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Trilogy, Documentary-Short-Courts Métrages by Yuri Ancarani, Italie
Il Capo, 2010, 15 minutes
Piattaforma Luna, 2011, 25 minutes
Da Vinci, 2012, 25 minutes
February 12, 2013
This trilogy is the most intriguing series to come out of Hors Piste at Centre George Pompidou-Paris.
One of the best part of the experience is the question-and-answer session with Ancarani at the viewing.
He speaks only in Italian. The informal translator for the event is less fluent than many people in the room. However, nothing can hide the droll and singular personality of this director. When asked straight-forward questions (Piattaforma Luna), such as "what is the overall purpose of six men doing working in an underwater station for weeks at the bottom of the ocean? Who do they work for?"
Ancarani replies with complete indifference, "It doesn't matter to me. I film only how they work, the visuals of the life underwater..." An individual focuses with intense concentration only on what interests him and the rest does not matter to him, nor should it matter to us. His response received a lot of giggles, but people were laughing with him, not at him.
Ancarani did express his amazement that, an underwater project that costs hundreds of thousands of euros per day, had only one sole purpose : to clean a tube somewhere deep in the ocean. However, the discussion ends there.
Ancarani focuses on an environment of small rooms that link to each other by circular water-proof hatches, small doorways just large enough for a man to slip through.
In my favorite, most claustrophobic moment, a man slips through one hatch into Room #1, yet to crawl through a tube in order to get into Room #2. The camera changes angle to follow his progress. It's difficult to not be reminded of 2001 : A Space Odyssey, and also, of Das Boot, the German film of life in a WWII submarine.
The men depend on Control, a man who we never see, for everything. He is just a voice, to us; he may as well as be a computer. With hilarious helium voices, the men must ask Control to release door hatches before they can manually open them... to turn on and off the water, so they can brush their teeth; they must even request evacuation of the water after the task is complete. Naturally, Control must know all their toilet functions...
The hilarious voices come from a quantity of helium present in the air they breathe; oxygen tends to swell in these depths. Control is the only one who speaks with a normal voice, which in the end, makes him seem like the unnatural one.
In the first film, Il Capo, is a shirtless man with the skill of a surgeon who directs with little gestures of his hands the men who drive the heavy machinery carving the mountains of marble in Carrara, Italy. Ancarani makes no effort to hide his fascination and admiration for Il Capo. The director opines that the "shirtless man" has more skill than any surgeon, including the redoubtable individuals in the third film of the trilogy, Da Vinci.
In the third film, Da Vinci* is a robotic machine used to perform less-invasive surgery. Surgeons use a tiny camera inserted into the body, and operate robotic arms which perform the surgery by very small punctures. In this way, surgeons can avoid any large incisions, which also aids in healing post-surgery. The surgeon must watch the progress of his own robotic "hands" by video.
Ancarani follows the progress of the tiny camera; this is not a film for the faint of heart. An audience member asked, "why is the inside of the patient's body is blue instead of red?". Ancarani's response that this was a technical error on his part is greeted with hilarity... however, in the final analysis, we are lucky that the internal organs are blue, not red. Most of us do not have the stomach for it.
I believe Ancarani will go far, if he decides to address the more commercial aspect of films. The fact that he was able to convince the organizations behind Piattaforma Luna and the surgeons of Da Vinci to cooperate on these projects is a testament to skills of persuasion.
His presence is similar to stories I have heard of Tim Burton and Pedro Almodovar. Tim Burton was reputed to be able to handle a room of difficult studio people with a lot of hard questions, and he could get away with just a smile and a few words. Pedro Almodovar, when asked how he got his films financed, replied, "Hypnosis"**.
Ancarani may have been aided by Maurizio Cattelan, first time producer of Piattaforma Luna and Da Vinci. Cattelan is an internationally well-known, prankster-ish and very expensive sculptor and curator.
All three films features a compelling understated soundtrack by Ben Frost.
*The Da Vinci machine was named after Leonardo da Vinci, who created the first robot.... Wikipedia 2013
**Patty Diphusa, Vénus des Lavabos, by Pedro Almodovar