The Taviani Brothers Collection (1977-1984) Reality and Fiction Working Together (Review)

What does realism mean to you? Too often, it’s discussed as if it’s self-evident: a realistic film is one that resembles reality. To say that, though, is to unconsciously admit a number of blind spots. How do we judge something to be realistic? Is it really true, or just a narrative that fits our prejudices? It could be argued that the social realist film is now as much as a genre as the Western or the science fiction movie, with signifiers both narrative (pessimistic, tragic stories of poverty) and visual (hand-held camera, grey colour palettes). The difference is, if you find a Star Wars movie implausible or tasteless, nobody is going to accuse you of being unable to handle reality. At its worst, the social realist style is a shield against legitimate criticism; hate this, runs the implication, and you don’t understand life as it really is.

One of the many reasons why the Taviani brothers are a breath of fresh air is that they don’t want their films to be watched in this passive way. They have been quoted as saying “The audience must always know it is watching a film”, an attitude that aligns them less with Mike Leigh and more with radical playwrights like Berthold Brecht and their countryman Dario Fo. On one level, they are the last men standing in the Italian neorealist tradition that brought us films like Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City. On another, they hark forward to the more playful, self-critical, postmodern films of the Iranian New Wave, such as Close-Up or A Moment of Innocence.

The closest thing to a conventional film here is The Night of the Shooting Stars, a tale of a Tuscan village taking evasive action to avoid being in the middle of a fight between German and American troops in the last days of World War II. It opens on a night-time scene that could have come straight out of a classic Hollywood musical and continues by placing its tough, hardscrabble story in blazing midsummer sunshine and bright green fields. Like the other two films in this set – Padre Padrone and Kaos – it has a very purposeful, static camera, completely different from the shakycam realism discussed above. For all it’s a well-told, moving story, though, it doesn’t make this style resonate as much as the other two films.

In Kaos, for example, the static camera is used to isolate the characters in the middle distance of the harsh, parched landscapes they find themselves in. Kaos is, in the classical sense of the word, a comedy, an anthology of tales of renewal based on stories by the writer of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello. It also includes many tragic and cruel passages, and even its most farcical moments, though, are rooted in an awareness of the harshness of this world. In the funniest story, a man goes to extreme lengths to repair an enormous vase he owns, which would be a mere satire on vanity or materialism if it wasn’t for the landscapes, buildings and costumes constantly reminding you that any possession in this world is one to be cherished.

Kaos is set in the nineteenth century, though it could be the middle ages and little would be different. The Night of the Shooting Stars and Padre Padrone move into the twentieth century, but the rural lives of the Tavianis’ subjects don’t change much. In Padre Padrone we see a glimmer of modernism which is immediately taken away; a school, which the hero’s father removes him from so that he can learn to be a shepherd. Winner of the Palme d’Or in 1977, the film is adapted from Gavino Ledda’s memoir. It’s unquestionably a brutal tale, with the child hero suffering repeated beatings at the hands of his father. The Tavianis’ camera is also at its most austere here, and the rich sunlight that the other two films bask in is smothered by clouds.

So why is Padre Padrone not only the best film in this collection, but also the most refreshing corrective to standard cinematic realism – and that’s up against Kaos, a movie where one of the supporting characters believes himself to be a werewolf? I haven’t read Ledda’s memoir, but I suspect part of the unusual flavour of this adaptation of it comes from the Taviani brothers refusing to squeeze literary realism into the straightjacket of cinematic realism. A literary narrator may write that he imagines everyone in the world is having sex apart from him, or that a goat he’s milking is being deliberately uncooperative. That’s part of the privilege of writing, that you can get inside the subjectivity of a narrator’s mind. Padre Padrone not only claims that privilege for cinema, but for realist cinema specifically, so long documentary-style scenes of farming will be interrupted by a voice-over coming from a goat, or… well, it would be a shame to spoil how the Tavianis visualise Ledda’s sexual frustration. It’s a memorable one.

The other thing that is energising and righteous about Padre Padrone is how unambiguously they identify with their hero. The violence his father inflicts on him would be unwatchable if there was a sense that the directors were revelling in it, or even that they weren’t as sympathetic as they should be. In Padre Padrone, by contrast, the camera feels so deeply for Ledda that it turns away from him while he is unconscious, much as Scorsese famously looked away from Travis Bickle in the film which won the Palme d’Or the year before the Tavianis. An elder statesman of Italian realism, Roberto Rossellini, was such a partisan of Padre Padrone that it is thought his death came partly as a result of the stress incurred from arguing in its favour with his fellow Cannes jury members. The Tavianis were ready to pick up that baton, though, much as the opening scene of Padre Padrone depicts the real Ledda handing a staff to the actor who will play him in the rest of the film. Their cinema doesn’t ignore reality, and it doesn’t exploit it either. Reality and fiction work together in these films, and they’re much stronger, more provocative and more interesting as a result.

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