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Investigation of a reality
above suspicion
Cyril Tuschi and Giovanni Donfrancesco |
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| 09/12/2011 |
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Part of the DocNoir section, Giovanni Donfrancesco’s Modigliani’s Genuine Fake Heads and Cyril Tuschi’s Khodorkovsky bravely and intelligently examine reality, offering an unusual look at two extremely interesting though somewhat unknown subjects.
The former focuses on events that took place in Livorno in the summer of 1984, when a group of young people as a joke made some sculpted heads in a style very similar to Modigliani’s, which were then palmed off as authentic. The latter film is an in-depth look at Russian capitalist Mikhail Khodorkovsky, sent to a Siberian prison for being, in the eyes of his direct rival President Vladimir Putin, a troublemaker.
“The decision to make a documentary came suddenly,” said Tuschi. “I got to know about the events during a Russian film festival to which I was invited. I immediately thought the story would make a great narrative drama. Then I found out that [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky listened to Tchaikovsky in prison, always wore white suits and was on a hunger strike. Fiction wasn’t powerful enough to depict this man. So I tried through documentary. I learned to wait, prepare interviews. Now I can use what I learned to make fiction films as well.”
Thus, Tuschi chose documentary to relate a fragment of reality that escapes the artificiality of fictional narrative. When it came time for the film’s post-production and distribution, the German director says: “I started editing the moment in which we secured an interview with Khodorkovsky. If that hadn’t been the case I would have continued collecting material. Until then I had only made fictional films, so this world was completely new to me. For distribution I turned to a number of broadcasters, to no avail. In any case, we’ve been able to get it to Germany, France, Poland, Russia, Switzerland and New York».
Donfrancesco also had problems making his film: “The most painful phase of Modigliani’s Genuine Fake Heads was production. The documentary came about as a co-production, but actually, and I say this as the film’s co-producer, most of the money came from abroad. And it was really hard to place ourselves internationally without any support from our own country. Italian documentaries often find themselves in this situation. In any case, we’re negotiating with several broadcasters. Many foreign ones have already gotten involved and are fully active. Let’s hope we get an Italian distributor. In the meantime, the film should be distributed in a small [Italian] cinema circuit.”
Like Tuschi, Donfrancesco also wanted to conduct a documentary investigation on an intriguing event in reality - the intrinsic contradictions teeming in the world of contemporary art. Says the director: “When you want to believe strongly in something, you believe in it even if all evidence points to the contrary. Beyond the entertaining story that I told, the between-the-lines offers other, highly interesting issues that engaged me from the beginning and that regard the way in which we approach art. Taking into consideration only an artist’s biography and originality when looking at a work of art leads to sacrificing the emotional relationship with the work itself, subjugating ourselves to the needs of the market.”
In this formula comprising the artist, public and work of art, Donfrancesco adds the media as well. He says: “The events took place in the 1980s, not long after the discovery of the Riace bronzes. The desire in that period to discover hidden treasures was therefore powerful, and the fascination with archeological finds strong. It’s not surprising, then, that a fake could immediately be stamped as an original. When the three guys came out and said they created the sculptures, no one believed them. We’re used to expecting certainty from science. In this case there probably wasn’t any, seeing as how you can’t determine with certainty when something is sculpted into rock. The most honest solution would have been to say: we can’t determine whether it’s real or fake. Only when, exploiting the credibility of the television medium, the guys sculpted a head similar to the ‘finds’ on the TV did it become plausible that they were behind it all.”
When asked what happened to fake heads, Donfrancesco said: “They’re in a warehouse that belongs to the city of Livorno. They’re being guarded as fake works of art but maybe in two thousand years they’ll become authentic. The boundary between the real the false is extremely fragile.”
In the video, an interview with Cyril Tuschi
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