The Brothers Behind ‘Padre Padrone’
By Leticia Kent
Oct. 16, 1977
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Imagine, if you will, two brothers who co‐direct neo‐realist films and who are in such exquisite accord that “when we are directing, we take turns doing things, sequence by sequence.” Imagine two such brothers who have co‐directed filmsbeginning with documentaries—in this manner since 1954 and whose current work, “Padre Padrone” (which will open here soon), is so fine that it was recently exhibited at the New York. Film Festival where critics acclaimed it, and, earlier this year, at Cannes where it became the first film to win both top honors—the Golden Palm and the International Critics Prize—and drew from the late Roberto Rossellini, who knew a thing or two about neo‐realist filmmaking, the tribute that “this film reconciles me to the cinema.” Imagine these gentle, cultivated, synchronized brothers traveling to New York from their native Tuscany and being interviewed through one interpreter, answerable to both, during which interview they take turns answering questions without once interrupting each other.
Imagine all this and you have Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 48 and 48 respectively, who together wrote and directed “Padre Padrone,” adapting it from Gavino Ledda's 1974 biography which tells how, against the harshest odds, especially his own authoritarian “father and master,” Gavino, a silent and illiterate Sardinian shepherd until he was 20, manages to break out of his solitary confinement and eventually earn a degree in linguistics. There is a classical circularity to the plot in that Gavino, now a linguist, returns to his hometown to record the Sardinian dialect and finds himself again isolated, this time as an intellectual among illiterates.
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At lunch the Taviani brothers ordered identical fish dinners and chain‐smoked from a single pack of cigarettes. They are of medium height and build, with straight black hair and languid brown eyes. Both wear black‐framed glasses and gold wedding bands (“We share nearly everything, including money, but, we assure you, we do not share our wives”). Vittorio, seemingly the more contemplative of the two, looks somewhat older than his 48 years. His melancholy, plunging mustache is turning gray and he covers his thinning hair with a black wool student's cap—which makes him look faintly comical. Of this, he himself is conscious. Paolo looks fit and vaguely romantic. He is casually dressed in a navy pullover, jeans and brown boots. When he talks, his hands chop at the air vigorously. Both Paolo and Vittorio are good‐humored, lucid, well‐spoken,serious.
Can they explain the way they work?
“It's very difficult to explain this abnormal relationship,” Paolo leads off. “There's‐no real division of roles or responsibilities. One is not more important than the other—we're on the same level. We always talk things over. There is a strange equilibrium between us which we cannot rationalize. Maybe it's that Vittorio is an introvert and I'm an extrovert and so we complement each other. Maybe it's that he's a Virgo and I'm a Scorpio, two opposing signs that either Join forces or kill each other. Maybe, in time, one single monstrous character will emerge. Or maybe it's simply a meeting of neuroses. Vittorio's wife Carla was expecting twins,” Paolo continues, “and they were to have been born in December. I begged her, ‘Please try to have the babies a month earlier; that way they'll be Scorpios.“No, please,’ Vittorio protested. ‘One is enough.’ As it happened, the babies were born one month early, on the same day of the month at exactly the same hour of the day that I was born.”
“There may be two neuroses,” Vittorio quips, “but there's only one clinical case.”
The scene shifts to their room. The interpreter and the interviewer are seated in chairs. Paolo and Vittorio sit primly on the edge of the bed—they smoke incessantly and take turns talking about their chronology.
The brothers were born in San Miniato, midway between Pisa and Florence, in Leonardo da Vinci country. Their father was a lawyer, an anti‐Fascist who was persecuted for his views and forced to flee with his family to Pisa. The eventual defeat of the Fascists made a lasting impression on Paolo and Vittorio—it taught them early on that it's possible to change things for the better, a recurrent theme in their movies.
Their was an opera buff. He adored Verdi and Donizetti and every year he would take Paolo and Vittorio to the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. From the moment the big red curtain went up, the brothers were .impressed by the spectacle.
After the war they went to university in Pisa. Paolo studied liberal arts and Vittorio law. One day they played truant and went to the movies without noticing what was on. To their mutual amazement it was a film which dealt with World War II and the resistance. The film was Rossellini's neo‐realist “Paisan.” The brothers saw the trauma they had lived through unfolding again on the screen and the verisimilitude in each frame, realistic without being real, helped them to understand the real thing better. “Then and there,” says Vittorio, “we decided that we would become filmmakers.”
They joined the movie club in Pisa, arranging the screenings for members; they wrote movie reviews for local newspapers; they made a few documentaries; they wrote some neo‐realist plays and produced them. They went to Rome and starved. Cesare Zavattini, the scenarist who collaborated with De Sica on his greatest films, helped them.
They made documentaries when they could, and finally won some $70,000 in prize money in 1960. They used the money to make their first feature, “A Man for Burning” (1962), the story of Sicilian farmer‐trade unionist who tried to organize the peasants in Sicily and who ran afoul of the Mafia and was killed. The film was well received at the 1962 Venice Film Festival and they went on to make six other feature films (among them, “Under the Sign of Scorpio,” 1969; “Allonsanfan,” 1974) which, at the very least, allude to social problems, mainly the unsolved problems in southern Italy.
“The real reason we make movies,” Vittorio asserts, gently dissembling, “is that we love making movies. It's as simple as that. Otherwise, we would have become philosophers‐or sociologists. ‘Allonsanfan,’ in fact, represents our experience in the theater. It's . like a production of‐a‐Verdi opera. For, example”‐Vittorio lights another cigarette“we love going to the movies. We see everything. In Italy we admire Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Ferreri, Scola. . .In Germany, Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders. There's an affinity between Herzog's films and ours. Abroad we admire Altman and Scorsese. Altman understands how to use music in a film.”
The most original aspect of “Padre Padrone,” most critics agree, is the Tavianis’ use of sound. Sound as music heard, thought, super‐imposed—a Strauss waltz, Sardinian Gregorian chants, a Mozart concert. Sound as the amplified voices of nature—wind riffling through oaks, animals screeching at dawn, a swollen stream rushing. Bestial sounds—the panting of shepherds sexually assaulting their donkeys, sheep and chickens. Sound as the literal narrative—Gavino Ledda's conquest of the spoken and then written word.
“We believe that music in film must not be just a comment accompanying the image,” Paolo explains, stretched out tired on the bed, “but it has to have the same importance as the image or as any of the characters of the film. In ‘Padre Padrone’ music becomes the protagonist in all ways. The sequences and images are built up through their affinity or contrast with sound. For example, during the religious proceshion, there is a fight, a clash between’ the young shepherds who are carrying the statue on their shoulders because they are the slaves, and their masters, the patriarchs, who are walking in the procession empty‐handed. Therels clash between two choruses, one in German sung by the shepherds who are thinking of escaping by emigrating,;and the other the traditional Sardinian chant sung by the patriarchs representing the Establishment who want to subjugate the young shepherds. And, in fact, ‘this whole conflict is staged not in action or in words, but in music by the two conflicting choruses. We have discovered that the image doesn't lose by using music as a substitute for narrative—itgains.
Is there a common theme that runs through their films? “From silenee to communication,” Paolo says.
Their film was shot in 18 millinieter for Italian television. Is the television esthetic a constraint? “When we make film, we make a film,” Vittorio answers.
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