Geoffrey Macnab meets the man who turned the Venice International Film Festival into what it is today, Gillo Pontecorvo, who admits to similarities between directing an epic film such as his La battaglia di Algeri and being director of a film festival
'I've nearly finished a script,' Gillo Pontecorvo sighs, 'the first half I say immodestly I find very, very beautiful. I've already composed all the music.' But this latterday Sisyphus knows there is no guarantee he'll ever go on to make his new movie. He puts his hands over his eyes. 'It's an illness of my head. I am so maniacally perfectionist that when I begin to write my film, I love it. Half way through, I love it a little less. And when I finish it, I have a terrible question that I ask myself - why should we do this script?' Invariably, he abandons it because, he claims, he loves cinema too much to risk tarnishing it. 'A woman who likes very much to make love doesn't necessarily make love just anywhere,' he murmurs, as if to clarify his point.
Over the years, countless Pontecorvo projects have been shelved before shooting has even begun. He is surely the least prolific of the great auteurs. When he does work, he works painstakingly slowly. (His masterpiece, La battaglia di Algeri [The Battle of Algiers, 1965], took seven years to prepare.) Nevertheless, his fascination with what he describes as the 'seventh great art of our time' remains as strong as ever. Now well into his seventies (he was born in 1919) he takes an almost fatherly interest in its well-being. When he speaks of 'the infantilism, standardisation and repetition' he finds in contemporary cinema, he sometimes sounds as if he is admonishing an errant child.
Pontecorvo once observed that the ideal director should be 'three quarters Rossellini, and one quarter Eisenstein.' He believes his remark has been taken out of context. He was speaking about himself, not other filmmakers. 'If I could change myself, this is what I would like to be. Rossellini is the one for whom I began this work. Later on, I learned to see the epic strength of Eisenstein. In a very little way, I see myself as the inheritor of these two traditions. In my work, I try to follow Rossellini's approach: to be very near the truth. At the same time, the few films I have made are all epics on Eisenstein's scale.'
It wasn't as if cinema was his first love. Originally, he planned to be a composer. 'But I never finished my course because I didn't have a penny. It's eight years. You need somebody to feed you.' Instead, he turned to journalism to earn a living. Then came the Damascean-like moment of revelation. 'I was in Paris, I remember, and by chance somebody mentioned that Rossellini's Paisa was playing. I went to see it and immediately I was awestruck. I knew then that I had to change my line of work.'
That was when he bought his first camera. Wherever his editor sent him, he'd take it with him. 'They had to remind me that I was a journalist, not a photographer.'
In best Neo-Realist tradition, he soon turned to documentary, making films on such subjects as the lives of Sicilian miners and the flooding of the Po Delta. His debut feature, La grande strada azzurra (The Long Blue Road [1957]), with Yves Montand and Alida Valli, won an award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, but it was La battaglia di Algeri, his reconstruction of the final days of French colonial rule in Algeria, that catapulted him to world attention. Shot in the markets, bazaars and maze-like streets of the Casbah with an enormous cast, this was filmmaking on the grandest scale.
Perhaps one of its most striking features was its relatively even-handed treatment of the French colonialists. They're not shown as monsters but as pawns of history, caught up in events beyond their control. This is not necessarily an approach he believes other filmmakers should follow. For instance, he believes Ken Loach's uncompromising portrayal of the Contras in Carla's Song 'is even too kind'. He speaks with horror of a trip he himself made to Nicaragua in the mid-80s. 'I was planning a film, which I later abandoned.' While there, he witnessed the Contra rebels use sheer terror to try to sabotage the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. 'It was a great period of hope, and the Contras destroyed it.'
One of the greatest propaganda films ever made, La battaglia di Algeri is also a film of dazzling technical virtuosity. On the one hand, it has the urgency of newsreel. Scenes were filmed on the actual locations where the battles between the rebels and the French police had been waged and some characters played their real-life roles. On the other, it is as elaborately choreographed as any musical. Its use of the narrow alleyways and roof tops recalls Julien Duvivier's gangster thriller, Pépé Le Moko, also made in Algeria. He wasn't consciously influenced by Duvivier's film. 'But the Casbah is so strong a presence that it can give two such different films a kind of similarity.'
Dealing with 20,000 extras and a multi-lingual crew in the Casbah, he suggests with a certain weary irony, was good preparation for his present travails as Venice film festival director. 'The difficulty and the effort is roughly similar. But shooting a film is very exciting, amusing and marvellous. Organising a film festival is less so.'
He has announced his imminent retirement from the Mostra almost as many times as he has claimed he is about to start work on a new feature. Somehow, he always seems to stay. Even now, as his fifth year as festival director comes to an end, he is under pressure to take up the reins one more time. 'Everybody asks me to stay, even my deputy. Many American friends say, 'we understand you want to go back to your real work. But why not try to stay in contact with the Biennale as a point of reference for foreigners?' I suppose this could happen if the demands of my film are not too heavy...'
Not so long ago, he believes, young filmmakers were given licence to create masterworks like Paisa, À bout de souffle and Umberto D. 'Now, the space in which such films can be made is getting less and less and less.' The emphasis is on bland conformity. 'Any industry which doesn't invest in experimentation has a bleak future. More and more, ours is an industry of prototypes. If you're not prepared to risk something trying to improve the style or the language of film, sooner or later, cinema will die.'
He talks darkly of the 'bad influence' exercised by America, the 'hegemonic industry', on filmmakers from Asia, South America and Africa, and bemoans the way the US offloads its worst product ('films they wouldn't even show in Rapid City') on the rest of the world.
Cinema may indeed be in crisis. Nevertheless, Pontecorvo suggests he is not yet too pessimistic. 'I'm sure we can keep our marvellous medium alive.' As a first step in the battle, many hope he may even get round to making a new film himself.
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