Comments

I chose not according to some rational and calculated criteria but spontaneously, like someone who was recalling some of his favourite souvenirs or – if you prefer – as a psychoanalyst’s client involved in a word-association test. I don’t know why I choose these films: the best films are in the thousands and I don’t really believe that life is a hierarchical system, but rather a collective one. So maybe, for me, a fragment of a film is more important that the corpus of a famous filmmaker. Anyway, if I’m now involved in the ‘cinema du réel’ (I don’t like the word ‘documentary’ – it’s too ambiguous and often used to depict a minor genre, mostly for television) it’s because in my past films that revealed the astonishment of the truth (I don’t talk about the truth of plot, information or a speech, but the truth of living bodies, of an action, of emotion) are connected to the reality, Also if they are the result of a complete manipulation (as – we know it – every form of art is). They are also, in some cases, the fruit of a challenge where we see at the same time a creative mind at work, a filmmaker’s faith in his project, the intimate necessity to do it, the respect for the spectator as an intelligent being. Finally, I probably chose them because they revealed something closely connected to my own intimate reality. I belong to a generation who was born in the 1950s – that’s why you don’t find any new film in my list.