Director: Mario Amura with :James Mcteigue, Richard Dreyfuss, Kasia Smutniak, Valerio Mastandrea,
Production: Garofalo A project by: Pescerosso
Music: The Niro, Gregorio De Luca Comandini Editing: Marco Battiloro Camera op: Raffele Losco
Sound:Adriano Dilorenzo
PORTRAIT FROM A SET: THE SECRET LIFE OF TIME
A movie set is an unreal, imaginary place, and portraying it means trying to hunt emotions and thoughts, catching the unexpected, the moment in which a sparkle of truth insinuate into fiction. Portrait from a set is a short experiment in truth Mario Amura brings on taking advantage of the invisibility granted to that strange figure of licensed thief of secrets and tricks of moviemaking that goes under the name of “backstage director”. Orson Welles considered Vittorio De Sica the greatest film director of all times, marvelling at his ability to make his camera disappear to reveal the image. And so Amura does: he doesn’t aim to make our eyes discover anything of what is in the “back” of the stage. Even the cast and crew, they are much more similar to a small “courtship” crossing the immense spaces of the Royal Palace of Caserta as a temporary intrusion of present time in what stands out of Time. On the contrary, he borrows the same perspective of the director’s eyes, but to betray it in some way, looking for the rare instants in which something happens beyond the staging. Something much more secret than the craft and technique of the director and the actors is. With this short an daring essay on a Space beyond Time, Amura has to do also with another dimension of invisibility. Using techniques of “stealing” what happens on faces reminding the “free camera” shooting of John Cassavetes, he writes a sort of peeping simphony of gazes referring to an imaginary narration hidden in the eyes and expressions of actors and director, in which director Mc Teigue plays the part of an orchestra leader, somatizing in a kind of dance of gestures and expressions what is meant to be the sense of the scene on the set. So the story of Vanvitelli, Queen Mary of Saxony and Charles III of Spain lies behind what actors actually feel in their effort of truth, as if they also were caught in a different dimension of experience in the suspended time of the Royal Palace. Amura obstinately looks for emotions betraying what the actors feel while really living the sensation of pretending to be someone else, catches what their speachless faces say while their voice-off wanders in free thoughts and reflexions about their acting life. This makes Portrait from a Set an “inner backstage” of fears, desires and utopias of acting as experiencing imaginary lives, as Richard Dreyfuss says, continously losing and getting again their certainties of being. It is also a portrait of the director as a dreamer trying to materialize his visions just like a child, involving other people in his own personal game.
There’s also, in the end, a subtle and empathetic irony in Amura’s look to those different dimension of experiencing the Royal Palace. It is in his surprising work with sound, when some actors’ conversations are stolen in all their naivete of common sense observations, in all their normality clashing with the stunning beauty of what surrounds them. A beauty revealing all her strenght with the “true” permanent/temporary inhabitants of the Royal Palace: the postcard sellers, some people immerged in the glorious gardens in an improvised Tai-Chi sessions. A naturalness, a simplicity that is denied to the performers: as the last shot of the actor dressed for the Royal Court caught against the outside light while speaking with his mobile. A sign of a time defeated by impermanence, filling the void of a rushing, neurotic experience of life with the illusion of being constantly connected to the world while living an alienated solitude in the middle of all that moving beauty.
Serrafino Murri