The tragedy of a ridiculous man

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Movie
German title The tragedy of a ridiculous man
Original title La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo
Country of production Italy
original language Italian
Publishing year 1981
length 116 minutes
Rod
Director Bernardo Bertolucci
script Bernardo Bertolucci
production Giovanni Bertolucci
music Ennio Morricone
camera Carlo Di Palma
cut Gabriella Christiani
occupation

The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man is a feature film that premiered in 1981, in the Italian original it is called La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo . It was written and directed by the Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci , who wanted to portray the inscrutable political situation in Italy with the story of a medium-sized entrepreneur whose son is kidnapped. Bertolucci shows the viewer a comprehensible plot, an identification with characters and a clear resolution. The work, which was created with a different cameraman for a change, is also out of the ordinary visually within his oeuvre. The audience showed little interest in the film; however, he received some recognition from critics familiar with his oeuvre.

action

Primo Spaggiari, manufacturer of Parmesan and Parma ham , does not correspond to the usual image of a business captain with his behavior. He stands with a captain's hat on his head and binoculars in his hand on the roof of the factory and observes the surrounding facilities and fields as if the factory were a ship at sea. He regards the lawn of two cars in the distance as a race until one overturns, from which his son crawls and masked men kidnap him with the other car. Primo's further actions reveal his awkwardness. In the unfolding opaque game he tries to pull the cord without seeing through the situation in the least.

The son's alleged girlfriend, Laura, shows up. She claims that he never introduced her to his parents because he was afraid he would embarrass himself with his father in front of her. Laura and Adelfo, a worker priest from the factory whom Primo has never noticed, reveal that they have contact with the kidnappers. The Spaggiari couple, whose factory is struggling with sales difficulties, wither as they try to raise the ransom, and the wealth and self-confidence of the Spaggiari couple. On top of that, the public prosecutor searches her house and expresses the suspicion that the son is a left-wing extremist terrorist . Despite some doubts, Primo begins to trust Laura and Adelfo, especially when Adelfo reports that the kidnapped son is dead. Primo now wants at least to save the factory from threatened bankruptcy and, as he claims, to help the workers. To do this, he involves Laura and Adelfo in a plan, according to which the ransom should flow into the factory unnoticed by his wife Barbara. Barbara stubbornly refuses to believe that her son is dead. After Primo and Laura and Adelfo tricked his wife into handing over the money, the young people refuse to give the money out. Finally, Primo and Adelfo go to a busy dance hall, where Primo meets his son again, who is already being hugged by his mother.

Themes, characters and society

It is not clear what the tragedy of a ridiculous man is about, what it tells. In many ways, the audience is like Primo, whose world suddenly becomes alien to them: who should you believe, who should you follow? Maybe we're dealing with a kidnapping thriller, maybe it's a film about terrorism or a police parody. You don't know where the front lines are, everyone is suspect, nobody plays with open cards. What remains unanswered is which role Laura and which Adelfo play, whether they are the kidnappers, whether the son may have orchestrated his kidnapping himself, and what Barbara knows about the intrigue. The only certainty is that the game serves to separate a “fool” from his money. Because he has promised to turn the factory into a cooperative, Primo trusts that Adelfo and Laura will use the money to save the factory. The scene with the pig slaughter indicates that he too is going to be slaughtered.

The paradoxical title between tragedy and comedy raises the question of whether tragedy in the classical sense can even go together with a ridiculous figure, because classical tragedy is about the overthrow of a lofty personality. For Bertolucci the words tragic and ridiculous expressed the situation in his country aptly - he found the state of Italy so tragic that it was ridiculous again, and if you perceive yourself as ridiculous, you become tragic again. “I realized that I was surrounded by ridiculous people. As soon as I looked in the mirror, I saw one. “ His film is completely funny, but doesn't make you laugh. He found ridiculousness to be superior to irony, because the latter was the basis for hypocrisy , whereas the ridiculous person was a holy idiot. The representatives of the government, in turn, give off a burlesque impression. They appear with the airs of a powerful troop, without it being apparent whether they really know the direction of attack.

Bertolucci flirted with the idea of ​​writing “End of Act Three” in the credits to suggest that the tragedy begins where his two-act film in 1900, describing the history of Italy, left off, and that Primo is a descendant of the character Olmo 1900 is. Primo comes from a rural background, was a partisan during the war and worked his way up vigorously. However, he is an entrepreneur who does not fully accept the rules of the game prescribed by consumer society . He has a strong, emotional relationship with the products he makes. While Primo's nobility lies in his rural origins, it is with his wife Barbara her education. She comes from the upper class French bourgeoisie and studied art restoration . It was the simple origins of her husband and his energy that fascinated her, and Bertolucci described the marriage as a chemical reaction, characterized by a dialectic of classes, by mutual admiration and envy. For Primo Barbara was a help in his social advancement, similar to how Bertolucci's hometown Parma once rose under French cultural influence.

With the film Bertolucci wanted to reproduce the basic mood in Italy around 1980 as he perceived it, the indefinable, incomprehensible, nebulous, doubtful and insecure that weighed on his homeland. The country was marked by the economic crisis, unstable governments and terrorist attacks. Crimes and scandals often went unresolved and the truth was not revealed. "State violence seems paralyzed, counterviolences entangled in impotent skirmishes." An inspiration for the film plot was the newspaper report about a local politician of the Democrazia Cristiana in southern Italy, whose son had been kidnapped and killed while his father was trying to raise money. Bertolucci saw the character Primo as a counterpart to the cynical logic that regards family members as a commodity. Primo tries to turn the kidnapping tragedy into something positive, saving the factory, and uses the son, who was believed to be dead, as a kind of fertilizer to allow his business to flourish again. In fact, the public also knows nothing about the Aldo Moro and Enrico Mattei cases . "In the looks that the characters exchange, we see the search for sincerity and at the same time the inevitable signs of betrayal."

As in many of Bertolucci's films, an oedipal conflict comes into play here. His approach to the topic has matured, however, and for the first time he tells the conflict from the father's point of view. Similar to the strategy of the spider , a complex political game develops between father and son, but with reversed roles. While there the son is caught in the cobwebs of the story laid out by the traitorous father, here the son entangles the father in the contradictions of his socio-economic-psychological position. Because of his rural origins and because he was a resistance fighter during the war, Primo does not understand why he is targeted by left-wing terrorists. In doing so, he overlooks the fact that he is a factory owner and capitalist in the present . He opened the factory the same year his son was born. The figure has already been interpreted to mean that he only pretends to love his son; in fact, he loves his factory and his position as boss. The possible loss of his factory and his power weighed no less for him than the loss of his son. Bertolucci designed a world shaped by his political views, in which a fellow from a humble background, if he was ambitious, could make money. In doing so, he alienates himself from his class identity , which the director imputes to him, from his youthful ideals, and thus from his son, who in turn turns away from him. Primo would have emasculated himself and thus made a fool of himself through his rise and the social compromise he entered into. Primo wasn't even aware of his son's political stance until the house search. The oedipal aspect is emphasized by the fact that Primo sleeps with his son's girlfriend and that, after the news of his son's death, he has intercourse with Barbara in his son's bed. Father and son also compete for Barbara's affection. It remains to be seen what she knows about the intrigues against Primo; She is enthusiastic about the liquidation of the property and "lives more in the process than she is depressed by the loss of her son."

style

After the cosmopolitan productions The Great Mistake , The Last Tango in Paris and 1900 , Bertolucci moved the location back to his home region, to Parma and its surroundings. With the exception of the French Anouk Aimée as Barbara, he cast the roles with local actors. He wanted to make an Italian film again, about the Italian province, because the big cities were no longer interesting because they had all lost their cultural identity. He also wanted to find the Italian language again; so he tried to free the dialogues, which he found mostly unsuccessful in Italian cinema because they were not written for speaking, of unnecessary ornamentation and to write them in a way that was suitable for film. He thought that this was a success, thanks mainly to the main actor Ugo Tognazzi . The “sentimental” film music, written by Ennio Morricone especially for the tragedy , uses an accordion and is inspired by popular waltzes . The character Barbara is accompanied by more "French" music with echoes of Ravel and Satie .

The review analyzed that the tragedy was staged in an extraordinary way and had no resemblance to anything familiar. She found a dreamlike subtext disguised as a thriller . In fact, Bertolucci had initially planned an end to the film that exposes the plot as a Primo nightmare, but dropped it. He disturbed the audience by presenting a likeable main character who gradually reveals a truth, but refuses to identify with it. Worse still, there is no such truth. The film disappoints the expectation of a traditional thriller, which allows a pleasurable tickle to be followed by an equally pleasurable dissolution, which confirms the common social values. Italian society no longer seems to trust its values. There are rumors, uncertainties, waiting, silent and dead times. The film tells in the first person, through Primo, whose voice comments on the plot and whose name means first in Italian . The observation of the events is distant and emotionally cautious, in marked contrast to the director's five previous films, which were characterized by operatic melodrama and poetry. In addition, the narrative style stays closer to realism and sticks to the chronology of events.

The recordings were made from late summer to winter 1980. The atmospheric change brought about by the seasons has shaped the film. In many pictures we see people and events through windows and door frames. “The terror is in the things that narrow and reveal the view, the excerpts whose randomness seems to be directed by an unknown person.” For the first time since Partner (1968), Vittorio Storaro was not in front of the camera in a Bertolucci film . For one thing, Storaro was already booked for another project. On the other hand, Bertolucci wanted a mise-en-scene with interior and exterior spaces staggered within the picture. Storaro's usual working method of placing spotlights in windows and doors in order to imitate plausible natural light sources would have stood in the way of this. The choice fell on Carlo Di Palma , who had photographed The Red Desert and Blow Up for Antonioni . Di Palma had no objection to illuminating even night scenes like those in the cornfield. The tragedy differs from the works created with Storaro in particular by its great depth of field, undramatic lighting that does not allow for shadows, shorter, narrower camera movements and static compositions with carefully placed figures. The “hyper-clarity” of the pictures sets the counterpoint to the nebulous, unmanageable content. "How can you explain that: These images are not clouded and yet are an inch from being untrustworthy?"

In the tragedy , an aspect reappears that Bertolucci was particularly preoccupied with in the 1960s and then disappeared from his films for a decade: the enormous stylistic influence that Jean-Luc Godard , whom he admired , had exerted on him. Although he had already succeeded in countering Godard's style with his own positions with the Strategy of the Spider (1970), here he once again dealt with his cinematic father. There are some references to Godard's Alles in Butter (Tout va bien, 1972), which is about a sausage factory in which photos of the company are hung on the blue-painted walls, as in the tragedy . Vittorio Caprioli plays the factory owner there and a policeman here. Elements of Godard's visual style such as cars, clothes, and furniture in primary colors appear in the first half of the tragedy , but are gradually being supplanted by Bertolucci's own stylistic features such as brown-gold colors and northern Italian landscapes.

Production and publication

At the Cannes Film Festival in May 1980, Bertolucci met Ugo Tognazzi , his preferred actor for the role, and presented him with his idea. Tognazzi was pleased and interested. Bertolucci started writing the script at the end of May. He wrote it a little as if in a trance, between eleven in the evening and five in the morning, in less than 40 days. The music composed by Morricone before the shooting was an aid to him during the recording. 14 weeks were available for this. Tognazzi brought a lot of personal information into the role and occasionally changed the text. Several supporting roles, such as the factory worker or the housekeeper, were filled with amateur actors. The calculated production cost of the film was 2 billion lire , as much as the ransom demanded in the storyline. The production was co-financed by the US distributor Warner .

The first copy of the film came from the laboratory a week before the start of the Cannes Festival , where the work premiered on May 24, 1981. Ugo Tognazzi received the Golden Palm for the male lead. The festival-goers met the film with incomprehension and booed it. The version of the premiere did not contain a first-person comment by the main character; Bertolucci had left it out in the final cut because it struck him as superfluous. However, the reactions in Cannes made it clear to him that leaving it out was a mistake, that the mystery and mystery of the film was in some ways a nuisance and a little arrogant to viewers. So he added Tognazzi's comment back on, assuming that the audience would then be able to identify more easily with the main character.

Reactions to the film

The film was poorly received in Italy, which Bertolucci attributed to the persistent personal dislike between him and the criticism there, which he found biased. Although he distanced himself from the terrorists, whom he qualified as “spoiled heirs, as bourgeois as Catholic”, parts of the Italian press attacked him for the unclear position he took in the tragedy towards terrorism. The opinions of the German-speaking press were mixed. The film "has often features a scathing farce in Italian craftiness, sloppiness and incompetence," said Urs Jenny in the mirror , and that it was "a work aching helplessness, but that it must have." Tognazzi meet the type of Italian SME entrepreneurs with " wide-legged joviality " . "What wants to unfold so dramatically is comically undermined; what threatens to sink into melancholy, brought to a level through irony, ” said Karsten Witte in der Zeit . Bertolucci accepted the challenge of evoking reality by omitting it. "Such films whose shape kept the social conflict that exists outside their aesthetic sphere, arise as a critique of the crisis that they reflect." The push was the director let resignation realize and it'll be "in such circumstances, not a big, no rousing film was made. ” This seemed “ not just relaxed, playful, but a little unfocused, almost arbitrary. ” The Fischer Film Almanach 1982 judged that Bertolucci was no longer trying to uncover and analyze the situation in Italy. The representative film is "the director's admission that his country is in a situation in which it has lost its orientation." In this, the work is honest, half ironically deliberate, half tragically affected.

Ultimately, the tragedy received little criticism and was rarely performed. Authors who judged this film in the context of Bertolucci's entire oeuvre, however, felt that it was possibly his most underrated work, or a film of splendid fascination for viewers familiar with the director's universe. For Bertolucci himself, the experience of the tragedy was very frustrating because he saw what he considered to be a very accurate representation of the crisis in Italy aroused a certain hostility in the audience. Bertolucci then left Italy for many years because he could not stand the cynicism of politicians like Bettino Craxi there. He needed "fresh air" and found it in the Far East and North Africa, where his subsequent films were set.

literature

conversations

  • With Bernardo Bertolucci in Time , November 13, 1981: "I am not Madame Bovary, I am the camera"
  • With Bernardo Bertolucci in the Cahiers du cinéma , December 1981, pp. 25–33: Entretien avec Bernardo Bertolucci
  • With Bernardo Bertolucci in Positif , November 1981, pp. 19–25: Entretien avec Bernardo Bertolucci sur La tragédie d'un homme ridicule

Reviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d Louis Skorecki: Un homme comme les autres In: Cahiers du cinéma , November 1981, pp. 50-51
  2. a b c d e f g h i j k Robert Ph. Kolker: Bernardo Bertolucci . British Film Institute, London 1985, ISBN 0-85170-166-3 , pp. 165-180
  3. a b c d Fischer Film Almanach 1982, Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1982, ISBN 3-596-23674-6 , pp. 233-234
  4. a b c d Urs Jenny: The big slap . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1981, p. 238-240 ( online ).
  5. a b c d e Zoom, No. 22/1981, pp. 19–21
  6. ^ Yosefa Loshitzky: The radical faces of Godard and Bertolucci . Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1995, ISBN 0-8143-2446-0 , p. 85
  7. a b c d e f g h i j k l Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with Positif, November 1981, pp. 19–25
  8. a b c d e f g h i j k l m Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with the Cahiers du cinéma , December 1981, pp. 25–33: Entretien avec Bernardo Bertolucci
  9. Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation in: Ungari / Ranvaud 1987, p. 219
  10. Urs Jenny: The big slap . In: Der Spiegel, No. 47/1981, pp. 238-240; Fischer Film Almanach 1982, Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1982, ISBN 3-596-23674-6 , pp. 233-234; Zoom, No. 22/1981, pp. 19-21; Gérard Legrand: Une comédie des apparences In: Positif , November 1981, pp. 17-18
  11. a b c d e Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with Die Zeit , November 13, 1981: "I am not Madame Bovary, I am the camera"
  12. Enzo Ungari, Don Ranvaud: Bertolucci par Bertolucci, Calmann-Lévy, 1987, ISBN 2-7021-1305-2 , p. 221
  13. Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation in: Ungari / Ranvaud 1987, p. 220
  14. a b c Bertolucci in conversation with Il tempo, January 2, 1983, quoted in. in: F. Gérard, TJ Kline, B. Sklarew (eds.): Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2000, ISBN 1-57806-204-7 , p. 170
  15. a b Karsten Witte: Citizens who have no suspicion In: Die Zeit , November 13, 1981
  16. Ungari / Ranvaud 1987, p. 221
  17. a b c d e f g h Film Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, spring 1984, pp. 57-63
  18. a b c d e Don Ranvaud: Tragedia di un uomo ridicolo . In: Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 49, 1982, p. 12
  19. ^ Claretta Micheletti Tonetti: Bernardo Bertolucci. The cinema of ambiguity . Twayne Publishers, New York 1995, ISBN 0-8057-9313-5 , pp. 192-193
  20. ^ Dietrich Kuhlbrodt: Bernardo Bertolucci . Film 24 series, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-13164-7 , p. 215; Gérard Legrand: Une comédie des apparences In: Positif, November 1981, pp. 17-18; Don Ranvaud: Tragedia di un uomo ridicolo . In: Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 49, 1982, p. 12; Robert Ph. Kolker .: Bernardo Bertolucci . British Film Institute, London 1985, ISBN 0-85170-166-3 , p. 165
  21. Kolker 1985, p. 125
  22. ^ Dietrich Kuhlbrodt: Bernardo Bertolucci . Film 24 series, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-13164-7 , p. 241
  23. Kuhlbrodt 1982, p. 218
  24. ^ Fischer Film Almanach 1982, Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1982, ISBN 3-596-23674-6 , pp. 233-234; Louis Skorecki: Un homme comme les autres, in: Cahiers du cinéma , November 1981, pp. 50–51; Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation in: Ungari / Ranvaud 1987, p. 223, also in conversation with Positif, No. 424, June 1996, Paris, p. 25
  25. Kolker 1985, pp. 174-175; Loshitzky 1995, pp. 87-88
  26. Kuhlbrodt 1982, p. 226
  27. ^ Positif, November 1981, p. 16
  28. ^ Conversation between Bernardo Bertolucci and Wim Wenders on the Italian television RAI on October 7, 1981, cited above. in: Fabien Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline and Bruce Sklarew (eds.): Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2000, pp. 146-147
  29. Cahiers du cinéma: Entretien avec Bernardo Bertolucci, December 1981, p. 25, introduction ( […] l'indifférence de la quasi-totalité de la critique […] )
  30. Gerard, Fabien S. (Ed.): Bernardo Bertolucci. Interviews . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2000, ISBN 1-57806-204-7 , introduction p. XX
  31. Ilona Halberstadt: Pix 2 . BFI Publishing, London 1997.