And it debated what was to be done.
It was the unofficial curriculum which led students into the streets of Rome and Milan, Turin and Trento and Naples.
These were students who wore suits, had short hair and scrubbed faces. They were the sons, and occasionally the daughters, of lawyers and judges and doctors, teachers and businessmen, civil servants and industrialists.
In the spring of 1966 one of these students, Paulo Rossi, was killed in a clash with fascists at the University of Rome. Alexei had known him vaguely. It was after that death that he, too, took to the streets in protest, participated in occupations.
Paradoxically, it was also that death, which led him finally to his dream site, Cinecitta, Italy’s very own Hollywood.
It happened in this way.
Giangiacomo Gismondi had come to Rome the week after Paulo Rossi’s death. In the richly appointed apartment above the Spanish Steps in which Alexei now lived with his friend Enrico, he waited for the boy’s return from the University. Alexei was late. Never a patient man, Giangiacomo paced the room between phone calls and barked orders into it with increasing menace.
When a dishevelled and dusty Alexei sporting a black eye finally appeared, Giangiacomo was already in a temper.
‘Look at you. Where have you been?’ Giangiacomo snapped at him.
‘At a demo,’ Alexei’s tone in response was more curt than usual.
‘A demo? A demonstration?’ Giangiacomo snorted. ‘Is that what you go to university for?’
‘A friend of mine has been killed by fascist thugs and you sneer?’ Alexei challenged him, ready to continue the battle of the streets.
‘When a friend dies, one arranges a funeral, not a demonstration,’ Giangiacomo retorted.
‘And allows the fascists and their friends in power to go quietly home to bed. Your friends, I imagine,’ Alexei was angry now, insolent.
‘What do you know about fascists?’ Giangiacomo growled. ‘You weren’t even in nappies when we put an end to Mussolini.’
‘Oh, so there are no fascists left now that Mussolini is dead?’ Alexei exuded sarcasm. ‘No fascists in Italy? no crypto fascists in America fuelling the military-industrial complex, exterminating the Vietnamese? Making a mockery of democracy? No fascists in Rhodesia? In South Africa?’
‘Empty rhetoric. Stupid, empty, student rhetoric.’ Giangiacomo spat. ‘Not even as intelligent as the Communist union leaders. If I hear that you’ve been to one more of these demonstrations, I’m cutting off your allowance.’
‘Fine. You can do that as of today,’ Alexei stormed from the room.
A moment later, he put his head through the door again. ‘And if you’d like me to move out of the apartment, just say so and I’ll pack my bags.’
Giangiacomo simply stared furiously at him.
The next day Alexei took up the contact he had through a friend of a friend of a friend to Cinecitta.
He had visited the vast studio complex before and been both enthralled and a little bewildered by that maze of activities which go into the making of a feature film. But now he wanted to be more than an observer. He wanted a job.
He struck lucky. A third assistant director was needed on a comedy about to go into production the following week. The script was a hundred pages long, a hundred pages tracing the complicated love life of a provincial Don Juan. It was Alexei’s job to keep track of the various takes and their details.
Every morning now, Alexei woke at the crack of dawn to drive the thirty kilometres out of Rome to Cinecitta. His first day on the job, he improvised a complex numbering system to record what was going on.
Films are rarely shot in narrative sequence. Locations and sets prescribe the order of scenes. The production schedule had it that the first week’s shoot would cover all the scenes which took place in the hero’s country house and grounds - created out of nothing in one of Cinecitta’s studios. Alexei noted the position of actors, the duration of takes, angles, retake upon retake. The whole thing was grossly complicated by the fact that the director had not yet made a decision on his leading man and three actors were vying for the part. By the third day, Alexei threw out both script and numbering system and simply started to write down everything that happened in minute detail.
The production was scheduled to run for ten weeks. It stretched to thirty. As the other assistant directors left to take on prior commitments, Alexei rose to first assistant. He had stopped going to lectures altogether. On weekends, he borrowed notes from friends and erratically caught up on reading. He felt it didn’t matter. He would somehow manage exams. And what he was learning now was far more interesting to him.
He was fascinated by the chaos of filmmaking. A chaos which at its end would have to be transformed into order. As if life with all its accidents, its differing points of view, its illusions and deceits could somehow be reassembled to breathe meaning.
Sometimes, during lax moments, he would sneak away from his own production to watch Fellini at work in another part of Cinecitta. Fellini, the master of chance, who rarely worked to a script, but allowed a story to unfold through the play of atmosphere and accident and the infallible direction of his own distinct eye. Watching Fellini, a comment he had never understood crystallised in Alexei’s mind. It was from the French filmmaker Jean Renoir. Film, he had said, was a huge machine in which everything is prearranged, but where reality enters suddenly through a door you have purposely left open in order to violate what was prearranged.
What Alexei loved almost as much as the actual making of the film was the camaraderie which developed amongst the team. For those weeks, they were a little world unto themselves, with their loves and their squabbles, but all united, all with their defined role, in the disparate activities which would somehow become a movie.
During his third week on the production, the wardrobe mistress responsible for the lead actor came up to him during a coffee break.
‘It’s you I’d like to dress,’ she looked up at him from dark laughing eyes. ‘I’d make you into a Russian count, complete with fur hat.’
‘How did you know?’ he smiled.
‘Know what?’
‘That I was Russian.’
She chortled, ‘I didn’t have a clue. Sheer genius, I guess. Whoops, there’s my call. See you,’ she waved, dashed off.
He watched her receding form: a trim woman with electric shoulder-length hair, blue jeans, white shirt. He searched his mind for her name. Laura, it came to him. He would have to remember.
Two days later, she invited him into her dressing room. Mirrors, wracks of clothes. ‘I can tell you, Gianni is no joke.’ She did a little mimic dance and imitated the lead. ‘What do you think, Laura? Just a little extra tuck here. No, no, that’s not right.’ She pranced and strutted in front of the mirror, held her breath, stuck out her chin. And then, played herself. ‘Oh no, Signor Gianni, you look delicioso. Your fans will be breathless.’
Alexei laughed.
She leaned against the dressing room door, shutting it firmly behind her. ‘Now, you, on the other hand…’ she lifted her face to him.
He suddenly realised she was waiting to be kissed.
‘Mmm,’ she urged him on, her eyes laughing.
Work permitting, they made love almost every day. During lunch breaks. Amidst the clutter of the wardrobe room. He would bring sandwiches, wine. She would add fruit, a slice of cake. They would make love, eat and laugh. After the day’s shoot everyone was too tired for anything but sleep. He only found out after two weeks that she had a husband. She laughed about that too. ‘Don’t pull a face, Alexei. This is cinema. That is life, eh mio caro?’
He knew what she meant. The two worlds rarely coincided. When he left the precincts of Cinecitta, he hardly thought about Laura. He imagined it was the same for her.
Alexei was happy. When the end of the university term came, he had been meant to go and work in one of Giangiacomo’s factories, ‘to learn the business’ as his uncle put it. Alexei expl
ained to him that he already had a job in as important an industry. Giangiacomo, a little rueful over the outburst that had caused all this, took it in his stride.
‘How much are you earning, Alexei?’ he asked.
Alexei told him.
‘And if I doubled it?’
Alexei shook his head. ‘I’m doing what I want. It’s important to me.’
Giangiacomo nodded. He was, he realised, proud of him. Proud of his determination. ‘Good boy,’ he mumbled.
By the time the shoot was over, Alexei had over four thousand pages of notes. ‘Bravo,’ the director shook his steel-grey head plaintively. ‘Bravo Alexei. We have 125,000 metres of celluloid and your weighty document is probably the only thing that will enable us to reconstruct it in the edit.’ They looked at each other and chuckled.
The special screening for the crew of the film took place in November. On a whim, Alexei invited Giangiacomo to accompany him.
In the preview room, Giangiacomo laughed until the tears ran from his eyes. He was, as the director later whispered to Alexei, the very best member of the audience. Alexei, himself, could barely manage a smile, so intrigued was he by the film’s transformation. He could see how each cut had been made, each take selected and how, miraculously, it all finally hung together.
When the credits rolled and Alexei’s name appeared on the screen, Giangiacomo let out an audible breath. He patted Alexei’s knee. ‘Congratulations, Alexei, congratulations.’
Two days later a bulky package addressed to Alexei arrived at the apartment above the Piazza di Spagna. Enrico looked on as Alexei opened it.
‘It’s too big for a bomb,’ his friend teased wryly.
‘More like a small cannon,’ Alexei agreed.
It was, in fact, a sixteen millimetre camera. Alexei whistled beneath his breath.
‘You know, Giangiacomo is quite mad,’ he said to Enrico. ‘On the one hand he prevents me from going into film, insists on university. On the other he gives me this.’
Enrico shrugged, teased him. ‘He simply thinks you’re the best son who ever walked the face of the earth.’
‘And that,’ said Alexei, ‘is probably because I’m not altogether a son.’ He stroked the camera, played with the lens, set up the tripod.
‘But if you don’t put that object away for a while and do just a little work, you’ll never leave this godforsaken university,’ Enrico counselled him.
Alexei pretended not to hear. He was already dreaming about the uses he would put the camera to. He did work, but intermittently. His energies went mostly into a little documentary he had schemed, a documentary about his friends and their political views. Faces spoke squarely to camera, criticising the university hierarchy, the realm of privilege, the condition of workers and students, the corrupt sell-out which was Italian politics. Interspersed with the faces were shots of Roman workers’ quarters, the blank faces of students in lecture halls, strutting professors. The film had little aggression. It was cold. A document.
He thought, when he saw the rushes, that he would throw it away.
But he learnt something from the experiment. He learnt that the world’s reality was not the camera’s. He learnt that fabrication might be the only way to find truth through the camera’s lens. He went assiduously to the movies to see how other directors did it.
That spring there was no work to be had at Cinecitta. The vogue for Italian westerns had come in and productions had moved to Spain and Yugoslavia. Alexei, feeling a little guilty about Giangiacomo, finally agreed to spend a part of the summer working in his Milan complex of factories.
Giangiacomo’s idea was that Alexei spend a month apprenticed to a production manager in each of the two factories, one making refrigerators, the other cookers. The last month would be spent with senior management, familiarizing himself with sales and accounts.
‘I think you’ll find it is almost as much of an adventure as Cinecitta,’ Giangiacomo said to him slyly.
Alexei shrugged, ‘I hope you don’t expect 4000 pages of notes.’
‘No, not that. Perhaps just a little conversation at the end of it.’
Despite himself, Alexei was excited when he arrived at the factory complex some fifteen kilometres outside of Milan. He had insisted on checking in without Giangiacomo and as he walked through the corridors to Signor Bassani’s office, his natural curiosity took over. The buildings were new and on this floor, an atmosphere of chrome and leather and airy functionalism prevailed.
Signor Bassani was a man of about thirty-five with an easy manner. His deference to Alexei, marked at the start of the week, almost disappeared by its end. He showed Alexei round the shop floor, explained the workings of the various parts of the assembly line, the depot, the warehousing systems, introduced him to the shop stewards, to the rest of the senior personnel.
Alexei was fascinated by the beehive of activity. He avidly watched what seemed to be a seamless stream of operations. He was particularly intrigued by the assembly line. From his vantage point on the ramp above the shop floor, the movement of men and machines had the rhythmic quality of an intricate dance.
It was only in his second week, when he got down onto the shop floor that his impressions began to change. He noticed the glazed look in the men’s eyes as they performed their repetitive functions, chained to the rhythms of the machine, eight hours a day, six days a week. He imagined himself in their place, constantly in the blare of that noise, in the midst of those acid smells.
In the bright new canteen, he took to chatting to them.
Many of them were from the South. They were shy with him, withdrawn. But he persisted. One of the men, he discovered was from Cefalu. He talked to him about the beauties of Sicily. The man whose name was Augusto looked at him with suspicious eyes. ‘Beauty, yes,’ he said to him, ‘but no jobs.’
His eyes reminded Alexei of Francesca, dark, hooded, secret. He wanted to ask him if he knew her, if he knew what had become of her, but Augusto gave him no opportunity.
One evening, he asked if he could drive him home. Augusto shrugged, ‘If you like.’
He made no conversation, except to say, once, abruptly, that he missed the sea. Then he merely sat and directed Alexei towards a high rise block on the outskirts of Milan.
Alexei had hoped he might be invited in, but there was only a mute thank you to be had from Augusto.
He befriended one of the shop stewards, Emilio, a thick set older man who had no reservations about joining him for a beer. Alexei asked him about the Sicilian.
The shop steward shrugged, ‘They have a rough time these Southerners. No life really. Country boys. A little lost. They live four to a room and sometimes do bed shifts with the night workers. One goes to work and the other goes to bed. It saves money.’
‘I see,’ Alexei murmured.
At the end of his second month at the factory complex, Alexei found himself in a rage. He confronted Giangiacomo.
‘It’s appalling. Inhuman.’
‘What’s appalling?’
‘The way you treat your workers.’
‘The way I treat my workers?’ Giangiacomo was all surprise. ‘What’s wrong with the way I treat my workers?’
‘One of them fell asleep on the line today and his salary was docked.’
‘It’ll teach him to sleep at home,’ Giangiacomo was restrained.
‘Home? Do you know how these people live? Four to a room. It’s inhuman. What they do is inhuman. The same motion, day in day out. No talk. No choice. No satisfaction. Just domination from above for a pitiful wage.’
‘Student claptrap,’ Giangiacomo rumbled. ‘My workers are well paid. Safety standards are good. The canteen is new. People queue up for jobs in any Gismondi company.’ He paused. ‘Alexei, if a man falls asleep on a line, he jeopardizes the rest of the men. You should understand that. His salary is docked as a warning,’ Giangiacomo explained with unusual patience.
Alexei stared at him angrily. ‘Look at the way we live. There are twe
nty rooms here. We never use half of them. And look at the way they live. There’s something very wrong.’
‘Oh, so it’s revolution now, is it? Spread the profits. Distribute the wealth. Like in the Soviet Union, eh? An equal distribution of misery. That’s what you want. I’ll tell you something, Alexei,’ he glared at him now, ‘They would die in the Soviet Union to have factories as well run as mine.’
‘We’re not talking about the Soviet Union,’ Alexei glared back. Mention of the Soviet Union was always a sensitive point between them. ‘We’re talking about Italy. Exploitation in Italy.’
‘Bah,’ Giangiacomo grunted.
That autumn when he went back to Rome, Alexei threw himself into student activity. He felt he had a new fund of knowledge now, a new fund of experience to contribute to the discussions which raged. It seemed to many of his friends that students and workers could be put in the same equation. Both suffered from conditions imposed on them from above. Neither had any voice, any degree of autonomy. Students, like workers, were the legitimate bearers of revolutionary aspirations. Together they would change things. Overthrow the old regime, build a new world where justice reigned. And the place to begin was here, now, with the very matter of their everyday lives.
There was a thrill to disrupting those tired droning lectures, to invading those musty oral examinations and disputing the marks students were awarded, to taking over university halls and running courses, to investigating the problems of Roman workers, to marching, to skirmishing with fascists and police. A thrill and a certainty of purpose.
Excitement was in the air. The excitement of shared aspirations. Aspirations shared over continents. A giant festival of shared hopes. In America, in Germany, in France, in Britain, the students were marching. Against Vietnam. For civil rights. In the autumn of ‘67 Milanese students occupied the universities. In Turin they set up a free university where the things they wanted to know were taught. Everywhere they protested, put on street plays, staged happenings, sang, danced.
Memory and Desire Page 51