Several months ago, cinephiles had the treat of a novel built around a cinematic moment. Daniel Kehlman’s The Director introduced us to major early German director, G.W. Pabst, trapped in Germany and trying to keep the integrity of his film career with the Nazis now fully in control.
Now comes a novel, where the background is the making of two major Italian films of the ‘70s, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma. This is The Silver Book by Olivia Laing.
Our way into the story of these two films is through Danilo Donato (below) who was the costume designer for the two films. Donato had a career of over forty years, and worked with many top directors, as well as Fellini and Pasolini. His final films were for Roberto Benigni, with Life is Beautiful (1997) and Pinocchio in 2002. Rossellini, Bolognini, Cavani and Zeffirelli were just a few of the other Italian directors he worked with, as well as several international names.
But the protagonist of the novel is Nicholas, a young Englishman who has fled to Italy after the suicide of a married man with whom he had had brief relationship. In Venice, he’s seen by Danilo who has gone to Venice himself, sulking over Fellini, and a bad clam. Nicholas is sketching, but it’s his angelic beauty that attracts Danilo.
Through Donato, Nicholas becomes involved with the films. After taking Nicholas back to his hotel room, Danilo realises he has a person who can help him with drawing sketches of details of buildings that may be useful for Danilo’s work with Fellini.
And so, the structure is set up for us to visit two real filmmakers as they go about trying to make two now significant films.
Alberto Grimaldi also figures in the story through his role as producer of both films. He took over the producer role on Casanova when original producer De Laurentiis bowed out. The history of the production of both films included an event in which several reels of both Salò and Casanova were stolen from one of the rooms of Cinecittà Studios, as well as some reels of a Western. All three films were still in production, and Fellini at least had to reshoot some scenes for his film. This theft is part of Nicholas’ story in The Silver Book, though we don’t get any specific insights into the reasons behind the theft.
Fellini and Pasolini go about making their films in different ways. Fellini, we’re told, holds a very tight rein, being very particular about the smallest detail. This can mean many takes of one shot when an observer probably couldn’t see any difference between any two shots. Pasolini selects his personnel and then leaves it to them to present him with useful material.
Casanova is mainly filmed in Cinecittà. Salò needs locations, and the relationship between young Nicholas and Donato develops during the time when they are scouting locations mainly in the areas around Northern Italy where the German puppet state of Salò was created in the latter part of World War II.
Later in the story, Nicholas visits Pasolini’s home in the EUR area of Rome. “They talk about the Salò edit. The film is being dubbed into French, not Italian. To assert its status as an intellectual work, Pasolini explains. Though it will no doubt be banned as pornography whatever I do. The sex is a metaphor, he adds. Did I say that already? Who gets fucked and how. It isn’t literal.”
As you can see, Olivia Laing’s prose style is rather staccato and little nuggets of the author’s research are thrown away in a somewhat off hand way, as though to say, “Look at how much background my research has uncovered!”
But it also exposes some of the problems with the book. That’s all there is to read about the language(s) of the film. I was not aware of the French version although it does appear that Pasolini regarded it as the “official” language of the film. (Apparently, Michel Picolli dubbed himself in the French version.) But there’s nothing more about this detail. And before we’ve really had a chance to think about this as much more than an item of trivia, we’re on to a comment about how Pasolini expects the film to be received.
And then even more quickly, a new paragraph with Pasolini shutting the bedroom curtains for Nicholas.
The book is an easy read, but it is ultimately disappointing. Nicholas’ s sexual adventures are not explored with more than superficial insight. And our pictures of the two film directors at work don’t deliver many real discoveries or details that a reasonable cinephile would not have been aware of. Rather, there’s a sense of I knew all this before – and what I didn’t know wasn’t really necessary to gain new ideas into the films.
Reading the book did at least inspire me to watch Salò for the first time in quite some years, so at least I guess there was something positive to say about the book. And I’m still not sure why it was called The Silver Book.
