Your film speaks about Rome and Italy, but it comes through the prism of a Brazilian filmmaker, Glauber Rocha, and one of his lesser-known films, Claro. Why did you choose this starting point?
There is a chiasmus at the origin of all this, and it struck us.
When he made Claro, Glauber Rocha was in exile in Rome in 1975, with his companion at the time, the French actress Juliet Berto. He was fleeing a Brazil under military dictatorship, and came in search of a kind of freedom, indeed, he managed to produce Claro, a totally free film shot in fifteen days. Our years of shooting (2023–2024–2025), on the contrary, have seen Italy experiment a far-right government at the very moment Bolsonaro lost power in Brazil.
For us, Claro is also the date 1975, a key date and not merely an anniversary - the fiftieth anniversary of Claro in 2025. Serge Daney made 1975 the end of modern cinema, legible in the coincidence between the release of Pasolini’s last film and his assassination. 1975 was also the year of the first anti-terrorism law infringing on civil liberties, passed in May (denounced through the grotesque pantomime of Carmelo Bene dressed as a woman in Claro): it marked the deliberate and definitive refusal to respond to the demands of the youth movements born in 1968–1969; the Third Worldist hopes embodied by the figure of Glauber Rocha were likewise extinguished. This endgame resembles, for us, what we are experiencing in our immediate present.
You propose a reflection on the contemporary forms of fascism and on the survival of the struggles that stand against it. How did you choose the different sectors of Roman and Italian society, and the different people whom you set out to meet? Could you tell us about the shoot? About its duration and its method?
There is this commonplace according to which Italy is always ten years ahead of France politically and, since everything is accelerating, we told ourselves that observing the first years of the Meloni government might perhaps teach us something about what could happen in France very soon. Rome, 2023: the city is quiet! Nothing is visible there. It is as though everything had always already been there. And yet…
Over the course of these three years, we return to Rome ritually at the same time of year as the shooting of Claro, that is to say around May 1st. From there, by capillarity, we listen to the people who are capable of speaking about politics loudly and clearly, and we confront them with voices from the year 1975 (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, Glauber Rocha). We try to film the city with those clear ideas and with our dark ideas.
“Totalitarianism does not announce itself with military boots and tanks. It begins silently, in the gradual erosion of our capacity to know what is real.” (Hannah Arendt)
How did you conceive and work on the writing of the double voice-over, alternating between the two of you?
We did everything together: writing, sound, image; the doubled voice followed during the editing process. We wrote together as one tunes two instruments, in order to discover what was happening in between. The principle of the letter to an absent person gave the appearance of a game played by three, but in reality it is a game played by two, since the text is neither a dialogue between the two of us nor with Glauber, but a single continuous addressed sentence, a perpetual one-upmanship, a bit like two children saying, “you see…you see…”, it’s a story of mechanical coupling (in the sense of the coupling rod that drives a steam engine forward) rather than a story of a couple. Even if couples are everywhere, beginning with the one in Claro, Juliet and Glauber, which is also, as the voices say, a two-person journey.
Letter to Glauber Rocha is your second film, after Bazin Roman in 2019. You are both better known as critics, translators, philosophers… than as filmmakers. Why this move towards filmmaking? In what way does it extend or mark a new stage in relation to your previous work?
In Bazin Roman, we dreamed up a film inspired by André Bazin’s practice of critical writing, starting from a film project that Bazin himself never had the opportunity to make. He was an intellectual who, like us, was venturing into filmmaking. Besides, nothing that we have written, translated, or published together or separately - Marianne translating German and Hervé Italian, for example - has ever been indifferent to poetry and politics: making films is part of the continuation of that practice.
In fact, this is our second-and-a-half film, we made a short film that we are keeping to ourselves for the moment because it has been caught up by history. Thirty-three Minutes at documenta fifteen was filmed in June 2022 at documenta 15 in Kassel and tells the story of a modern-day book burning: a coercion directed against Indonesian and Palestinian anti-racist artists in the name of the fight against antisemitism, which has taken on an especially violent form in Germany. It’s a story about censorship and the destruction of cultural institutions : it has not stopped since ; neo-negationism will not stop before the genocide in Gaza comes to an end ; the subject is too vast, too current for us to finish the film now.
Interviewed by Nathan Letoré
