“Thank you because you have not betrayed us”: perhaps the most important recognition has already arrived for the film “Strehler, how is the night?” directed by the Novara director Alessandro Turci and written with Federica Miglio and Antonia Ponti for the hundredth anniversary of the master’s birth. It is the thanks of the workers of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano after watching the documentary, a fascinating and engaging story about the life of the director and the Italian culture of the time. After the success at the Turin Film Festival it will be proposed by Rai Documentari on Saturday at 15.05 on Rai 3.
What line did you follow in directing for an immense character like Strehler?
“We wanted to create a non-boring film that teaches who the master was, not a celebratory medallion but a fixed point that remains: there are childhood memories and the almost Oedipal relationship with the violinist mother, the theater and the most famous productions , the partnership with Paolo Grassi, with some actors and set designers, the friendship with Riccardo Muti, the private and political Strehler. We drew from the Rai archives, immense, extremely messy and fascinating, with a long work of vision and choice. But for us it was very important to give a voice to those who knew him and worked with him: his companions Ornella Vanoni and Andrea Jonasson, the musicologist Franca Cella, the writer Claudio Magris and then Franca Squarciapino, Giulia Lazzarini, Pamela Villoresi and others. protagonists of those years. From their words we have learned a lot ».
What man emerges from this reconstruction?
«Character with a magnetic and inexplicable charisma, a person who has never spared himself with great outbursts and great depressions, full of contradictions, never at peace with himself and with others. He wore black because he said that the director must remain in the shadows and in fact he never kept anything for himself: he lived in rent and the only property was a second-hand boat. The theater was his life and the people who worked there were his family. He was lucky enough to live in an era of reboot after the war, the right man at the right time and place, Milan, for which he had wanted a public theater, like a school ».
Can we say that the film is also a Milanese tale?
“Strehler went through the history of the city, from the rooms of cultural debates to common existences and brought all of them with him to the Piccolo and the Scala, he was also a great opera director. We wanted to represent a certain Milanese world in the film, starting with new spaces such as the house in via Medici. But there is also Novara where Strehler and Grassi made their debut in January 1943 on the stage of the ex cinema Excelsior, under the police headquarters. Today the hall belongs to the Region and being able to film there was a challenge due to the difficulty in obtaining permits and the regret in ascertaining the conditions of the theater ».
Where did the title of the film come from?
«The words“ How is the night? Chiara ”are the lines that close Brecht’s“ The life of Galileo ”, one of the most loved shows by the Piccolo public: making it the title of the film was Federica’s idea. This is perhaps the question we would like to ask Strehler, an open question that the film tries to solve ». –