Letter from Liliana Cavani

We are proud to present director Liliana Cavani’s open letter in heartfelt reaction to certain articles published in the national press upon our release of her film “The Night Porter”.

Photo Liliana Cavani  1974  Mario Tursi

As usual, these gentlemen can’t manage to watch a film without having a preconceived idea about it, without comparing it to this or that other film because it’s about the same period in time. 

Do I exaggerate if I say, once again, that a woman making films is still struggling to be taken seriously?  Luckily there have been many excellent critics who have liked my cinema, but I must say that this is demoralising.   And furthermore, I find that rather tediously I keep defending myself trying to explain my intentions to these all-knowing critics, knowing very well that they won’t make the least effort to understand me or at least to manage to watch my film with an open mind.

My first reaction would be to just tell these scribblers writing about my film to “sod off”.  My film seems easy, but it isn’t, it’s difficult, it is directed to those who pay attention to what happens in it.  I certainly didn’t make to cause a “scandal” in fact, I meant to pass down what happens in Human History, what happens if power is in the hands of fools and how horrible the consequences are. 

The film centres on a woman, a victim, the protagonist who was hurt in a way that cannot be healed, she was hurt by some bastard such as the nazis were.   She was saved by one of them, maybe the less foolish, in fact someone able to feel something similar to love, this feeling that seems common and instead it’s rare because it’s love that slowly makes us human and if we are human we understand that we can’t bring light where there is too much darkness. 

We understand that there is a price to pay so that this feeling can really become love.  Lucia knows all this and her partner knows it too because love comes always with a price to pay, Lucia is ready for this and passes this on to him.  This is my film. 

The best French critics have understood this and part of US and British critics have too and who cares if the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who was also a little misogynist, did a hatchet job of it, it was her full right as it was the right of other American critics who wrote about the film,  more than negative they were mostly ignorant. 

 In Italy the critics have been negative, but those whom I respected understood the film and this also happened in France and in London.   It is also rather upsetting that Primo Levi, a lager survivor has been mentioned, he didn’t like the film and I understand that.  But his is an opinion and not a verdict.  I met Primo Levi in Cuneo, I wanted his opinion on two women of the Resistance one who had survived Auschwitz and the other Dachau, who couldn’t remove their experience from their mind. I’d met them whilst researching a documentary I made for Rai about “Women in the Resistance”.  Levi didn’t want to talk about his experience and I understood that.  It’s not easy to talk about it for a victim. 

When years later, I made “The Night Porter” I knew that the first seed of that film was my experience when making that documentary.  Why did I make that film?  It’s like asking “Why do you exist?  It stemmed from my work on another four hours documentary on the Third Reich.  Whilst researching that I watched hours of archive material on the opening concentration camps in Germany and Poland. 

And that’s why I’m disappointed, I thought that the journalist I spoke to had understood.  But I also wish to thank him because I’m sure that he meant to be kind.       Liliana Cavani