Monica Vitti on ‘The Oberwald Mystery’
Naturally, this further professional encounter with Antonioni was not by chance…
Of course not. Michelangelo and I had been talking for years about the possibility of making another film together. Probably because our friendship, our feeling good together, never did come to an end during this time. What was a chance, was the choice of making Jean Cocteau’s The Two-Headed Eagle (L’Aigle à deux têtes). At the beginning, we had thought of The Human Voice (La voce umana). but there was the precedent of Anna Magnani and Roberto Rossellini, and to confront ourselves with them seemed to us in bad taste. Thus we thought of Cocteau’s Bell’indifferente (Le bel indifférent), with the ending turned upside down. Finally, our choice was for The Two-Headed Eagle.
And what was it that made you decide?
The idea was Michelangelo’s. He liked the situation behind what actually happens: the queen, a symbol of power who is waiting only for the moment to die, and the young man, the opposition that feels it must intervene and assassinate power. But later on we saw the film Cocteau himself made of it, with Jean Marais and Edwige Feuillère, and we felt most uncomfortable: it was so rhetorical … Maybe wanting to make something completely different out of it was what actually convinced us finally: the desire to make a melodrama with sobriety.
Antonioni was interested in the coinciding paths of destinies which at times occurs between the aims of power and counter-power. What was it that interested you?
I liked the queen. No, not the queen, the woman who had firmly decided to die, who was only awaiting the right moment to no longer exist and instead, at a certain point, contradicts herself: she wants to live, to love, to start again. The imponderables of life, the right to change one’s mind, have always fascinated me. I like to suppose that the characters take their very author by the hand and decide, become autonomous, stronger than the very ideological framework that supports them.
A moment ago, you switched from the term ‘queen’ to the more common word ‘woman’…
Yes, because when one thinks of a queen, when one has to act the character of a queen, one inevitably ends up by giving her the tones, the movements, the looks of conventionality. Therefore false. I did not want to put a queen onto the screen, but a woman. I am interested in people understanding the stories I am telling, and I feel that in order to be understood one must be sincere. Sincerity is my goal. Thinking and doing the things that people think and do, transforming them, personalising them, re-inventing them. Take costumes, for instance: when an actor is in a period costume, he (or she) often ends up by being conditioned by it, by moving within it as in a marriage suit (or dress). I, on the other hand, tried to feel as if I were wearing one of my everyday dresses when I was wearing the theatre costumes. I would have liked to be able to kick away, as Bette Davis did in her film on Queen Elizabeth. This is why that of the two costumes I wear in this film, the one in which I felt most at ease is the authentic period one. Its smell, the feeling of the past in it, memories, all helped me in my search for authenticity.
Antonioni is a ‘dry’ or a ‘lean’ director, in the sense that he communicates with looks, with colours, with silence rather than with words. Jean Cocteau is used mainly to words: to great, sweeping passions, ample gestures…
Quite, and the biggest job was to have to do but little on stage. Personally, I am (unfortunately) of a passionate temperament. Hot reactions was what first came to my mind, and it was beautiful to have them and have to hold them in. They were useful, but were not to be seen outside. I had to ‘brake’ myself, put the brakes on. But that is what acting is all about anyway: taking away, and not adding. A play of hands, looks, tones, half-smiles, half-sadness. Sergio Tofano, one of my teachers at the Academy, used to often repeat Diderot’s position on acting, that one should act passion without feeling it. I feel rather that one should feel emotions without ever failing to check them, and place between year own self and the character you are living, a critical diaphragm which prevents you from letting yourself completely go with regard to the stage pretence. Basically, a matter of self-respect.
And in order to reach this sort of double-self state, an actor uses professionality?
Professionality, maybe, and up to a certain point. But not technique. Technique is not sufficient for me: it can help me raise or lower the tone, open or close a vowel when speaking, move or stop a muscle. It does not help me, however, create a character.
Strange that a person whose profession has been acting for so many years should not manage to find technique a valid support for acting well…
Acting is not a technique, it’s a state of mind. And, what’s more, a fragile state of mind, that can easily be broken from one moment to the next. Maybe, for actors who work mainly on the stage, technique can be helpful because the spectator, in a theatre, sees the actor from afar, small, distant. And sometimes you can get away with cheating. But for these who, as I, work mainly in films, you get used to the camera X-raying you: it frames your eyes right down to the depths, and if at the bottom of your eyes there is no emotion, that’s the end. The pretending game ends right there. Maybe that is why I am keener on doing comic rather than dramatic parts.
Are you saying that this film, The Oberwald Mystery , was difficult for you to act?
The most difficult part of all for me was the character in Red Desert, because I was deserto rosso: my anxiety, my wanderings, my illusions. And nothing is more painful for me than being myself. Because this means that night and day, on stage and in life, I am obliged to remain anchored to my problems, without ever being able to eliminate them for an instant … Who knows, maybe it was a matter of personal survival that pushed me on towards comedy.
Interview by Simonetta Robiony
In partnership with
Cinecittà and the Cinema Department of the Ministry of Culture
With thanks to
Paola Ruggiero, Camilla Cormanni, Marco Cicala and Germana Ruscio
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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