Interview with director and illustrator Stefano Bessoni, who discusses his cinematic works (Imago Mortis and Krokodyle) and artistic works (Homunculus, Alice sotto terra, Canti della forca).
Let's enjoy his fascinating answers.
L: Who is Stefano Bessoni?
B: I am simply a person who is obsessed with images, and in order to transform this pathology into something constructive, I had no choice but to devote myself to cinema. However, I came to cinema late, around the age of twenty-eight or thirty. I started out as an illustrator, after a detour into science, studying zoology and anatomy, and I still draw to visualize my ideas. Lately, illustration has been throwing me a lifeline from the endless difficulties I'm encountering in making new films.
My expressive world is closely linked to my drawings. I believe that cinema is the ideal medium for extending the potential of ideas captured on paper with pencil. I consider Peter Greenaway to be my greatest point of reference, due to our affinity in terms of themes and his tireless research into the manipulation of images. I also admire the poetic dimension of Wim Wenders“ work, with a particular fondness for Wings of Desire, which I consider one of the very few films in which the calligraphic agility of the camera can be compared to the tools of a draftsman.
L: You are a filmmaker, writer, and illustrator. When did your love for these art forms begin?
B: I have always drawn, ever since I was a child, and when I was little I dreamed of becoming an undertaker, but then I didn't succeed and so, after a detour at university towards zoology and natural sciences, I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. In the end, I decided to make films, which is my preferred means of expression, even though drawing has remained a fundamental tool in my daily work. So the world of science has remained close to me and has become the core of my poetics. My books and films always revolve around the world of science, in particular human anatomy, zoology, and all the so-called ‘inexact’ or ‘anomalous’ sciences.
I arrived late at the cinema, as usual. I remember that when I was little, my father used to take me to the movies. When I spotted a film I liked, I would go home and start drawing hypothetical characters from a film similar to the one I had seen. I spent whole days inventing a universe on paper populated by hundreds of characters who were just waiting to be embodied by an actor.
L: In 2004, Frammenti di scienze inesatte (Fragments of Inaccurate Sciences) began as a documentary but was then developed into an original film that addresses interesting topics such as thanatology, taxidermic sculpture, and apocryphal zoology. What is it about these disciplines that fascinates you so much that you want to talk about them in your work?
B: “Frammenti di scienze inesatte” (Fragments of inexact sciences) arose from the need to do something. When you present a project to a production company, you know when you are proposing it, but you don't know if and when it will come to fruition. So, at a certain point, I realized that the years were passing and the producers' interest was fading, it never turned into a concrete project. I felt the need to do something, even on a low budget. So I took three stories from three different screenplays, three fragments, in fact.
L: 2008 was the year of Imago Mortis, an international co-production involving three countries (Italy, Ireland, and Spain). Where did the idea come from to invent the photographic technique known as “thanatography,” whereby the last image seen by the subject is imprinted on the retina of a deceased person?
B: Imago mortis stems from the desire to construct a dark fairy tale centered on the obsession with images, a gothic tale populated by terrifying specters, defenseless children trying to escape a bloody game, and innocent souls who, after a tormented existence, do not hesitate to sacrifice themselves in the name of good. It is a film about images and their use as a tool to stop time and defeat death, albeit in an ephemeral way. Imago mortis deals with drawings, photographs, cinema, and cinema within cinema, all suspended in a gloomy atmosphere, under the constant threat of a mysterious conspiracy lurking within the walls of an old film school, the Murnau Institute.
The film tells the story of a strange and gruesome technique for capturing images called Thanatography. I have always been attracted to the occult sciences, alchemy, and the history of science, both official and so-called anomalous or inexact sciences. I have undertaken various studies on the subject, documenting myself as much as possible, and image capture is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating worlds I have encountered. Capturing death in the eye of a corpse is something that goes beyond imagination, as well as a subject that deals directly with something supernatural. All of this is based on real scientific experiments, the actual studies of Athanasius Kircher, Newton's optical experiments, the anatomical and scientific studies of the Baroque era, and even more modern research.
The capture of the last image through the optical phenomenon of retinal persistence, actually discovered in the 18th century by Abbot Nollet, has already found ample space in cinema, literature, and various comics, but I thought it could be a formidable starting point for addressing the theme of death. Above all, I realized that it had never been approached as a true ancient scientific discipline, as an obsessive precursor to photography that could lead to people being killed in order to appropriate an image.
L: Your works reflect your love for the macabre and the fascination with death. What do these dark themes convey to you that “sunny” ones do not?
B: I don't know, it's difficult to answer, it's just something that's in my nature and it comes completely naturally to me to work on macabre themes.
L: You often talk about the wunderkammer, a theme also addressed in Frammenti di scienze inesatte, Krokodyle, and other works of yours. What does the “room of wonders” mean to you, and how important is it in your life?
B: The wunderkammer is a place that makes me feel comfortable, that helps me come up with new ideas for my films, my stories, and my drawings. It contains dried-up animals, skulls, bones, old toys, puppets, old mechanisms, seeds, leaves, shells, insects, crustaceans, fossils, strange objects... in short, everything that arouses my amazement and wonder.
My work with images can be conceptually likened to a wunderkammer. I have always collected objects, gathered things that I cannot help but collect, to preserve them and display them in my own personal museum of the world. After all, I believe that cinema is exactly that: a chamber of wonders. And it is peculiar that the camera is often called a “chamber.”.
L: Homunculus (2011) is an illustrated nursery rhyme about a man obsessed with creating artificial life using secret alchemical rituals and altering biological processes. In addition to the nursery rhyme, there is also a recipe book explaining how to create homunculi. What inspired you to create the homunculi?
B: The history of the homunculus is lost in the mists of time, bordering on alchemy and the occult sciences. It is said that the creation of the homunculus is a mystery that will only be revealed on the day when all mysteries are revealed.
I have been fascinated by the creation of these beings since I was a child, and I have made them one of the cornerstones of my poetics, together with the wunderkammer. I have worked on homunculi in many of my films and explored the concept in depth in my latest work, Krokodyle. I absolutely wanted to capture this obsession of mine on paper, and so this book was born.
The process of generating Homunculi is based on the concept that nothing in nature is dead, that life can spring from everything. Ancient alchemists were staunch supporters of this theory and developed recipes for creating homunculi, using natural elements mixed together in specific ways and accelerating and altering normal biological processes through mysterious procedures.
It is not clear what the homunculi were used for, but it is believed that they could be used to provide men with excellent health, love, good luck, or to free them from disease, alleviate torment, save them from danger, ward off wars and epidemics, protect them from invisible and insidious enemies, and defend them from spells and the darkest evil spells. Homunculi could also be created to cause illness, arouse envy, hatred, and enmity, bring bad luck, and cause misfortune. According to ancient writings, these little beings had to be made based on the positive or negative influence you wanted to give them, which had to come straight from the soul of the maker or the person who ordered them. They were therefore poor, unsuspecting little victims, upon whom all the faults and negative forces of this world were to be placed, sacrificial lambs to be offered in exchange for one's mistakes, one's weaknesses, or to be sacrificed for one's boundless selfishness. For example, during a plague epidemic, homunculi could be specially manufactured to bear all the deadly negativity of the disease, and within a few days the disease would vanish into thin air with the death of the unfortunate creatures.
L: Your art, your works, your ideas intertwine to create a single magnificent work with the original touch that sets you apart. Even in your award-winning film Krokodyle from 2010 (best fantasy film at the 6th Cinefantasy in São Paulo, Brazil, best international film at the Puerto Rico Horror Film Fest 2011, special mention at Sitges 2011 and Fantaspoa 2011), we witness the creation of a homunculus by the protagonist Kaspar. This film is complex, but I believe it reflects the world of ideas and passions that you hold in your head. What does this film represent for you?
B: Krokodyle is a filmed diary containing my personal reflections on cinema, on my obsession with capturing images, and on what it means to live as a filmmaker, with my head perpetually in the clouds, waiting for a contact or a phone call that gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, in a few months or years, one of my film projects will get off the ground.
I clearly didn't want to stand in front of the camera; I have no desire to do so, I'm not capable of it, and it wouldn't have been interesting at all. So I had myself replaced on screen by an actor (Lorenzo Pedrotti) who played the role of Kaspar Toporski, my alter ego. I then invented a series of other characters around Kaspar who shared his concepts and obsessions, so that everything could be diluted into a story and thus move away from the structure of a documentary, or mockumentary for that matter.
In the film, I identify with Kaspar Toporski, a young filmmaker of Polish origin who moved away from his hometown at a very young age. Kaspar (like me) would like to bring his ideas to life on screen, but he can't find the right path or the right people to help him do so. He is waiting for answers for his film projects, so he spends his days drawing, writing, and inventing his own imaginary world that seems to become more and more real day by day. Since childhood, he has had an unbridled admiration for crocodiles, which he considers perfect beings capable of controlling the passage of time.
To capture his ideas, Kaspar begins making a film about himself, a sort of cinematic notebook made up of instinctively captured images, drawings, photographs, short animations, sounds, words, music, dreams, and nightmares.
As time passes and his film progresses, however, Kaspar's detachment from the real world seems to become increasingly insistent, to the point where he begins to think he is on the verge of madness and that he himself is the bizarre fruit of his uncontrollable imagination.
What I describe in “Krokodyle” is my everyday life, even if it is told in a fantastical way and enriched with inventions and characters to immerse it in a captivating narrative dimension.
L: But let's talk about the macabre version of Alice in Wonderland: Alice Underground (2012), to which, incidentally, an exhibition was dedicated at the DOROTHY CIRCUS GALLERY in Rome IN 2012. It is a travel journal that collects drawings and notes on the inhabitants of the underground. An underground world you love, given the elements that populate it and which have a very important place in your wunderkammer. How did this idea come about?
B: I have known Alice since I was a child and have always drawn the characters from Carroll's story. Then, in 1989, I created a first series of illustrations that I found again some time ago and that aroused my publisher's curiosity. So, instead of publishing that series of old drawings, I decided to create completely new ones, accompanying them with short descriptions of the individual characters.
This is how ALICE SOTTO TERRA came about, a travel journal filled with sketches and notes on the inhabitants of Wonderland. A “bestiary” compiled with the eye of a naturalist with a Victorian soul, torn between a passion for insects, skeletons, ghosts, photography...
My book is a brief journey among the inhabitants of the underground, seen through a personal, macabre, almost “intrusive” gaze, where Alice becomes one of them, perfectly immersed in that upside-down reality that should instead amaze her.
For Lewis Carroll, Wonderland was located underground, so I wanted to continue playing with what lies beneath the surface. The first manuscript, created for little Alice Liddell, was in fact entitled “Alice's Adventures Underground.”.
My Alice is, however, a personal version, very macabre and deadly, but at the same time extremely faithful to the original spirit of the work. I wanted to move away from the stereotypes that have been created over the years, especially after Disney's animated film version and Tim Burton's more recent one. So there is no ‘Cheshire Cat’ but the ‘Cheshire Cat’, no ‘White Rabbit’ but a simple yet deadly White Rabbit. In addition to the original text, Carroll's own illustrations, and those in the first edition by John Tenniel, there will be various other points of reference, starting with the major themes that characterized Victorian culture, such as zoology, entomology, photography, spiritualism, and phantasmagoria.
L: Currently available in bookstores is Canti della forca (Gallows Songs, Galgenlieder), a book about a group of hanged men dangling from the gallows on Mount Patibolo. The book also comes with a DVD containing the short film. For this work, you were inspired by the Gallows Songs of German writer Christian Morgenstern, a series of children's writings from which you drew inspiration to shape characters and create a story that involves them. What struck you about the German writer's work so much that you created your own personalized and animated world around it?
B: The film is inspired by a series of seemingly bizarre and childish writings by German writer Christian Morgenstern (Munich, 1871 – Merano, 1914), whose loosely sketched characters come to life through my imagination. I invented personalities and appearances for them, and developed a new original story to bring them all together in a single narrative. In short, it is a free play with the amazing people of the gallows created by the German writer.
This is clearly a way to make the feature film project, which is much more expensive and complex, a reality. So I am now using the short film and the book to try to get European producers involved in the project.
I stumbled upon Canti della Forca many years ago in a small bookshop, one of those places where you can buy old editions that are no longer in print for next to nothing. Needless to say, I was immediately fascinated and decided to work on it, even though I soon realized that he was a virtually unknown writer, at least in Italy, and that editions of his works were very few and now practically impossible to find. This only served to increase my curiosity and my desire to create something that could convey, through the medium of film, the visual sensations that those strange nursery rhymes conveyed to me. It was 1993 or perhaps 1994, and for years I sketched strange characters, inspired by those writings that I had read, reread, and learned about through a collection of critical writings that I had painstakingly gathered from libraries. Then, in 1999, I decided to make my first cinematic foray into Morgenstern's universe and made a small, rudimentary short film based on my personal selection of songs from the gallows, supporting it with my own writings to give it a very simple and apparent narrative structure. The short film was well received by some critics, who honored me with the authorship of the discovery and dissemination of a misunderstood author, but it raised the perplexity and bewilderment of a large part of the audience, certainly not inclined to nonsense, especially if of a macabre nature. However, I decided that sooner or later I would continue the work, so even though I have been working on more commercial projects in recent years, I have never stopped thinking about the Galgenlieder and jotting down sketches and notes.
And today, many years later, I have decided to produce a book and film about Canti della Forca, taking advantage of the fact that in a few months, in March 2014, it will be exactly one hundred years since the death of Christian Morgenstern.
L: Can Canti della forca be considered a spin-off of Krokodyle?
B: Absolutely.
L: In addition to illustrations, you also create beautiful resin puppets on request, characters from Canti della forca (Scheletrino, the little puppet, etc.). The toys are hand-painted and each character is limited to 30 copies. Are they in demand among your fans?
B: Never sold one...
L: What are you currently working on?
B: I'm working on a macabre version of Pinocchio, influenced by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Cesare Lombroso's theories on criminality.
L: Who have been the mentors in your life?
B: In cinema, the filmmakers I admire and who inevitably influence my work as a director are all highly distinctive, recognizable after just a few shots, and possess an unmistakable style and a poetics very close to my own. I admire Jean Pierre Jeunet for his grotesque, comic-book-like, colorful, poetic world. Tim Burton, for his childlike but dark universe, focused on diversity. Peter Greenaway, for his scientific and pictorial rigor and for his baroque, encyclopedic, artificial, and anachronistic nature. Guillermo Del Toro, for his characters straight out of an old storybook. Roman Polanski, for the poetry of his storytelling, his melancholy, his conspiracy theories, and his phobia of enclosed spaces. Terry Gilliam, for his crazy circus of curiosities and oddities that transforms him into a modern Barnum. And then, of course, Jan Svankmajer and the Quay brothers, pioneers and mad scientists of that strange discipline that is stop-motion animation.
I like the illustrations of Dusan Kallay, Roland Topor, Lisbeth Zwerger, and Elizabeth McGrath. I'm crazy about Joel Peter Witkin's photographs. I also love Nick Cave's macabre ballads, and I listen ecstatically to the Balkan punk of Gogol Bordello, the French folk of Têtes Raides, and then Mano Negra, Les Negresses Vertes...
L: Which horror movies have had the biggest impact on you?
B: Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Herzog's Nosferatu, Kubrick's The Shining, Bekmambatov's Night Watch, Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre... the list goes on and on.
L: Your opinion on this interview!
B: Very thorough!
L: Leave a message to the DarkVeins community!
B: Hello!
L: Thank you, Stefano!
