l’Amatore (the Amateur)

“…what has always been necessary to me: to look inside a man, what feelings move him, what thoughts, through his journey towards happiness or unhappiness or death.” 

Michelangelo Antonioni

When more than ten years ago one of Piero Portaluppi’s great grandchildren, Piero, who was named after him, discovered the hundred reels inside a trunk, I was given the task to watch the material. Nobody knew what was on the film. I approached it not knowing what I might find with the same discretion we feel when we find somebody’s secret diaries and we ask ourselves if we have the right to enter their lives. At the same time, we are seduced by the opportunity of being able to look into someone’s innermost intimacy. I watched the footage on an old Moviola, noting down the places, the dates, the titles Portaluppi had given me through his captions. And soon I realised that the reels had been edited so that someone would watch them. To the extent that the content could be recreated even without the presence of the filmmaker. Except one, a private gift to a lover who was present, with all the others.

For these past few years, the feelings I got from the images I had watched have always been with me. I carried around the sense of pleasure and solitude they had left me with, the feelings that this visual material had given me of the man. A vibrant vitality, the desire to invent and construct, the incapacity to express his feelings, the rules of a social class, the detachment, the irony, the seduction, the sensation of death that transforms his face and makes him look thoughtful in the colour reels. In the background, we witness the arrival of a new era and the regime it brought with it. History walks relentlessly alongside the events of the man. A grand and tragic era that leads to the collapse of illusions, both collective and personal. That era in history, the disaster of the regime and the consequences on the lives of individuals, reopens a stinging cause for reflection on our own present. A world that repeats itself like a tangle of contrasts and questions is what the film wants to confront. 

The film begins with the visions of man and an era that stuck in my mind, and from the desire to bring to the surface that which for years had been buried. 

Portaluppi is a powerful and controversial figure, full of light and shadow. We want to portray his personal side, “to look inside the man”, but respect the mystery surrounding him. And Portaluppi provides all the magnificence and weakness of a social class that is rarely talked about; the upper middle-class. He is the emblem of a city, Milan, which in the film is seen through a different point of view from the conventional one. He represents the values of a country that struggles to change, which is resistant to change. And he is the epitome of the artist, including the mysteries, who at a certain point loses his creativity. 

The 16 mm film and the architecture are the precious materials for the staging of the memory, imagination, time and space, with which to rethink the present.

DIRECTOR’S BIO