The constant return to Casarola: at a certain point in the film, we see little Bernardo running after a hen. We are on the cusp of 1943/44. It is wartime, but in Casarola, a district of Monchio delle Corti on the Appennines near Parma, life goes on as if suspended in a different, peaceful dimension. The Germans will arrive to sow terror soon enough. The Bertoluccis have retreated to the family home in the mountains, to the place where – in Attilio’s poetry – a vision opens up of “a fairy-tale place, detached not only from the lowlands below, but also from the world”. Here, in the Bertoluccis’ world, one day the 20-year-old Antonio Marchio goes to visit his friend Attilio, bringing his film camera, a pro­digious device that functions like a time machine.
Here is a 16mm fragment, a first, primal scene, of that day and that memory. That’s what we see when we look upon the face of a child enchanted by the film camera, or the proliferation of gazes as Attilio and Antonio pass that magic device between them, filming each other in turn. We like to think that it was this same film camera that the adolescent Bernardo Bertolucci would pick up some ten years or so later, again in Casarola, to shoot his first two – mythic and now lost – films on the cable car and the slaughter of a pig. For it is said that it was precisely Antonio Marchi – a young and brilliant protagonist (director, producer, critic) of Italian cinema who was too-soon forgotten – who gave him a camera. As Bertolucci would later write in a note: he was “my first erotic cinematic impulse. If I became a film director, it was to imitate Antonio Marchi”.

Paolo Simoni