In an interview with André Labarthe for “Cahiers du cinema”, Gian Vittorio Baldi spoke of the film Fire! (which he had written, directed and produced) as an “open wound”. In fact, the main character’s rebellious behavior is an act of pure desperation, both murderous and suicidal, all the more tragic because enigmatic and without explanation. Mario’s violence suddenly explodes in this anonymous small town in Lazio where he lives, when he shoots at the statue of the Virgin Mary during a procession and then locks himself in his home, firing at anyone who tries to get near (but making sure not to hurt anyone). The dreary apartment that he shares with his pregnant wife and daughter has already been the scene of a crime (the camera reveals his mother-in-law’s dead body only after several minutes), and in the end there will be yet another, performed like a ritual of sacrifice. Mario never says a word, and the only information we glean about his story (he is unemployed, up until then a mild person) are the words of the police officer who desperately tries to convince Mario to drop his weapon and surrender, insisting with ambiguous kindness for a day and a night. Shot live with long takes following the disturbing motions, violent reactions and dark turmoil of a man under fire, the film contains almost all the thematic and stylistic elements of Baldi’s cinema: the characters’ claustrophobic existence, their social and existential marginality (a dominant feature of his debut feature film, Luciano, 1962, of his shorts Via dei Cessati spiriti, 1959; La casa delle vedove, 1960; Il bar di Gigi, 1961; Ritratto di Pina, 1961, and all subsequent films up to Nevrijeme – Il temporale, 1999), madness as a cornerstone of the individual, the unmitigated (nor congratulatory) unpleasantness of what we see; a form of simulated documentary in which the camera is itself a character, omnipresent and silent. Presented at the 1968 Venice Film Festival with two other IDI (Baldi’s company) productions, Straub-Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and Nelo Risi’s Diary of a Schizophrenic Girl, Fire! became an emblematic film of ‘68 (even though the filmmaker got the idea for it in 1961 when there was a news story similar to the events in the film). In 2008 it was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and presented again in Venice.

Roberto Chiesi