PERLA SARDELLA #18

AL
Perla, Le Grand Viveur is a found footage film that reflects on the enigmatic figure of a mountain man seduced by the medium of film. A filmmaker who between the 1960s and 1970s observed and documented the mountain life of the Walser, a small community inhabiting the Alpine regions around the Monte Rosa massif.
Mario Lorenzini recorded images of common life, capable however of generating an articulated ambience, made up of stratified imagery, also thanks to the ambiguity of his own persona.
To realise this work, you explored a secret archive shot in Super 8. What emerged from this research? Who is Mario Lorenzini?

PS
The archive remained secret until the work of Superoptimists brought it to light. The work of family film archives is valuable because it is precisely the work of preserving and preserving small family stories that are usually not given a particular artistic value, but at most a historical value. Lorenzini’s images are special because they have an almost professional quality, which is difficult to find in family archives shot in super8, and he also has unusual subjects and situations: he usually filmed scenes of family life such as communions, confirmations, weddings. Lorenzini did not have a traditional family but an extended one, an entire community (the Walser family of Valsesia), and therefore filmed the people around him and the community life in the mountains, which makes his films extremely interesting. He filmed and then screened his films in front of his community, in the piazza. He would make his neighbours, their little stories, into films. I tried to question who was the man behind the camera, the one you don’t usually see, what he was looking for in the world and the people around him. I studied his material as one studies that of a great author, trying to understand his interests and peculiarities. I did not discover anything that was certainly true, I just speculated on who he might be and what attracted him.

AL
The Rimasco community considered Mario Lorenzini ‘a weirdo’. This is why no one took any notice of his filming and perhaps this ‘invisibility’ makes his footage a form of documentary of a time gone by, when winter was a season that strongly conditioned the lives of the people living in the mountains. It is perhaps no coincidence that Lorenzini died in winter.

PS
I do not like winter and I am not a mountain person, but from the stories and my very brief visit to Valsesia it is immediately clear that this season greatly conditions the way of life there. First of all, when it snows, the valley is stuck in the snow for months at a time, this creates isolation from the outside world but certainly compacts people within their own community. It’s a feeling I’ve never experienced and it kind of attracts me. Trying to give so much importance to the geographical, physical proximity of other people’s bodies is valuable. Lorenzini died in winter and it is not clear how, his figure remains shrouded in gossip, in village history. I like to think that he died in his season, since he was constantly filmed in the snow. But perhaps I continue to romanticise the character….

AL
In a recent interview you described yourself as transfeminist. This characteristic has in my opinion contributed to the final narrative of Le Grand Viveur. Indeed, Mario Lorenzini portrays a context in which, historically, masculinity and machismo have conditioned gender roles. His subjects are often ‘infallible, strong, fearless men whose fatigue is measured by their hands’.
The mountain, even today, is often linked to an out-of-time and out-of-sense claim to superiority by the male gender.
What reflections does the figure of Lorenzini trigger in this sense?

PS
Lorenzini films men and women differently. The man always has the role of the hunter, the worker, he is the action. And in this he is very traditional, as he is in filming his counterpart, the woman who has the role of care, who cooks and cleans, who sits among the flowers, delicate and maternal. Lorenzini, like everyone else, is a child of his time, we are in the 1960s and to find a filmmaker who questions gender roles would be incredible. So it is true that in filming Lorenzini adheres to the stereotype of how to show the mountain man, but then it emerges from his story that he was considered a little strange, precisely because he did not exactly adhere to the expectations of the community: he was alone, had no family, had no woman. And this is what I think makes him an ambiguous, different, complex and interesting figure. I really like the fact that a different idea of family comes through in his films: more extended, non-blood, communitarian, certainly different from the patriarchal one usually found in family films of the same years.