LA MEMORIA DEI CANI

Simone Massi (Pergola, 1970) is a former factory worker of peasant stock. He studied Animated Film at the Scuola del Libro in Urbino. Since 1994, Massi has conceived, created, and directed a feature film and twenty-seven short animated films. They have been shown in 111 countries on the five continents and have garnered 1800 selections and over 900 awards. His most important awards include a David di Donatello (three nominations), three Nastri d'Argento (eleven nominations), and a Flaiano Award. Alongside his main activity as film animator and director, Massi is also an illustrator, with 15 books to his name. He also created the posters and opening themes for the 69th through 73rd Venice International Film Festival, which honoured him with a special screening of all his short films in 2012.

Very few film-makers of the Italian animation industry have managed to direct a feature film (and a wonderful one at that) without giving in to the logic of mainstream and the standardisation of tastes, and at the same time to obtain a very good response from theatrical audiences.
Simone Massi, with Invelle, has achieved this result – a reassuring one. He was born into a family of workers in Pergola, a village in the Pesaro hinterland with a strong Umbrian influence and a living memory of an ancient history made of conflicts, culture, and labour: a rugged land, a crossroads of peoples for millennia, just like the rest of the Italian provinces (walls, churches, palaces still bear witness to this, in competition with those on the other side of the fence). Like several other Italian animators, he trained at the Scuola del Libro in Urbino. Then he worked as a labourer; after that he honed his craft at the Bozzetto Studio in Milan, and subsequently began to work on his own, devoting himself to his inventions, with an artisanal approach. He has never embraced the digital, while relying entirely on drawing, with his original, unmistakable style. Fundamental presences in his films are the peasants, with their hieratic gestures reiterated over the centuries, or lost in their silence. Their hands and faces seem carved in wood, if not in stone, as do the questioning gazes of children who have grown up too fast. The ritual quality of rural life, however, is not displayed rhetorically: all is consumed in simple gestures, in the grasping of humble objects, in daily actions, and in the relationship with the domestic and non-domestic animals that accompany their lives, such as dogs first of all, then cattle, the pig, ducks, flocks of birds, the blackbird, and last the robin – charged with a powerful symbolic function, just like the red scarf, also a recurring motif. The vermilion stands out against darkness, life resists day after day. The composition of the figures within the shot is extremely accurate, as is the methodical alternation of lights and shadows, almost a black-and-white that recalls an established cinematic tradition. The characters frequently lie down on the ground, seemingly losing themselves and any sense of rationality. Understanding and respect for man and beast prevail: a constant resistance.
Lost in the illusory game played by memory, dream and recollection tend to mix in Simone Massi’s films. In the same way, the oneiric dimension of language merges with the concreteness of materiality: shapes, figures, the sky, the soil walked on by people. The transition from one realm to the (adjacent) next is conveyed by tracking shots, a distinctive feature of Massi’s cinema. The millennia-long sufferance of those who farmed the land is not neglected: long-standing indentured servitude and sharecropping, injustice, not to mention the even worse condition of bonded labour, an outrage that still exists to no one’s indignation. The tragedy’s climax, the act of bloodshed, is left off screen, as in the ancient Greek classics. The measure of storytelling is given by ellipses, allusions, imperceptible references to something else.
Simone has chosen a life of seclusion, following the lesson of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Ovid – far from the limelight, in the same places where he was born: detachment is essential to think, dream, do an entirely manual job based on constancy and commitment, with the help of only a bunch of trusted collaborators and his family, like his wife Julia Gromskaya, an illustrator and animation film-maker alike. Echoing another lesson, that of John Cassavetes, he said, “For me, people come before art.” This too is a great merit, in our opinion.

Pierpaolo Loffreda

by Pierpaolo Loffreda

What is your cultural background?
The same as my father’s and my mother’s: the culture of peasants and labourers, which has always put the individual and ethics at the forefront.

How did your artistic path develop?
In the beginning, in a casual, at times confused way, with moments of lightness, even fun. Then, at the turn of the century and millennium, everything seemed clearer to me, to the point where I felt I must support my newly acquired awareness (of myself, of the work to be done) with a staunch determination that leaves no room for compromise.

What are your film references, the directors with whom you feel most connected?
Always the same: Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, Wenders.

And in literature?
Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Mario Rigoni Stern.

In painting?
Giotto, Beato Angelico, Piero della Francesca.

What are your working materials?
Humble ones: xerox paper sheets, white, black, and red oil pastels, drypoint, and gouge.

How do you and your wife work together?
Giving advice to each other. She is much better at using colour than I am, while I have more experience in film directing.

What is your opinion of contemporary cinema, animated or not?
I have chosen not to be in step with the time. As a consequence, I am very little informed. My experience with feature-length film-making has confirmed what I already imagined, that is, this is the worst time to make films; I can’t make sense of the mechanisms underlying and governing this form of art; I’m not okay with anything.