The Guardian (Gran Bretagna) 17.11.04
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1353014,00.html
I miei piccoli terroristi
In via Caetani, una tranquilla strada nel centro di Roma, una targa sul muro di una chiesa segna quella che è ancora una ferita aperta nella società italiana: ventisei anni fa qui fu ritrovato il corpo senza vita di Aldo Moro. Quando Marco Bellocchio, uno dei più noti e rispettati registi italiani, ha deciso di fare un film sul rapimento e la morte di Moro, ha cercato di entrare nella testa dei terroristi. Perciò 'Buongiorno notte' non è un documentario, ma la storia della brigatista Chiara. "Non sono uno storico. Non mi interessa la verità", spiega Bellocchio. "Quello che è vero è lo spirito del tempo, la fanatica convinzione che in nome di una causa si può uccidere". Il film esce venerdì in Gran Bretagna.
My 'little terrorists'
When Italy's most provocative film-maker decided to dramatise a political murder, he never expected to be attacked so ferociously - from left and right alike. He talks to Sophie Arie
The Guardian
In Via Caetani, a quiet street in central Rome, a modest stone plaque is embedded in the dark brick wall of a church. It marks what is still an open wound in Italian society. Twenty-six years ago, the bullet-riddled body of former prime minister Aldo Moro was dumped here, 55 days after he was kidnapped by left-wing terrorists.
When Marco Bellocchio, one of Italy's best-known anti-establishment film-makers, was asked to make a film about Moro's abduction and murder, he decided it was time to get inside the terrorists' heads, rather than simply set out the facts. So Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno Notte) is not a documentary but the story of the fictional character Chiara, the only woman in the Red Brigades cell that snatches Moro. Bellocchio calls her the "piccola terrorista" or "little terrorist".
Bellocchio explains that much of his film is made up. "I am not a historian. I'm not interested in the truth. What is true is the spirit of the time. That fanatical, religious kind of conviction that it is worth killing for a cause."
To get inside the mind of his "little terrorist", Bellocchio's film stays inside the dark, crowded Rome flat where the group held Moro in a cupboard behind a bookshelf. The gang sleeps in shifts and watches the news about the kidnapping while Moro eats soup, contemplates his fate and writes letters to his family and the Pope inside a cell draped with the Red Brigades' emblem, a five-point star. The grey-haired devout Catholic tries to talk sense to his hooded, revolutionary-minded young captors. And the world outside does little to save him.
Chiara cooks for her "comrades" and their prisoner, keeping up a pretence of normality to her mother and her boyfriend during her occasional forays into the world outside. While her hardline fellow kidnappers (one of them played by Bellocchio's son Gianni) dream of a working-class revolution in Italy, Chiara dreams of Moro slipping out of his prison cell and walking free down a car-lined street, back into his life. There are flashes of archive footage of triumphant Soviet workers to the sound of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album.
Bellocchio's psychological fantasy about one of Italy's worst political crimes since the second world war has roused passions. "I have been accused of being too damning - saying that the terrorists were little religious fanatics," he says. "Or I was too benevolent when in fact they were criminals, assassins. The film revived a whole political debate - between those on the left for negotiating to save the prisoner and those who were absolutely intransigent, who said you should not negotiate and so effectively handed the prisoner to his death, to execution. I didn't expect ferocious polemics."
But against the background of today's "war on terror", Moro's fate acquires a whole new significance. The language of the terrorists who are willing to die for their cause is uncannily similar to that of today's Islamist terrorists. The enemy - the capitalist, imperialist, Christian establishment - is in many ways unchanged. In 1978 as in 2004, a small group of fervent idealists create an atmosphere of terror far larger than themselves. While the country holds its breath and police hunt down the terrorists, inside their flat the militant students are so nervous they cannot open the wooden box in which they have smuggled their prisoner past the neighbours.
"I remember those times," says Bellocchio, 65. "From the outside they appeared invincible. An invincible armada. But in fact that was an exaggeration. The real militants were only a few hundred people."
The 1970s leftwing militants were ready to die for their cause, as well as to kill. In its early years, even those joining the Communist party had to swear allegiance for life and willingness to die for communism. "They said they were atheists, but they believed religiously and absolutely in their cause. They were ready to die for it. Their behaviour was similar - though on a less massive destructive scale - to that of the fanatical terrorists of today.
"Ultimately, the film is an indictment of the religious fanaticism with which a small but destructive few are willing to take on the world," he says. "The death of Moro is not a triumph but a failure."
After the murder of Moro, the Red Brigades began to unravel and waves of disillusioned militants gave up the armed struggle. Many of the more moderate leftwing Italians - among them young Bellocchio, who had passively supported the Red Brigades' struggle - were disgusted and disillusioned. "Their ideals were so far from reality. And they could not see it," says Bellocchio.
Bellocchio has been one of Italy's better known and more provocative film directors ever since 1965's Fists in the Pocket, in which a young man decides to kill his closest relations as a rebellion against conformity and family. This is the first time in nearly 40 years of film-making that he has focused on a father figure such as the 61-year-old Moro.
The gentle, intellectual Bellocchio admits this was no accident. "Without doing cheap psychoanalysis, I lost my father when I was small, so obviously I wanted to ignore, deny this absence," he says. Bellocchio's father, to whom Good Morning, Night is dedicated, died of a tumour when Bellocchio was 17. "While I was writing the script, and also during the shooting, I had an image of my father in my mind, wandering around the house at night when he was not well."
· Good Morning, Night is out on Friday
