Director's Cut (20 page)
Authors: Arthur Japin
“I touch her when I feel the need to,” Maxim says, feeling gauche and strident, his voice hollow in the empty room.
“The body conquers eternity. Two young people. Here. In this light. From where I'm standing. Unimaginable, you together, and only me to see it.”
“Come on, Gala,” says Maxim. He stands and pulls her to her feet. And then, with gratuitous cruelty, “Before we know it, he'll pull out the shiny black coat.”
“You're quite right,” quips Sangallo, “tara-rom-ti-ra-ta-ta,” but he looks as surprised as if he's just then realizing something. “I'm years older than you!” He gulps for air, twice, three times, deep and then deeper, as if the oxygen has only just reached him and he's catching up on something he'd forgotten.
Gala rests her hand on Maxim's neck.
“Come on,” she whispers, “don't be like that,” and she twirls a strand of his hair around her finger until it hurts. “We can do him a little favor in return, can't we?”
“You've been summoned.”
“By him?”
“To his office. I don't know what's gotten into them. They want to see you. Unimaginable.”
Gala is so shocked she drops the photos they've just had developed, one of herself and one of Maxim, immortalized at the entrance of Cinecittà . They float through the room on the breeze.
“Between Christmas and New Year's? Unheard of!” Fulvani screams into the receiver. “When all of Italy is eating and praying?”
Early the next morning, Gala and Maxim are at the gate. This time, a guard stops them, only to apologize after one quick call. The grounds look abandoned, but some people have turned up to work. They're hanging around in small groups, listless as cleaners at a train station hours before the first train is due to leave. The kiosk in the middle is open. Someone is drinking a cappuccino at the bar, but the chairs are
upside down on the tables. Gala orders two vodkas. Maxim decides to ignore it.
The offices above Studio 5 seem deserted, but the low-level official is manning his desk. His face lights up when they come in. He takes their portraits down from the notice board and, holding the drawing pins carefully in his hand, opens the door to the next room, identical to the first. He pins the photos up again inside it and closes the door with a bow.
Before noon, this ceremony is repeated no less than five times. The same chairs and the same desks, but closer to the core. Only twice do they meet someone en route. The first is Giorgio Salvini, the casting director for this production, a friendly but absentminded man, who doesn't ask about their experience or photos but simply wants to know whether they too love the circus, at which point he starts reminiscing about his boyhood. After a while, Maxim cautiously interrupts to ask whether he knows anything about Snaporaz's film.
“Nobody ever knows anything about Snaporaz's films,” he answers, surprised. “Not before they're shot. Anything can happen, each and every day, so even if you wanted to you could never say what's going on.”
“And is there a possibility of a role for us?”
“Definitely. Until the very last moment, everything is possible.”
“We were asked to come today ⦔
“See?”
“⦠for an interview.”
“Yes, and I'm enjoying it very much,” Salvini says, launching into a story about how he hooked up with an itinerant troupe of
saltim-hanques
when he was fourteen.
The next meeting is more formal. Gala and Maxim are in the last room, heads resting on their hands and backs aching from the cheap chairs, when a young blonde throws open the door, laying a pile of manuscripts on a desk marked with her name. Fiamella obviously wasn't expecting visitors.
“Who let you in?” she asks loftily, and their explanation fails to warm her up. “I have no idea who came up with such an idea. Someone's playing a joke on you. Snaporaz isn't even in the country.”
She glances at their portraits on her notice board and shrugs.
“And even if he was ⦔ She tears off the photos and gives them back, flapping them in the meantime like useless scrap. At last she opens the door, not to usher them into the next room, but to dispatch them into the hallway, steps away from where they'd begun hours before.
Enough already. They have a dream, and they're not going to let it slip away without a fight. There's no point in postponing the inevitable. They walk around to the side of the building, kick the garbage cans out of the way, and open the rear entrance of Studio 5. Nearby, they discover an iron fire escape, painted black to be nearly invisible against the black wall. As if on cue, their eyes glide up the stairs to the small glass room at the top. The old control room, built before the days of portable monitors, lightweight cranes, and radio microphones, protruding out of the wall eighteen meters up and seeming to float in the big empty studio. Thin blinds have been lowered on the studio side, but the low winter sun is shining straight into the office. Behind the glass, they can see the silhouette of a man pacing. That profile, that hair, that postureâstraight back, weary shoulders: unmistakably Snaporaz.
He pauses in his thoughts, interrupted by the sound of feet ascending the iron stairs. He walks over to a window. With a snap he lets the blind shoot up, revealing him suddenly, like a lemon in a slot machine.
He pulls open the door. He's bigger than they imagined. And older, but his eyes are still bright. He scrunches them, and his narrow black eyebrows, which don't quite follow the line of his sockets, shoot up instead like tufts on either side and make him look angry. He's actually quite friendly. Without a word, he lets Gala and Maxim tell him their story. He looks at the photos they push into his hands.
The young man.
The young woman.
He examines their portraits. He examines them, first through his lashes, then stepping back a little and opening his eyes wide to take in their bodies. Especially Gala's. He comes up to her and does his best to look her in the eyes, but can't take his own off her breasts, which are high and half exposed by her plunging neckline. When they swell with her breathing, they seem to be coming to greet him.
It would be impolite not to return the greeting.
“Ciao, belle poppe!”
These are the first words they hear from his mouth. Between these and the next comes a long silence in which he takes Gala's hand and pinches her cheek as if she's a little girl. Gala beams, but lowers her eyes. Finally Maxim clears his throat. Snaporaz looks up, evidently surprised that someone else has come along with those breasts.
“Forget it,” he tells him, already looking away. “You, I can't use in any way at all. Not now, not ever.”
I was wrong about that. I have a use for Maxim after all. He's like the lantern in front of the teahouse. By placing him in the foreground in certain scenes, I can shape my picture of Gala, hidden behind him. Whether I like it or not, he is a part of her.
The doors are wide open. All kinds of things are blowing past. Images storm in, change shapes, melt down, fly off again. Everything is possible as long as you're still making up the story. This is the phase of waking dream.
People think that it demands concentration, but the opposite is true: it requires complete abandon. It feels like bewilderment and touches on insanity. You have to dare to step back, let everything go its own way: one who tries too hard to fall asleep spends the whole night tossing in bed.
Within these thoughts, special rules apply. They are sealed in time. Just as I am. Their images exist outside of reality. They show everything and nothing at once. One cannot exist without the other; you need nothing to imagine everything. From this basis characters emerge, hundreds at a time, some growing sharper, others blurring yet again. It makes no difference: a few are strong enough to stay. You begin to play with them, like a little boy playing with the bubbles of olive oil floating in his soup, but the more you stir, the more they take on a will of their own, fighting their way back to the surface.
This is the phase I love most. The stage of excess and irrationality, of unlimited freedom. Nothing matters, none of what you think, nothing you grasp of everything that comes your way. Everything can still be changed. You are uninhibited, because not even the most extreme
choices have any strings attached. The characters are still free. You can make them do and be whatever you like, because though you know them you still haven't embraced them. You harry them with your imagination, like swinging a net at a butterfly, wanting to catch them but still enjoying their colors too much when they flutter away in fright. You keep putting off the moment you have to contain them, until at last you fear they'll escape if you put it off any longer. Make the story your own, or give it up altogether. So you catch them. One by one. In your cupped hands, separating them, confining them, assigning them boundaries.
Their wings beat against the palms of your hands.
This phase is now over.
From now on, choices must be made, if only because the producer insists and the people in the workplaces are waiting impatiently to start work on your dreams. Now I can no longer remain aloof. I get involved with my own material. I alter. Stop. Limit. Adjust. Limit again, more rigorously this time. Cutting back more, until the story, which could have been any story, becomes mine. The things I love most have to die, again and again. Until it tells my story, just as everything I have captured in pictures, in a different way every time, always tells of
me
.
“Forget it.”
With these two words, I separated Gala from Maxim. The moment I spoke them was like the first blow of the clapper board announcing the first take of the first shot on the first day of shooting. With this line, the screenwriting phase irrevocably becomes the first step toward the story's materialization.
Air from the fantasy got mixed into reality. Two separate worlds, the invented story and its concrete filming, were mingled. In that single breath, I took responsibility for my characters. I walked into my own story. The dream dissolved in the day.
ART
T
HREE
Nüftes, Tüftes, and Grüftes
Now that we've made it this far, I have to tell you about my earliest memory. It's as important as it is odd, simple yet virtually incomprehensible, trivial, yet an apparent answer to essential questions. I understand what it was, but I can't explain it. It is highly improbable, but I experienced it myself.
It was like this. In the first years of my life, maybe even every night, just before I fell asleep, I regularly saw a bombardment of color. From the bombardment, a colorless core emerged, transparent and changeable as an air bubble in water. It was as far away as the moon in the sky, but when I stretched out my hand, I could grasp that strange planet between thumb and index finger. It had no mass, yet I could feel it. It resisted the pressure of my fingers in a way I recognized only much later, when I tried to push two magnets against each other. I succeeded at the same time I failed, an invisible tension both powerful and gently pleasant. The sensual feeling added to my joy in those moments, but the real pleasure was the sudden and fleeting realization, the knowledge, the absolute certainty, that, as long as I held this distant object “caught” between my fingers, I simultaneously had
everything
and
nothing
in my grasp.
This daily apparition became rarer once I started to talk and think more or less logically. I might have forgotten it completely if it hadn't suddenly returned twice in my midtwenties, before it disappeared forever.
â¢Â  â¢Â  â¢
Much to my mother's sorrow, I have a bad memory. I've forgotten most of my childhood. Toward the end of her life, when she said, “Remember when you did this or that?” I could never rise to the challenge. She brushed my doubts asideâ“Oh, of course you remember”âbefore proving herself wrong by dredging up all the details. In the end, I'd lay a hand on her arm and pretend that it had all come back, and we'd smile at the fun we had together. Then she'd shake her head and start rummaging through her bag.
In fact, virtually all I remember from my childhood are moments that were captured in photos. I don't really remember them; I just know I experienced them. The pictures lead a life of their own. I think I recall something of that summer's day in the park, but I can't actually summon up a single feeling about it. From all those occasions, all I remember is the instant the shutter opened, freezing the light passing through the diaphragm.
Photography has changed our memory. The past used to be alive, and as people grew older, further removed from the facts, they were free to tone them down, to change them, forget them, embellish them, or fantasize them. Fact and fiction were equals, and neither had a monopoly on truth. The camera has deprived memory of this freedom. Our actions are captured. Pictures in a kid-leather album give the lie to the life we thought we led. All we can do is reconstruct a life from this evidence. The past has been pinned down forever; fantasy is confined to the future.
As indisputably as I remember a donkey ride on the beach, black and white with a zigzag edge, I remember the extraordinary apparition from my earliest childhood. I know that there was a clear perception and that it made me happy, but I can no longer call up the sensation and my understanding of it. All I know is that every night I held all of creation between my fingers.
From the moment I could capture the world between thumb and index finger, I understood that everything is limited. Indeed, this sense of limitation later became the determining fact of my life. Another child, exploring the world, might be surprised to find so many things he's never seen before, but I discovered the same thing everywhereâan edge, a border, a narrowing, an endâand if this surprised me, it was only because others seemed not to notice how limited were all the
things around them. As long as I can remember, I've suffered from these limits. Well, suffering's not the word.
I'd wanted to discuss this with my friend Alberto in Sabaudia. He claims, in one of his books, that he's felt something similar with boredom, which made him suffer but also offered oblivion, alienated him yet placed reality in a new light. The limitations have the same effect on me.
For many people, they are simply the opposite of freedom; and for such people freedom means free choice, being carefree, unlimited progress. I don't see limits as the opposite of progress. I'd even say they resemble one another, since limits also take away worries, bring progress. I see it like this: infinite freedom offers infinite possibility. You rack your brains, worrying what to do next. It's impossible to choose, so you wait and see; ultimately, you do nothing at all. Limitations define a range for our possibilities. The more limits, the simpler the choice. Bold steps become easier the more we are closed in and confined, a constant contraction that helps us move ahead. Our true motivation is to avoid suffocation.
The development of civilization is like the route the water follows through the Acqua Felice, the aqueduct I see from my studio. Water from a placid lake in the Alban Hills is stored in a reservoir, from which only a single opening offers escape, into a stone chamber with converging walls. The pressure increases, forcing the water to seek a new exit and bringing it to the next stone chamber, from which it is pressed into yet another. Mile after mile, pushed through a system of tapering vessels, the confined water flows faster, always in the same direction, toward the center of Rome, filling pumps, pools, and horses' drinking troughs, turning mills, irrigating fields, and supplying fountains and bathhouses without ever losing its strength, until finally, through smaller and smaller pipes, it empties into the Moses Fountain. There, the sun glitters on the clear water flowing over the marble statues. It is part of a work of art, offering pleasure, beauty, and, on stifling days, cooling, to the people passing by.
That's what limits offer me: the possibility of channeling my reservoir of babbling thoughts until they begin to foam, gaining direction, speed, and power until, far from their source, they burst out in clear jets in the sun.
