04/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Cineuropa talked with the duo of Italian directors who told us how their film came to be, what’s hidden behind its title, and what unites the three acts that compose it

(© Giorgio Zucchiatti/La Biennale di Venezia/Foto ASAC)

Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Martina Parenti and Massimo…
film profile], the latest feature film by the duo of Italian directors Martina Parenti and Massimo D’Anolfi, presented Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival, is a precious object made up of three intriguing acts, each dedicated to a precise world: the animal, the vegetal, and the mineral.

Cineuropa: How was the idea of making such a particular film, which seems like a real epic, born?
Martina Parenti, Massimo D’Anolfi: After we finished War and Peace [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], presented in the middle of Covid, we told ourselves: let’s try to make a slightly “smaller” film set in the city, since travel was difficult. We’d wanted to work on the plant world for years, but it’s a difficult subject because plants don’t talk, they don’t move. At the same time, one of our friends told us that in the vet clinic near our house, two tiger cubs were being treated, and that made us curious. Going to film there, we discovered that the founder of the clinic treated all the wild animals from the Italian circuses. It is however only when we met the tigers that we understood that the film would be a bestiary and a herbarium. Since mediaeval tradition dictates that there should also be lapidaries, we therefore decided, in a more rational way, to add them as the third act of the film. The stone represented is a memory stone, metaphorical. Just as seeds are planted in herbaria, lapidaries plant memories of millions of lives.

The titles of the three chapters take us back to mediaeval traditions even if the moralising explanations that characterised them are obviously absent from the film.
The title is an inspiration. Of course in this case, we deviate from tradition, but the idea of the catalogue, of the encyclopaedia, has remained. What interested us in particular was how cinema has filmed animals. It certainly isn’t an accident that the first image filmed in pre-cinema was that of an animal. From that idea, from that suggestion, we started on a trip into European cinema archives looking to reconstruct the relationship, the infatuation between man and animal. On that trip, we were also guided by the research conducted for us by Francesco Pitassio and Sophia Gräfe. Collaborating with European cinematheques and accessing their archives was fundamental.

Didn’t the duration of the film scare you, and in what way was this dilatation of time important for you?
It is so difficult to distribute documentaries that, at the end of the day, their length doesn’t make much difference, so you might as well work the way you want, in complete freedom and independence. It wasn’t a programmatic choice but when we wrote the film, we knew that dealing with three subjects so complex would mean we would easily approach three hours. At the same time, and considering its runtime, the film had to be made in such a way as to hold up. As a matter of fact, Herbaria was the first act we edited, the second was Bestiaries and both last about 70 minutes. From the beginning, we thought of and wanted Lapidaries to be shorter. Over the years, we’ve understood that when we approach the finale, we have to somehow shorten the runtimes, tighten things up. We imagined a lot of things, to offer the films in three different festivals, even to propose them to the same festival but to have them play on different days. But we realised that it would be more interesting to keep them together by having an interval after each act. These pauses give you a breather at the end of each act and allow you to welcome the next one with greater serenity. Our films are always about journeys and also a bit about the one we went on ourselves to make the film. Every time, we promise ourselves to try to make a shorter film, but we haven’t managed yet.

I get the impression that the music also serves as a binder, that it creates a very special overall atmosphere.
Our musician is always Massimo Mariani. The inspiration for the film was that of the music box, of super simplification, of these extremely long sounds. At times we have slowed down the music we’d received by up to 300%. The result is sounds that last up to two minutes. The music had to be a unifying element.

(Translated from Italian)