Vittorio Taviani: An Interview

Abstract

This interview was recorded in June, 1982 in the small piazza of San Pietro in Montorio, situated near the top of the Gianiculum Hill in Rome. Bramante's masterpiece of Renaissance architecture, known as the Tempietto, stood a few dozen yards distant. The occasion for the interview was the imminent release of the Taviani brothers' latest film, La Notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of Shooting Stars), which had just won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. The film is a moving, largely autobiographical portrayal of the attempt of a small group of Italian villagers, caught in 1944 between the advancing Americans and the retreating Germans, to escape to the American lines. The Tavianis, now nearly fifty, have been making films for twenty years, but are known in the United States chiefly for Padre Padrone (1977), an adaptation of Gavino Ledda's bestselling account of his passage from ignorant Sardinian shepherd to university professor. Their most recent film to be released in the US, II Prato (The Meadow, 1979), stars Isabella Rossellini; its whimsical combination of love triangle and myth did not sit well with New York critics and the film quickly disappeared. What are perhaps their best films are barely known in this country, but with their visibility greatly increased by the success of Padre Padrone, this situation seems about to change. The films that are destined to have the biggest impact, once they reach a wider audience, are their first, Un Uomo da Bruciare (A Man for Burning, 1962), which stars Gian Maria Volonte as a reluctant Sicilian revolutionary, a complicated mythical allegory called Sotto il Segno dello Scorpione (Under the Sign of Scorpio, 1968), San Michele Aveva un Gallo (Saint Michael Had a Rooster, 1971), and the brilliant Allonsanfan (1973-4), starring Marcello Mastroianni as another less-than-eager