Enrico Ghezzi. Forty years between words and cinema, on a poetic, obstinate and contrary journey. Always looking for the paradox, with writing. Always looking for life, in the work of directors. Or rather: always seeking, in the work of directors, their being face to face with life, and with death. Because every image, in every film, questions what the world is, what life is, what death is. Enrico Ghezzi, obstinate, courageous, reckless “philosopher of cinema”. The inventor of “Blob” and “Out of hours”: two programs that have made the history of television. Now, Enrico Ghezzi has published, for La nave di Teseo, a voluminous book, ‘The aquarium of what is missing’: more than 700 pages that collect his reflections on television, lovingly collected, in the midst of thousands of scattered articles, unpublished typescripts and manuscripts, by Elisabetta Sgarbi and her daughter Aura Ghezzi. ‘Out of hours’: a night formula that made history. Art films shown late at night on weekends, in original language with subtitles. Introduced by the words of Ghezzi, which always led you to one millimeter from infinity. It is ‘Because the Night’ sung by Patti Smith in the theme song, with images of Jean Vigo’s ‘Atalante’. ‘Blob’, …
Enrico Ghezzi. Forty years between words and cinema, on a poetic, obstinate and contrary journey. Always looking for the paradox, with writing. Always looking for life, in the work of directors. Or rather: always seeking, in the work of directors, their being face to face with life, and with death. Because every image of every film questions what the world is, what life is, what death is.
Enrico Ghezzi, obstinate, courageous, reckless “philosopher of cinema”. The inventor of “Blob” and “Out of hours”: two broadcasts that have made television history. Now, Enrico Ghezzi has published, for La nave di Teseo, a voluminous book, ‘The aquarium of what is missing’: more than 700 pages that collect his reflections on television, lovingly collected, in the midst of thousands of scattered articles, unpublished typescripts and manuscripts, by Elisabetta Sgarbi and her daughter Aura Ghezzi.
‘Out of hours’: a night formula that made history. Art films shown late at night on weekends, in original language with subtitles. Introduced by the words of Ghezzi, which always led you to one millimeter from infinity. It is ‘Because the Night’ sung by Patti Smith in the theme song, with the images of Jean Vigo’s ‘Atalante’. the variety, the erotic and the ethical, the philosopher and the dancers, the umbrella and the sewing machine on the operating table. First, Ghezzi had the intuition that we all live in a gigantic Blob.
Ghezzi, how was your passion for cinema born?
“We go to the cinema as children, to see Disney films. Then, with my mother, to film clubs”.
Did you ever think about working as a television writer?
“No, if not like the dream that one has as a child, to be an actor or a director”.
How did he find himself doing it?
“Winning a competition in 1978, as a programmer / director for RAI in Genoa. At that time I was working as a substitute teacher at the university, I taught Descartes and Aristotle. For the competition I did a long essay on Rossellini and television, which I didn’t finish. Even then I had a taste – which I have kept – for the unfinished. So I entered this strange ‘thing’, thinking of staying a few months. And instead… “.
What was the environment in Genoa?
“I frequented film clubs a lot, where sometimes very rare, ruined copies of black and white films that circulated on ships remained. In Genoa I met Tatti Sanguineti, Carlo Freccero. Another one who had attended, a few years earlier, the same classrooms as the Genoese university rebellion was Antonio Ricci. And in Genoa I met Marco Giusti “.
With which you design ‘Blob’.
“We were at a coffee table with Marco when that title was born. In English, the word means ‘stain’, fragment, dirt. The sound tells us something of grease, of burgers and dripping sauce and of continual boiling”.
What is ‘Blob’ for you?
“In a bar in Tuscany they gave it a nice definition: ‘It’s a stone in the RAI underwear!'”.
Can you see it again, understand if certain combinations are dangerous, ‘inconvenient’?
“None of us check it before the broadcast: ‘Blob’ awaits the gaze, the blades of others that enter its flesh. Blob is born from the embrace between the demons of analogies and the automatisms of the brain synapses of the spectators”.
How has television Italy changed, before and after ‘Blob’?
“Today everyone talks knowing they can be ‘blobbed’: ‘Blob’ contributed to the loss of television innocence”.
But ultimately, what is ‘Blob’?
“A sort of wild encyclopedia of television. A program I don’t say ‘recovery’ but marginal, which works on an idea of reuse, in a certain sense even ecological”.
‘Out of hours’, his other creature, goes on the air, on weekend nights, until six in the morning. Since 1988.
“It is a non-program which – however rare or unique it may be or is considered in the world – has been pushed further and further back into the night, by ‘education’ and various information. Often and willingly ‘nuanced’. But ‘after hours ‘is space whose time has already faded into the image “.
His face has become iconic, with presentations of ‘Out of Hours’ films, often recorded out of sync, with the sound and lip not coinciding.
“There was a kind of relationship with the public that was very unexpected for me. I have always been very shy, not very capable of speaking in public. But I have never heard this problem when I happened to present things on TV, even in direct “.
Did you feel free on Rai?
“I think that in order to be free it is important to feel free. And I felt free, even if everything in Rai tends to make work sticky, difficult, routine. But if you manage to overcome these difficulties, the almost crazy pleasure of working arises”.
Ghezzi, how would you describe the evolution of television?
“In the 1950s, the still rare TV emptied houses to fill bars and public places – even cinemas – on the evenings of ‘Leave or double’. Then it emptied the cities on Saturday evenings of the 1960s with the glittering and glitzy homemade variety . Later he made deserts in the streets with the great live events of international football. But for some time the TV has abandoned the concept of ‘event’, except for very few programs, and has favored reruns, delayed viewing. to the monumental totality of the moment and to the sacredness of the event, to be produced as a continuous event. A circular tele-reality, a reel in front of which you just have to sit down because sooner or later everything will pass: Totò, the news, the drama, the basketball , gastronomy, the corpse of your enemy “.
Where does generalist television go?
“Generalist television (Rai in particular) quietly lets itself go to accompany its audience to their own and their own tombs”.
Some time ago he wrote a short reflection to Cecco Angiolieri: ‘If I were Google’. What would he do?
“If I were Google I would look at the portrait of the world that shines through the clouds of clicks. I would find and re-knit the invisible plot of what humanity is still trying to imagine, I would discover what people want, the clear drawing of what people want: to live and postpone death. I would discover the lists of what they want to preserve or never find “.
© All rights reserved