there is no difference between trying to understand how to materially create an eclipse and manifesting on stage, through the actors, the cooling of love among human beings illuminated by the halos of the two darkened celestial bodies. It is the same thing. In this sense, the work on light proceeds in parallel with that on the actors: each reflects and nourishes the other. Both are not seen, yet they make things visible.
How did the idea of seeing the storm from beneath the sea come about? Was it a surprise for you as well? Ariel’s very liberation, at the end of The Tempest – which, in the text, is not emphasised, despite being anticipated from the very first lines – takes place through light. How did you conceive it?
It revealed itself; I did not conceive it. Stage writing frees us from ideas and from the risk of illustrating them. After Giorgio Strehler, that scene has become something of an archetype, reflected in a cliché. And so, precisely to avoid falling into that cliché, I began right there: with the storm cloth. But not Strehler’s, which was made of precious silk, nor the kind one buys from stagecraft suppliers – tellingly called a ‘storm cloth’. I asked the production to make a prototype in inexpensive satin, machine-sewn, and I devoted several days to improvisation.
When one improvises, everything is permitted: there is an object, endowed with its own identity and certain dynamic possibilities – we begin to play. And so, when Chiara Michelini lies beneath the cloth laid on the ground, she appears to be resting on the seabed, covered in mud. That is an image that acts at a deep level; later, when Alonso says that his son lies beneath the mud, the spectator will already have seen it, even if they are not aware of it.
Then, by lifting the cloth, the weave of the fabric – and above all the seams – allowed the light to filter through, so I tried adding haze; and when, during the improvisation, I saw those beams, the same that pierce the sea when one looks at it from below, I felt – as a spectator – that I was underwater. Only then did I decide that the perspective would be that. I did not decide it; I saw it. And I told the actress that from that moment on she would activate the storm from beneath the water.
Chiara was there, dancing in synchrony with the two actors manipulating the cloth through the ropes: every gesture, every held breath, every inhalation moved in chorus with the light and the sound… That scene was a surprise even for me.
The final lighting was one of the many attempts I made during rehearsals to find a way for Ariel to take flight. The beauty of motorised fixtures is that, in a matter of minutes, you can converge all available light sources into a single point. I had already done something similar in the third act of Il giardino dei ciliegi, when everyone dances in despair, awaiting the axe that will fell the cherry trees. The stage direction calls for a single light source: the chandelier. Instead of a chandelier, I used an early twentieth-century white satin parasol, hung from a large hook of the kind used to load crates onto ships. The parasol descended slowly while all the motorised projectors converged on the exact point where it would come to rest.
In the end, the entire theatre – stage and auditorium – was bathed in a milky, ghostly light, filtered through those small pieces of antique satin. A colour and a diffusion impossible to achieve by other means. Visually, the effect was also very powerful: that small object, which in the second act had protected Lyuba from the sun, had itself become the sun – the sun in a room.
And so, in the end, Ariel is terrified of freedom, as though he were about to die – and in fact he dies in order to be reborn and freed into the light. These are very difficult scenes to capture with a camera, because they would require an extraordinary dynamic range. If you expose for Ariel and the parasol, everything else sinks into darkness; conversely, if you try to retain the environment, both Ariel and the parasol become blown-out silhouettes.
Here, once again, we encounter the marvellous and stimulating limitation of photography compared to the retina’s imaginative capacity to see everything, to focus, to balance, instantly. Those two images – Ariel and the parasol – exist only if they are imagined by the spectators, who immediately manipulate reality and project their own inner vision: that parasol radiating light is an artistic device that activates the imagination. In my case, such devices are always connected to the text or to the author I am engaging with.
With photography, the technique changes, but the final result should be the same: to manipulate the visible in order to facilitate the perception of the image. To capture these two scenes with a camera (whether still or moving), one must cheat – but truth, as Louis-Ferdinand Céline says, is achieved by cheating in the right way. This is why anyone who understands photographic technique knows that there is no direct relationship between the photograph and reality: the photographic image is always an alteration of reality, an alteration that becomes art when the author, through technical means and artistic instinct, allows us to see beyond the real. The principle is always the same: the image is not the visible.
This is a photograph taken during rehearsals: as you can see, all the light sources converge on the large shell, and Prospero (Marco Sgrosso) is illuminated by it. The idea was that he could observe the storm and follow the shipwrecked by looking into the shell as though it were a crystal ball – or the Palantír from The Lord of the Rings. The scene was eventually removed, but it is interesting that this particular shell, with its alabaster colour, came not from the sea but from the earth. It was found while working the land in Sardinia. Imagine how many years of darkness it endured before returning to the light and being flooded by it.
I would like to step away for a moment from the specifics of light and ask you to elaborate on a couple of your statements regarding your initial approach to the text, which once again led me to draw cinematic parallels. You say that, for you, a first reading of a text should be light, should even allow for misunderstanding or for falling asleep. This reminded me of a statement by the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who said that he does not feel offended or disappointed if a spectator falls asleep during one of his films; rather, he feels honoured to have helped lead them into the realm of dreams. ‘When I watch the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang or Tsai Ming-liang, I always fall asleep. After years of watching them and falling asleep, I too became a director, and now it is my films that make audiences fall asleep. I think there may be a special power in these works, one that can lead spectators towards a different vision of the world, a different state of relaxation, where we can all leave everyday life behind. The film transports us into a dreamlike world, and when we wake up we are still there, almost as if the film and the dream were stages of a single journey’ .” (Cit. A. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, interviewed in Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema by Chinlin Hsieh. Do you share this position of Apichatpong, which accepts and allows for a certain lightness on the part of the viewer?
I tried to watch Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: I did not fall asleep – I went to bed. When a film bores me, I find it disrespectful to fall asleep; I would rather switch it off and go to sleep. Dreaming is the ideal state, the only opportunity we have to silence the mind and listen to the soul, which has no other way of communicating with us. Sleep is another matter: in cinema one can fall asleep because no imaginative participation is required of the spectator – if the scene is a desert, one sees a desert. In theatre, a desert is not needed: it is enough to say to the spectator, ‘imagine a desert’, and they will see one. It is convention, which, as Simone Weil says, is the light that casts shadows. Theatre does not exist without spectators; cinema does. I have never made a film, but if I were ever to try, perhaps for the first time I could entirely ignore the audience (also because it would most likely be my last, given my age). Something I never do during a theatrical creative process. The imperative is primum non taedere: first, do not bore. I experience that freedom when I take photographs, never when I make theatre. There is, of course, a cinema that tears through the fabric of reality, and it is the cinema I love most: Ingmar Bergman, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, Béla Tarr, Aki Kaurismäki, above all Yasujirō Ozu. The empty rooms of his films… all those dialogues, that coming and going, that crossing of lives and rooms – and then suddenly everyone leaves, almost imperceptibly, and the room empties. Its inhabitants have gone, yet they have left behind a trace of life: a smell, an object forgotten on the table, a broom hanging from a nail that still sways.
Empty, abandoned rooms that sink into the darkness of night, only to be awakened at dawn by a ray of sunlight entering through the window and brushing against objects. The hours pass and the light moves, revealing chairs, worn sofas, paintings and photographs on the walls. To contemplate these places, charged with humanity yet momentarily uninhabited; to contemplate the melancholy of a steaming cup of tea… some directors manage to place you in a condition of such deep looking that you enter that room – I would almost say, you become that room: your solitude outlined by the steam of a cup of tea. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, there is an extraordinary scene. A child is left alone at home; suddenly a woman appears, perhaps a ghost. The child notices her, is frightened, then waits. The woman sits at a table and sips a cup of tea; she tells the boy to take a notebook from the bookshelf and read a page. The boy reads. When he finishes, the woman says, ‘go and open the door, please’, and the boy obediently goes and opens it. An old woman appears: ‘I must have made a mistake’, she says, and leaves. The boy closes the door and returns to the living room – but the chair is empty, the woman is gone.
Up to this point, it is the representation of an event through a moving image. And then, at a certain moment, the image explodes: all the power of the supernatural, without ever resorting to the supernatural. On the wooden table there remains the mark left by the steam from the hot cup of tea – that mark which, as everyone knows, soon disappears, shrinking rapidly. Andrei Tarkovsky shows us this natural phenomenon, accompanying it with an insistent, deafening music that stops a few seconds before the mark completely vanishes. It is a concrete, naturalistic image, and yet anguishing, because it seems to cry out: she was here, she was here! But immediately afterwards no trace remains – only the boy and his fear – and yet, at the same time, one is carried by the image into a dimension in which a supernatural reality manifests itself in its objectivity.
Our faith in that reality falters and evaporates. Our reason, our desire to see, is literally violated by this evidentiary image: the proof is there, and yet it cannot be shown; it has evaporated, and with it our contact with the beyond. The mark does not represent anything – it is simply a mark, an ephemeral yet powerful trace of a ghost, an entity that rarely reveals itself and in which no one truly believes. The image of that mark seems a perfect example of what the director himself defined as substitution.
In narrating what is alive, the artist works with what is dead; in speaking of the infinite, he offers the finite. It is a substitution. One cannot materialise the infinite; one can only create the illusion of it, its image. What you say about the first reading of a text is what cinematographers do when they first read a script. The first reading is a spectator’s reading, almost novelistic, if you like. One must resist the temptation to stop immediately and take notes on visual ideas, camera movements, or anything of that kind. There will be later readings for that.
Given that, for a director, reading a text inevitably entails a kind of emotional amputation – because, while I read, I perceive the mechanism and take pleasure in the technique, perhaps inhibiting somewhat the pleasure of emotion, much as a composer does when listening to new music – beyond this obstacle, I consider the first reading, the most emotional and unconditioned one, the most precious. It must be allowed to include error, misunderstanding, misinterpretation. Yet those errors often conceal a treasure, because in the very act of reading (reading also an image or listening to a sound), the mechanism of projection is activated. We project into that particular form, character or situation what we are and what we know.
This intimate and profound connection with a literary work is perhaps the source that nourishes the creative process, but it cannot, in my view, be its object. Theatre is a collective art, made for a collective, and therefore requires that the personal be transformed into the universal. What fuels the creative act must be the impersonal magic of the anima mundi. For this reason, during rehearsals, all of us are called to share the signs of our interiority – not interiority itself, which must remain a personal matter, because if we turn it into the object of art, we risk falling into a morbid exposure of the private self, excluding humanity.
In my case, I can say that with my actors and collaborators I never speak about how deeply a given work, character or situation touches me. What is quite surprising is that – it happened recently with Tragùdia – only after a number of performances did I begin to see and feel, deeply, how much that being had to do with my own life. This occurred because Tragùdia exposes archetypes, and I find it wonderful that, after many performances, the work can speak to me as though I were an ordinary spectator, in a direct and overwhelming way.
If you ask me how to proceed technically, I would say that, once the emotional phase has been set aside (though it never entirely disappears), there follows a more scientific phase, almost like that of a watchmaker: dismantling the text, also because very often what we are dealing with is a script reduced to dramatic literature. I usually proceed through a series of surgical removals, in an environment free from preconceived ideas. If, for instance, I am working on Hamlet, in extracting all the objects indicated or inferred from the reading, there will be swords, cups of poisoned wine, letters, stools and thrones. And then there will be Yorick’s skull. When it ends up in our hands, I must not begin philosophising, but simply explore its dynamic potential beyond the text.
To be clear, when Hamlet asks himself whether it is better to be or not to be, this has nothing to do with the skull, even though the collective imagination – not the unconscious, but the imagination – sees Hamlet as a blond young man in a black roll-neck, holding a skull. Is the skull a cliché or an archetype? The fascinating thing is that the two always resemble one another: the formal difference is subtle, the real effect devastating. Here too, it is a cliché that opens onto an archetype. Or perhaps the reverse. That skull lay underground for twenty-three years, Hamlet tells us – like our shell. Two objects of similar shape and size, returning to the light after a long nocturnal slumber. The analysis of the text must be rigorous and free from any conditioning; in this way one first discovers the wonders of the work, and above all protects oneself from illustrating one’s own ideas – or worse, in my case, from stepping downstage to bow, suffocating the audience with all my Hamlet-like ‘orphanhood’.
In my experience, I can confirm that the only way to detach oneself from a purely mental plane is to possess formal control over matter, so as to afford the luxury of letting it explode before our eyes, waiting for images to form. Today, art is almost entirely personal and self-referential. If Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, advises us not to illustrate our ideas but to seek images in the stains on walls, in puddles, or – as Hamlet does – in the clouds, why should we today believe ourselves so necessary as to impose our inner turmoil, which is often nothing more than minor or major personal neuroses?
I would only add that Leonardo says one must seek images outside oneself, but he also specifies that, first, one must obsessively learn technique: ‘But first learn well to render all the parts of the things you wish to depict, such as the limbs of animals, and the forms of landscapes – that is, rocks, plants, and the like.’
You say that texts must be ‘known and then forgotten’, and here one thinks of the method of the Coen Brothers, who carefully storyboard an entire film in preparation. But then they do not bring the storyboards onto the set, nor do they show them to the actors. What does this mean? According to their cinematographer Roger Deakins, if you have prepared so meticulously, you have mastered the text – and can therefore allow yourself to improvise, to embrace the happy accidents. In an interview with Antonio Moresco, there is a playful exchange about your obsession with control. You say that you want to have control even over the creaking of the wooden boards that make up the stage (that is, control over the world, as William Shakespeare might see it?), and you say ‘that is why I chose theatre and not cinema.’ Do you think that theatre, in general, allows the dramaturg a different – perhaps greater – degree of control than that of a film director?
For me, all life is a happy accident – let alone theatre, which is crystallised life… In my case, I study a great deal, I prepare schemes, dramaturgical structures concerning characters, scenes, light, sound, costumes, and then, yes, when I enter the theatre I truly need to lose myself and to have unexpected visions. To stage an idea, a sketch, or a storyboard would, for me, mean descending from mystery into craft (whereas it should be the opposite): I find nothing interesting in that. It is a paradox, I know – months of preparation that seem useless, yet are the bait with which to seduce mystery. Once again, the same principle: if the image is not the visible, the idea is not what must be seen, but merely a reagent that activates an alchemical process whose destination we do not know. Speaking of storyboards, I find very interesting the use that Béla Tarr makes of them – or rather, the fact that he replaces them with postcards. I have no real idea what a storyboard truly is, but for me cinema is above all places and environments, natural light rendered artificial, very few shots. If I think of an intense dialogue between two lovers, or between a mother and a son, the mere thought of cutting from one face to another would feel like stealing sweets from a child. This does not mean I do not love cinema that makes wide use of such techniques, but it is not the cinema I would make… and for me the same rule would apply as in theatre, where I try to create the theatre I myself would wish to see. Béla Tarr and Max Ophüls made great use of tracking shots, and so did Yasujirō Ozu in his early work, but later they disappeared. The most perfect definition of cinema was given by Anton Chekhov when defining what a short story is: ‘
It is far rarer in cinema for an author to concentrate in themselves the roles that you take on in your productions – roles which, for you, are inseparable from directing (lighting, costumes, set design). I found many cinematic insights as well in your conversation with Alessandro Toppi in the afterword to the book La Tempesta. Dal testo alla scrittura di scena. In particular, you were discussing the Commedia dell’Arte, and when asked ‘how does one avoid caricaturing life?’, you replied: ‘Simply by not imitating it – that is the task of cinema.’ So is this your conception of cinema, or is it a provocation?
From the moment reality itself is a great performance, in which we play the roles assigned to us, the risk is that cinema ends up imitating an already simulated reality. Theatre is the only place where one is free not to act. It is a freedom acquired by learning to expand the heart, the voice and the body.
Unfortunately, the use of radio microphones is contributing to the diminishing of actors’ bodies and voices in theatre: since they no longer need to make any effort to project their voice, they end up speaking as they do in everyday life – or worse, as in cinema or television. We have arrived at the imitation of the imitation of the imitation.
Two of the greatest actors in history both confessed the same thing: ‘We act so much in life that, to make theatre, it would be enough simply to stop acting.’ (Ryszard Cieślak)
‘Acting is the least mysterious of the arts. Everyone acts: the child who quickly learns how to behave in order to gain the mother’s attention, as well as the husband and wife in their daily rituals, with all the artifices and role-playing typical of a marital relationship. Politicians are the worst actors and the ones who most seek to draw attention to themselves. It is difficult to imagine anyone surviving in this world without acting. (…) ‘Acting, in general, is something most people think they are not capable of, yet they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I have ever seen is that of ordinary people, who try to show that they feel something they do not feel, or who try to conceal something. It is something everyone learns in early childhood.’ (Marlon Brando).
In this play of roles lies the risk of identification, whereby we end up convincing ourselves that we are the role we perform. This is pathological in life and rather depressing in the art of acting. William Shakespeare speaks of little else in almost all his works. In The Tempest, one of his final plays, Shakespeare has Prospero speak and definitively declare:
«like one
Who having into truth, by telling oft,
Made such a sinner of his memory
To credit his own lie, he did believe».
‘like one who, by dint of lying, causes his own memory to sin so grievously against the truth that he ends up believing his own lie, so he convinced himself that he was truly the Duke.’
The ego is not pure mind, but identification with the form of thought: the ego is Antonio, who yields to his mind to such an extent that he comes to believe he is the Duke of Milan. ‘Do not believe everything you think,’ says Lao Tzu.
Perhaps it is the Fool, in William Shakespeare, who is the only one who always speaks the truth and – in contrast to the role he plays – does not act?
The answer lies in William Shakespeare, as always:
‘Give me leave to speak my mind,
And clothe me in a motley coat;
And I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.’
The Fool is without a role. He is an actor, not a character. An actor who plays the madman and, precisely in that guise, can say whatever he wishes. He is only apparently a subject of the king; in reality, he is his mirror – the mirror of power. In exchange for his subservience, the Fool receives the motley costume which, in its splendour, grants a most precious gift: freedom of speech. By virtue of this investiture, he can strike anyone, because he is immune from everyone. He can mock, parody, ridicule any courtier, even the king.
The modern version of the Fool may be found in stand-up comedians: one may like them or not, but they are in fact the only ones capable of elevating comedy from entertainment to a ritual of sarcasm. Sarcasm means to tear the flesh, as in the Sardinian carnival: Carrasegare – carre is living flesh, segare means to cut, to lacerate. I think of Ricky Gervais, the Italian Giorgio Montanini, or his brilliant precursor Lenny Bruce, who sacrificed his life for the sake of freedom.
This untouchable figure, dispenser of unsettling truths, perhaps has its origins in the parabasis of Attic comedy: that sacred moment when the dramatic action was interrupted, the actors removed their masks and addressed directly the powerful seated in the front row, exposing the foul body of their infected world. A powerful tearing of illusion in order to establish direct contact with the polis. A notable example in our own time is Ricky Gervais’s most recent hosting of the Golden Globe Awards.
«Let’s have a laugh at your expense. Remember, they’re just jokes. We’re all gonna die soon and there’s no sequel».
[Divertiamoci a vostre spese. Ricordatevi, sono solo battute! Moriremo tutti presto e non esiste un sequel».
Più avanti, in un passaggio di due battute, dice tutto su Epstein e sul fatto che “lo abbiano suicidato”. Il teatro dovrebbe essere il luogo in cui incarnare l’archetipo dell’emozione eseguendo una partitura che libera dai vincoli di una vita condizionata. Il luogo in cui ci si rivendica a sé stessi e ci si libera dai ruoli della quotidianità. Il motivo per cui una certa recitazione sta prendendo il sopravvento è perché mi pare stia diventando consolatorio vedere, o meglio illudersi di vedere, una copia di sé stessi in scena o su uno schermo. Un attore cioè che fa il verso a un essere umano che a sua volta fa il verso a personaggi emersi da uno schermo. Si tratta in realtà di uno specchio ingannatore che induce lo spettatore a imitare gli attori nella vita di tutti i giorni, nei momenti di massimo pathos, nei litigi, nelle piaggerie e negli ammiccamenti. Una vita di celluloide. Un esempio estremo è che il linguaggio della camorra lo riscrivono gli sceneggiatori della serie televisiva Gomorra i quali, che lo vogliano o no, finiscono col fornire un’iconografia del potere della criminalità molto attraente per i giovani che vivono in contesti di marginalità.
Even before Gomorrah, they had already begun holding guns sideways, as in Pulp Fiction.
Theatre must hold up a mirror to the soul, not to its обол — its outer shell. It must communicate on a deeper level, making the body and the voice vibrate, thus activating a resonant response in the bodies of those seated in the stalls. The text, the quality of dialogue, the much-vaunted ‘message’, the equally vaunted ‘reading’ of reality, of the condition of the world, of man, of woman, of the last among us… all this risks running aground on a purely conceptual plane: energy fades, the thinking mind ignites, and the danger is a rhetoric of the real.
Energy does not lie and does not act; by contrast, our mind can be instructed to simulate any feeling. If one wishes to penetrate the mind and soul of the listener, one must stop speaking and begin to sing. The most harmful examples are the speeches of great dictators, or of certain politicians: they know that to hypnotise crowds one must sing to them the lies and the violence that inhabit them. At the opposite pole lie mantras and Gregorian chant. In between lies theatre.
Art feeds on life, but it is not life. There are no emotions, only the archetypes of emotions. The task of art is not to imitate the visible but, as Plotinus writes, ‘to rise to the ultimate reasons from which nature itself springs’. When film directors seek the right faces to embody certain roles – not merely skilled actors – they are, in essence, attempting to construct the bodily and facial imprint of an archetype.
While Pier Paolo Pasolini was desperately searching for the right figure to play Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Jesus knocked on his door. When Pasolini saw that nineteen-year-old anti-Franco student asking for support for his political cause, he saw Jesus. He saw him because he was looking for him.
Let us return to the initial theme of our conversation. Pier Paolo Pasolini chose an actor as though he were a location, as though he were capturing a moment of natural light. He chose him primarily for the emotional function he wished to assign to him, not because he had to perform the lines of Jesus written by Matthew the Apostle.
Actors should feed on life, but also imitate art – move as if within a work by Pina Bausch, allow androgynous expressions to surface in their faces, as in the portraits of Leonardo da Vinci. Bernardo Bertolucci recounts that, while shooting Last Tango in Paris, he took Vittorio Storaro to see an exhibition of Francis Bacon, inviting him to bear in mind those colours – I think – or that extraordinary handling of space… I am not sure. He then took Marlon Brando to the same exhibition, pointing out the paintings that appear in the opening credits:
‘Do you see that painting? Good. I want you to recreate that same intense pain.’
And that, apparently, was the main direction he gave him for the character.
The most effective directions we receive – in the case of cinematographers, from the directors we collaborate with – are not always obvious references to other films or photographs. They may also be words, music or other kinds of suggestions, and we are asked to translate them into images. Seamus McGarvey, the cinematographer of the series M – Il figlio del secolo, told us (in an episode of the Chiaroscuro Podcast) that, in order to describe to his colourist the photographic tone he wanted to achieve, he brought him just two words: nicotine and tobacco – nothing else.
However skilled an actor may be, after a number of films they can do little more than repeat themselves, imitate themselves – De Niro playing De Niro. If it is true that Clint Eastwood has only two expressions (and what expressions they are!), Robert De Niro may have twenty, but we remain within the same sphere. The face of a great actor should be a normative face in which one can lose oneself – apparently almost expressionless, yet in fact hyper-expressive. An ineffable and un-signifying mask. This refusal to signify renders the mask unpredictable and capable of sustaining all possible expressions: all of them and, at the same time, none.
The faces of Greek statues never betray a feeling: that is the nature of the mask – it is not any one emotion, but all emotions. The mirror must reflect the essence of the human being, not its everyday sophistication. There are actors who have cast off the mask to reveal the face; to do so, they need symbols, because in art essence manifests itself in form. I am not speaking of the false forms with which we identify, but of the very essence of a given feeling.
I look at the portraits of Rembrandt, or those of Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Alberto Giacometti, Piero della Francesca and many other painters I love, and I think that these great artists borrowed features in order to draw the essence of the human being – not the essence of a particular individual, but of humanity as a whole. Giacometti said that at first he went to museums to observe the masterpieces of the past, only to convince himself that he should look at people, not at artworks. I believe that the works in the Louvre taught him how to see and how to reproduce the essence of a face.
An actor should feed on life and, at the same time, study the faces of Leonardo and the works of Giacometti. The same applies to objects: in theatre, that cannot simply be a chair – it must be the chair. Just as, in order to compose the physiognomy of one’s own face, one must refer not to everyday faces but to the normative faces of the great portraitists of humanity, so the chair is not the everyday chair, but the one painted by Van Gogh. In this sense, to facilitate such a creation, it is advisable to use worn, weathered objects, charged with life. Of course, that is not enough: that chair will become Van Gogh’s chair or the throne of Alexander the Great only if the actor treats it as such.
This is not a conceptual simulation, but a true miracle of transubstantiation. It is not easy, and often the result is disappointing, but it is precisely in the human and theatrical attempt to perform this miracle that the miraculous resides. It carries us into another dimension, and on stage – I do not know why, but I know that it is so – phenomena occur that belong not to the realm of representation but to that of transfiguration. A chair is, yes, only a chair, yet it can also be a formidable scenic device that bears within it the traces of the thousands of people who have sat upon it. And when it is left there, in a bare room or an empty stage, it is transfigured. I think of the chairs of Tadeusz Kantor, those with little wheels, or the anonymous yet powerful ones in Café Müller by Pina Bausch. I think of all the chairs in the interiors of Edward Hopper or Vilhelm Hammershøi: empty, arranged with magnetic precision. I think of the chairs of Francis Bacon. I think again of Yasujirō Ozu – his empty rooms: people leave, and what remains is a perfectly chaste composition; accomplishing the extraordinary through the ordinary, as Bernard Dort said.
The room is charged with life and presences: a little steam still rises from the teapot, or a woman enters, hangs a broom on a nail, and leaves. And that broom sways, solitary, for eternity – the metronome of a perfect image.
I return to one of the earlier questions, to the conception of cinema and of its light as an imitation of life. Which is limiting, as it does not include all those films that have little to do with imitation – whether it be a game of chess with Death set against a seascape, or the whole of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema, which is realistic only in its most superficial epidermis. In the same conversation with Alessandro Toppi, you also highlight certain aspects in which cinema enjoys an expressive ‘superiority’ born of its technical specificity, when you refer to the ‘powerful silence of cinema’, citing Hana-bi by Takeshi Kitano, which is more difficult to achieve in theatre. Would you like to be able to control the room tone – that is, the ambient sound – as a film sound mixer does?
Sound in theatre is an extremely delicate – and painful – matter: with every new renovation, the acoustics are systematically destroyed. That in itself is serious, but even more so is the fact that no one seems to notice or mourn the loss. This is because prose theatre has too often become a pale imitation of cinema and television, and with the use of radio microphones spectators end up experiencing Il giardino dei ciliegi by Anton Chekhov as though they were in a multiplex with Dolby surround. Sound dies, silence vanishes, pauses and ellipses disappear… everything becomes blurred; listening fades, and directors end up directing actors’ gestures simply so that it is clear who is speaking. In my productions, there is always a great attention to the dramaturgy of sound: there are sounds I record in everyday life that sometimes find their place in the work. For instance, the purring of my cats, amplified through a powerful system and pushed through the subwoofers to accompany the feline, seductive entrance of the witch in Hansel and Gretel; funeral bells recorded on a spring afternoon full of life, together with the buzzing of insects and birds that close Il giardino dei ciliegi; or nocturnal birds captured by placing a recorder deep in a forest throughout the night, later becoming the birds inhabiting the sacred grove of the Eumenides in Edipo a Colono.
In AURE, I remember recording the creaking of the stage on which we rehearsed and using it to accompany the slow-motion, lacerating scene of the two newlyweds. Sometimes sounds happen by chance. While rehearsing AURE, there was a music school adjacent to the stage, and at times one could hear children mishandling and tormenting various instruments. One afternoon I recorded a piano lesson between a grumbling teacher and a child climbing over the keyboard, playing out of tune, starting again… that crooked music, yet so alive and moving, eventually became the score for all the gestural sequences of AURE. Particularly in those scenes where a human relationship tries to mend itself: searching for one another, embracing, yet failing – unable to play that harmony, that melody of broken human bonds.
During rehearsals for Il giardino dei ciliegi, every evening at the same hour, a cicada present in the theatre would begin to sing; after two weeks, we decided to record it, and its solo became the background for the second act. And then there are the sounds produced live by the actors – you may recall the pane carasau crushed underfoot by Banquo in Macbettu. That production has toured the world, and that moment has always sent a chill through audiences, because the bread is sacred, but also because that sound evokes so much more…
Certainly, in cinema it is enough to capture something once to create a work that will then be reproduced identically forever, whereas you have often said that a theatrical performance is organic (the writing itself is), that it changes over the course of a tour – in Macbettu, for instance, actors have changed over the years, or some have taken on roles previously held by others.
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that ‘all the visions of all spectators today are founded on cinema’? Do you mean that even the experience of theatre, for most people today, inevitably carries a comparison with the image projected on a screen?
Today, in theatre, we end up doing literature: we speak as in everyday life and move as in everyday life. It is a fact – the voices and bodies of actors are fading.
It seems to me that your visions of theatre aspire to reach both the high and the low within the audience – the mind as much as the heart, tears as much as laughter: I am thinking of the anecdote you told about the applause at the end of screenings you witnessed, both in the case of Dogville and Rocky IV. How does one applaud William Shakespeare? Can an audience uplifted, applaud both the ending of Dogville and that of Rocky IV – is that your ambition? And on that note, I cannot help but ask what you think of the recent Hamnet, but also of what, in my view, is the most powerful, personal and universal cinematic adaptation of William Shakespeare: Ran. But that opens up an enormous parenthesis – perhaps for another time.
As for Hamnet, I must admit I could not help but cry. But to answer you properly I would need to see it again at least a couple of times. Certainly, although it has little to do with what we know of William Shakespeare, the author has created an enchanting narrative; the actors are splendid, and the direction deserves applause. If only it were not for that hand beating on the heart, and that insistence on reiterating an immensely powerful ending, overdosed with music so beautiful that it suffocates it. The emotion ceases to be deep and rises to the surface. A pity, because when she reaches out her hand towards Hamlet, my heart stopped. ‘To produce emotion by a resistance to emotion,’ writes Robert Bresson in one of his remarkable cinematic haikus. But perhaps the director did it knowingly; perhaps that overly beautiful and familiar music turns a magnificent scene into a popular one. It remains a very fine film. When I watch it again on Blu-ray, I might turn off the sound.
As for Ran and Akira Kurosawa, that would require a separate interview. Rocky IV is, in fact, a rather embarrassing commercial film, whereas Dogville is a remarkable work by a brilliant director, destined for a few. Today, cinema is popular mostly when it is commercial, with very rare exceptions. The reason is that there is no longer a polis, no longer a collective.
Take Avatar: it is not the kind of cinema I love, but the fact that it is a film seen by everyone, centred on fundamental and necessary themes – respect for others or their subjugation, respect for or destruction of nature, and above all the presence of the Mother Goddess – is anthropologically and artistically significant. After millennia of patriarchy, in which a false god has been placed in the stead of the true goddess, this is no small matter. A masculine, military, virile – in a word, Western – energy, ready to dominate and destroy everything. I do not know whether Avatar can be defined as popular; certainly, it manages to speak to everyone.
When one goes back in time, in search of the origins of humanity, one discovers that there is only one thing shared by all human groups as they took shape across the world: the representation of the Mother Goddess. Avatar speaks of this as well. It is a pity that it is, above all, an American film in the worst sense of the term. In truth, the cinema I love is an unknown cinema; perhaps the only truly universal artist was Charlie Chaplin.
In theatre, it is different. The great authors – the Greek tragedians, Molière, and above all William Shakespeare – are able to speak to everyone. Perhaps the difference lies precisely in this profound and, fortunately, irreparable distinction: theatre exists only if there is someone to imagine it, and this is possible thanks to the fire that casts shadows – that is, convention. I point to the floor and say, ‘this is the ocean’, and the spectator sees the ocean.
I have read that you consider Alfred Hitchcock a guiding spirit, together with Jerzy Grotowski. Cinema often returns in your reflections. The very company you founded carries in its name a tribute to Ingmar Bergman, Insn’t it?
As a child, I was not taken to the cinema, but fortunately I often happened to see on television three very different kinds of films: those by Alfred Hitchcock, the James Bond films, and those of Totò. I can now say that Totò and Hitchcock certainly influenced me, and I learned a great deal from them; it remains to be understood what influence James Bond had on me (though, to be clear, for me Bond is only Sean Connery).
My company is called Teatropersona – we needed a name, and it came to me almost by chance. For many years, in every house I lived in, one of the first things I would hang on the walls of my study was that marvellous photograph of the faces of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson. I am referring to that sublime scene in which the two women meet at night, in that darkness that becomes dense like the unconscious that engulfs them. And then that moonlight, that caress, that turning of the gaze towards the camera. Of course, there is no Ingmar Bergman without Sven Nykvist. In that film, as you know, there was the miracle of the fusion of the two faces – and if you consider that it was achieved simply by cutting and splicing film. A profoundly powerful image, obtained by merging the least flattering profiles of two magnificent and beautiful actresses.
Finally, I will ask you a question that I am sure is not new to you at all. Does cinema call to you? I will understand if you tell me it is still a secret you do not wish to reveal, but is there a literary work you would like to adapt into a hypothetical film of your own?
I am perhaps a little too old now to receive calls. But where there is no vocation, there is no calling. There might, however, be a commission. Making a commissioned film could be interesting. Most productions by companies like RAI or Netflix seem to have nothing left to say: it is all a catalogue of biographies – queens, singer-songwriters, politicians – and one ends up merely performing, with actors imitating (brilliant, he looked exactly like him!). There are no images, nothing beyond what is seen. In this way, the extraordinary power of cinema is diminished – its magical realism, the vein that runs beneath reality.
Yesterday I saw the image of a father holding his little daughter’s brightly coloured schoolbag; she had been killed, along with other children, in bombings. It moved me deeply, precisely because of its austerity and the shameless vividness of that carefree colour. It reminded me of the account of a Jewish woman who survived the camps: when she left home, she packed her suitcase and put on her multicoloured swimsuit. When she arrived at Auschwitz, the women were lined up, naked – and she stood there in her swimsuit, a patch of colour in that grey inferno.
These are images… What remains to be seen is whether I am capable of them.
Like the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List: an apparently symbolic element that is in fact based on a real person who survived, now a writer and painter, Roma Ligocka, also a cousin of Roman Polanski.
I would like to close with this final quotation of yours, from the beautiful conversation Lighting Light(s) #2 with Cristina Grazioli: ‘The rectangle, as Maria Lai used to say, is the only geometric form that does not exist in nature: it is the form that represents human thought.’ The rectangle is also the negative of the camera, and the frame of cinema…
All art is inscribed within a rectangle: painting, the cinema screen, television, the computer, and finally the smartphone – a black hole that is devouring our soul. And yet humanity still longs for the circle, that is, for the soul, which develops and grows in a circular manner, like a stone thrown into water. Love is circular; the embrace, the foetus – whenever we seek shelter or define a sacred place, its form is always circular. Circular and coloured. Today everything is angular and grey. The inner growth of every child is a circular expansion that mirrors the shape of the cosmos and the unfolding of nature. But then we begin to ‘educate’ children, imposing lines of interpretation upon reality, so that we end up repeating the same mechanisms – following paths traced by others. And thus we cease to move in circles and proceed instead along straight lines of thought, which generate angles and rigid minds.
Yet what we now call art was originally nothing more than manifestations of the sacred, aspirations towards transcendence: one sang, drew, played, danced to evoke forces of nature with which to enter into resonance, not for beauty in itself. In art, the rectangle – that is, thought, rule – is in some way the reagent through which the instinct of the soul is awakened. Theatre, like the circus, is born circular; only later do stories and characters appear – that is, the lines of thought – and even the shape of space changes. Today all theatres are inscribed within a rectangular stage framed by a rectangular proscenium. Attempting to break the fourth wall is a futile operation as long as one remains within the sphere of art: in truth, the fourth wall will always devour us. It devours us if we do not learn how to use it. The only way to free oneself from it would be to abandon art and embark upon a path of transcendence – impossible for those afflicted with the malady of creativity. Eros does not forgive infidelities. One might also say that the rectangle is the frame that prevents poetic and psychic forces from overflowing, the equivalent of the tyranny of metre in poetry. There is no poetry without metre, and there should be no metre without poetry. Art is the attempt to draw the circular form of the soul despite the square tyranny of thought: a circle inscribed within a square. The source is the circle, but the rules are dictated by the rectangle.
The photographs accompanying the conversation are by Alessandro Serra.
