LUCE estratti LUCE 322_Calafiore_Conversazione con Pasquale Mari | Page 8

of the performances by Carmelo Bene, deep
in dark black settings where light and colour
became tactile phenomena along with
the words, there was extreme technical skill
and formal rigour. I later found these in
the performances of Leo de Berardinis and
in the stage lighting master, who was present
every night personally, that Maurizio Viani was.
In other words, I acknowledge a theatrical
imprinting which is tied to a detailed study
of space that does not avail of large stage
machinery and, for this reason, is guided
by a distilled use of lighting.
From a reflection on the daily practice of
making light written by you, I found the
dimension that describes your thoughts about
carefully listening to spaces very clear, and
the image of a diviner searching for luminous
frequencies came to my mind…
Searching the laws of space that govern the
place that has been chosen for the action,
following their coordinates, and letting them
be a guide, leading to the birth of a more
natural light: this is what I have learnt to do
from the very beginning, inside, but mainly
outside, the theatre spaces where I have been
called to work.
Let us talk of light through the boundaries,
distances, and balance that unite and separate
theatre and cinema. As a spectator, when I am
in a theatre I have a feeling that the stage
is a place that generates light in a perspective
optical box, that there are moments when it
seems to be born at that precise instant; in the
cinema, light is reflected by a two-
dimensional screen, and is however generated
by a projector…
This is similar to the activities for the study
and preparation of the lighting that take place
on a film set, inside and outside. The close
relationship of the film scene and reality
implies an even greater rigour in the choice
of the sources of light and their management,
channelling them through the one luminous
movie projector that guarantees the show
in the theatre. I have been and I still consider
myself a projectionist. I was one, because
in the movie theatre I was in charge of the
good focus and quality of the images that
invested our scene and our actors from all
The way you used light in Buongiorno Notte
(Good Morning, Night), the movie directed
by Marco Bellocchio about the Anni di Piombo
(years of lead) and the kidnapping of Aldo
Moro, comes to my mind. There are a number
of close-ups, in particular of Chiara, who
is often only illuminated by a blurred circle
of light that comes through the spy-hole in the
door of the hideout. Here we see a suggestive
and obsessive play of light, fluid shadows
and blurred views, that reveal the gaze, face
and distress, and the growing contradictions
that Chiara feels.
Buongiorno, Notte, in which I closely worked
with Bellocchio, has been a journey among
the words in the title and those following
them in Emily Dickinson’s poem entitled
Good Morning - Midnight, which tell the story
of a young woman and her eyes, seen from
opposite ends of daytime and night. These are
also the deeply human, organic, analogue
themes of my work. Therefore, I felt the
challenge of the movie like something decisive.
On one hand, the subjective part, Chiara/Maya
Sansa, seen through the spy-hole of Moro’s
cell, searching an evanescent focus and
a colour that lights up and moves in the dark
black frame, on the other Chiara’s eyes, the
objective protagonists of close-ups that are
the most touching I have ever had the fortune
to see from behind a movie camera.
Above all, what I consider the best result
of my career as a film-maker: the close-up
of Chiara listening to a voice reading the
prisoner’s last letter to his family, in the dark.
This was obtained by letting the contours of
the practically colourless face, emerge from an
underexposure of the emulsion, and entrusting
the remaining silver salts with the “hope”
for the little light needed to make the eye’s
pupil and the forming tears shine. Bellocchio
taught me the hand to hand contact between
operator and the human face, and between
light and darkness, that movies are made of.
What we see is a woman face that becomes
a close counterpart of those sorrowful ones
depicted in b/w frames of executed partisans
and of the Russian cinema, here called by the
final editing to act as counter-melody to the
crucial moment of a tragedy we all know.
Looking at the present, how has your poetry
been re-encoded in order to illuminate movie
sets with LED sources and in particular with
regard to the evolution of digital movie
cameras?
I have expressly used the term analogue, with
reference to my research on light, to indicate
how I have dealt with the opacity of the movie
film base, similarly to the darkness on stage.
That is, like a material to work on, with
techniques to engrave and to reveal
transparency and visibility. I do not do
anything else. I find a suitable darkness
and I engrave light into it. The quality of this
material is decisive, and when I had to deal
with movie film base, I searched for analogies
in its granularity and in the dust of the theatre
scene. The digital sensor “documents”
darkness, light and colour, in the best possible
way, and increasingly precisely. It encodes
them, transports them, and decodes each
of them with a feverish numerical processing
procedure.
The digital Super 35mm is good mathematics.
The 35mm negative is good chemistry.
Even in the case of a smartphone camera,
what makes the difference is the light.
I deal with the light.
How was the suggestion of the scene with
an incandescent forest lit from behind on the
walls of the salon born for Maria Stuarda?
How did you obtain this light, and also
calibrate a perfectly focussed lighting of the
interpreters in the theatre?
The space and lighting in Maria Stuarda,
directed by Andrea De Rosa, first of all display
the painting and colour of Sergio Tramonti’s
stage design. Yet another human artefact
made of material, pigment and support,
opacity and transparency. Just as for the words
in the opera libretto (or a script, a screenplay),
I try to enter the artistic images proposed
by the set designer, to understand their
language in order to then interpret them
with light on stage.
Morte di Danton di Georg Büchner, regia Mario Martone, 2016
Baccanti di Euripide, regia Andrea De Rosa, 2017
directions, and I still consider myself one
because the variations in the light of that
single projector that makes the show-movie
is a distilled form of a number of lights, both
natural and artificial, which come together
during the course of the making of a movie.
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