Alice Rohrwach­er: ​‘The past must be a liv­ing thing’

A film­mak­er fas­ci­nat­ed by the inter­sec­tion between nat­ur­al words and human civil­i­sa­tion, Alice Rohrwach­er con­cludes her decade-long inquiry into the ques­tion of ​“What to do with the past?” with La Chimera, a strik­ing fairy tale about a young archae­ol­o­gist (played by Josh O’Connor) who becomes entan­gled with a group of tomb raiders in 1980s Italy.

LWLies: Where did your inter­est in the sub­ject of tomb raiders begin? 

Rohrwach­er: This top­ic has con­cerned my life for­ev­er, con­cerned my region, con­cerned the whole Mediter­ranean – but in par­tic­u­lar where I live is a place where, in the ​’80s and ​’90s, many men went to dig up trea­sures and told sto­ries about their adven­tures. So it’s always some­thing that impressed me, but even scared me since I was a child, not so much because it was against the law, but because these men came into the tombs at night and I was afraid when said they had found the body of a princess and when they lift­ed it out, it crum­bled in their hands. They told very scary sto­ries. Napoleon came to Italy and opened a lot of tombs to take the vas­es. A gen­er­a­tion has arrived that feels as if it’s not linked to the past, that feels dif­fer­ent, that no longer believes in the sacred. So this sto­ry fas­ci­nat­ed me. Then dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, when death entered our lives in such a way that was col­lec­tive­ly impor­tant, I decid­ed to write this film that also talks about our rela­tion­ship with the world of death.

Is the past sacred for you? 

No, it’s not sacred to me, but the past must be a liv­ing thing. Nor­mal­ly if we look at the past we find either the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion or the destruc­tion of the past. We can only see our per­son­al his­to­ry as part of the his­to­ry of human­i­ty. Maybe if we do that, we can do some­thing good.

Your work has been com­pared in the past to that of Rober­to Rossellini’s because it has these almost utopi­an desires baked in, but with a real ground­ing in place. How did you come to work with Isabel­la Rosselli­ni on La Chimera? 

I’m a great admir­er of Rosselli­ni. When peo­ple say that we are alike, it’s not a super­fi­cial sim­i­lar­i­ty, it cer­tain­ly comes from a deep admi­ra­tion. But I was very excit­ed to work with Isabel­la Rosselli­ni as well. I have a farm, so we were talk­ing about farm­ing a lot before decid­ing to make the movie because she’s also a farmer. She has a lot of ani­mals and land, she knows every­thing. For me it was, of course, a dream to work with her, she’s a leg­end. She’s a guid­ing light in the film, not only because she’s the daugh­ter of great Rober­to and Ingrid, but because she’s a woman who is full of joy, peace­ful­ness and energy.

You worked with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Hélène Lou­vart again, using a lot of dif­fer­ent film stocks. How did you build the visu­als of the film? 

I am a great admir­er of Hélène as a friend, a philoso­pher as well as an artist, and we decid­ed, since the sub­ject of the film is archae­ol­o­gy, we were going to use the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma and the archae­ol­o­gy of cin­e­ma as inspi­ra­tion. So we used dif­fer­ent for­mats, 35mm, 16mm, Super 16 film stock, to tell the sto­ry of cin­e­ma. It was a game, but a game in the very pos­i­tive mean­ing of the word, as the nar­ra­tion had to be ser­viced by the stock that we chose. And with Hélène, it’s nev­er a mat­ter of what is the most beau­ti­ful frame, but which will show our posi­tion the best.

There’s a rela­tion­ship between La Chimera and your pre­vi­ous two fea­tures, Hap­py as Laz­zaro and The Won­ders. Were the films con­ceived of as a trilogy? 

I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly had the project of mak­ing three films, but I realised that they are con­nect­ed. Not as a tril­o­gy, but as three paint­ings on an altar, and they share their rela­tion­ship with the past. I took a long jour­ney to be able to deal with this sub­ject and it gave me also the oppor­tu­ni­ty to realise the rea­son why I’ve always felt so involved and so inter­est­ed in archae­ol­o­gy. It’s the first steps that a child makes to go back to your mind years lat­er. It’s the idea of a com­mon child­hood that we as human beings have shared in the past. I don’t under­stand why this time in the past is so fixed on the idea of an indi­vid­ual sto­ry. I think about the idea that my house was anoth­er thing before and it will be anoth­er thing after. The idea that there have been so many lives in the same space and that all the lives have been lived with great inten­si­ty, that there have been full of joy, fear, life, and death… it calms me down.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.