Note d’intention de Marco Brenta concernant BARNABO DES MONTAGNES-661

Sooner or later, however – and this seems truly inevitable – the moment occurs and then you struggle to find an answer. You usually attempt to relate the deeper meaning of the film to a presumed and vague universality of values that no one can object to, since it is a matter of putting the conscience to rest, but which has solely a superficial value: for in reality you are unable to go beyond the obvious and the commonplace. Everyone (the person demanding the answer and the person providing it) claims to be satisfied in their own way and congratulate themselves through the others, in a sort of collusive understanding at having thus escaped the danger: thank God, everything has remained untouched! This film, Barnabo delle montagne, should be no exception to the rule.

But what if one side refused to respect this rule? What if the person who is ordered to reply interpreted the question in a totally different manner? "Why cinema and why this film?" for instance.

Why cinema? To extend the game into life itself, to use an illusory reality (that of the film) to create the perception of a reality that isn’t illusory (that of life). To exorcise reality, once and for all, through the illusion of the filmmaker’s omnipotence, the filmmaker who, in his own way, weaves the lines of the story and pulls the strings of his characters. If the illusion of the film truly works, it convinces the audience that the film is not an illusion.

Why this film? Basically, for the very opposite reason. Not so much to transfer Barnabo’s adventure purely and simply to the screen, than to experience it in the first person through a sort of parallelism between telling and making the film, as if it was the same text, written but open. As a result, abandoning the security of convention, of the so-called omnipotence of the filmmaker, to come up against the discovery of the real world of the characters and their context. Exposing yourself to the same risks as the character, Barnabo, by confronting a reality that it is hard to dominate, to perceive the signals and attempt to rearrange them without bringing them back to a different and foreign reality to which they do not belong. In short, risking oneself and, like Barnabo, taking into account also the possibility of failure and the cost of this: accepting the error and also the expiation of the error, if this must be used to understand things better. Agreeing to relate a fable with the codes of reality… even if this may seem nothing more than a perverse game…"