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Futuro Antico. Interview with Roberta Torre
Oct 29, 2022
Marco Bassan
Director of the famous film "Tano da morire," Roberta Torre talks about the future and the need to create art. Today more than ever.
What are your inspirational references in art?
I mix painting, cinema, photography, and music in a disorderly manner and without temporal solution, different eras, pop and neoclassical; I am greedy and omnivorous. I have certainly fed and continue to feed constantly on the images and imaginaries of others. Over time, these have settled and transformed as they came into contact with the historical moment I was living through. The Madonnas of Paolo Uccello, the altarpieces of Pietro Lorenzetti, Caravaggio's Deposition, Jackson Pollock, Basquiat, Schifano, Emanuele Cavalli—a recent discovery for me—the ex-voto of the devotees to Saint Rosalia, the votive shrines of Naples, and then Canova, Otto Dix. Among photographers, Robert Frank, Ghirri, Sarah Moon, Nan Goldin, Vivian Maier, Alex Prager, and Martin Parr. The clothes of Yohji Yamamoto, the punk of Vivienne Westwood. Among directors, definitely Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard, Fellini in La Dolce Vita, Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai, Béla Tarr, and Paolo Sorrentino.
What is the project that represents you the most?
I could say that my first film, Tano da morire, contained in summary everything that I have continued to explore over the years and all the codes that I love; I would call it a manifesto film: a true story that originated from urban mythology, in that case, it was the story of a small neighborhood boss, a great genius loci that supported the entire dramatic structure—Palermo. Then there were human stories and actors who were characters without being actors, faces that were already portraits. And then there was the music, spontaneous and reworked; in this case, it was neomelodic music, which has never ceased to fascinate me due to its intrinsic connection to the territory.
Finally, there was the possibility of deconstructing everything and using classic narrative codes, transforming them—in this case, the American musical of the golden years adapted to a street musical where the dancers were crazed marionettes. The freedom of language that that film had allowed me to mix a high level of narrative with a very pop one that I have always loved. In reality, I don’t know if it’s the film that represents me the most; certainly, it was the one most free from constraints and the one where I could best express myself.
What are its origins?
It arises from a long field research, years of observing a reality I didn't know, Southern Italy in the 1990s, particularly Palermo. You always return to the scene of the crime, and every time I start a new project, I find the path again as Little Red Riding Hood would, inspired by the same suggestions that I began to recognize in that film. Even though I am now far from those places and those stories, the desire that drives me to begin a new story, a new project, is similar.
How important is the genius loci to your work?
Everything stems from that. For many years, my work took on the aspect of Palermo, a city so powerful that it demanded representation or at least inspired it continuously. Over the years, it has changed and pushed me elsewhere. Today, I find inspiration in circumscribed places; they can be an abandoned house, for example, like the one of the Favolose, a bourgeois house from the 1970s in Bologna that remained intact and where abandonment has created its charm and memories; its dust became narrative for me.
Or there’s the house where I set my new film Mi fanno male i capelli on the coast of Sperlonga, which I reconstructed like a film set from the 1960s, inspired by houses and feelings I experienced in the homes I lived in as a child—the same lights, the same shadows and colors, the same curtains: the living rooms of Cassina, the lamps of Serge Mouille. Those childhood years are something I carry with me and continuously search for when looking for a place to begin constructing a story. “You could sparkle anywhere. There was a fantastic universal impression that whatever was done was right, that we were winning. That was, I believe, our reason for being, that sense of inevitable victory against the forces of the Old and the Evil”: this fragment from Hunter Stockton Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas describes well the feeling I carry with me since childhood, inevitably tied to those years, and that I seek in every place.
How important is the past for imagining and building the future? Do you believe the future can have an ancient heart?
I would hope so. But I see that periodically the past returns, as it inevitably does, in suggestions that are reworked according to the spirit of the times. It’s difficult to imagine something new without roots in the past, yet I have the feeling that especially in our country, there is a sort of forced removal of the past. I can’t explain why except by thinking that Italy has had such a powerful artistic richness in all fields that the comparison is always complicated and often impossible to endure. It seems evident that this is a fragile time compared to so much of the past.
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to follow in your footsteps?
I have the feeling that there is now a homogenization dictated by forces that are hard to counter, I could say economic, political, but not only. It’s a single thought that violently leads everyone in the same direction, embracing uniform visions, prepackaged images, reassuring and inauthentic. The advice I would give is to seek one’s own voice, knowing that this will not lead to an easy life. Indeed, perhaps it would be the surest way to a challenging path. But after all, if you don’t do this, what is the point of making art, assuming there is still space today for art?
In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still hold importance and strength?
It is a very intimate, very personal choice to seek the sacred. Personally, I wouldn’t find interest without this search, but it’s truly a path that is too personal to make it a general assumption. The sacred is not a destination; it is the sense of a journey. We should rather ask ourselves what the sacred is today. We would find that humanity has long been thrust out of this territory.
How do you envision the future? Could you give us three ideas that you believe will guide the coming years?
“One of the tasks of art has always been to create needs that it currently cannot satisfy,” Walter Benjamin tells us.
Being a creature of the twentieth century, I have traversed a century that still had man at its center. The individual was capable of creating something, and there was interest in the individual. The future seems to forever exclude this possibility. No longer individuals, then, but movements and ideological flows to which everyone will be led, consciously or unconsciously, adhering with results that may vary depending on the moment, certainly leading to fascinating and liberating outcomes that can alternate with and be linked to obscurantist visions. These are the major themes, partly already evident and deeply intertwined: the environment, the posthuman, the preservation of memory beyond the end of life on this earth.