Thea
Hello and welcome to The Italian Files. A podcast of conversations about lesser known protagonists, themes and stories of Italian culture, society and history.

I'm Thea Lenarduzzi and today we're looking at the life and work of the filmmaker and author Lorenza Mazzetti. Lorenza Mazzetti arrived in the UK in 1951. She was 24 and still reeling from the traumatic loss of her family, brutally murdered by the SS on August 3, 1944 at Rignano, in Tuscany. She was almost penniless, her family’s fortune having been squandered by the man in charge of handling her and her twin sister Paola’s finances. She had travelled to London alone, with no clear plan, no place to stay, no acquaintances to rely on. Nevertheless – and against all odds – her arrival would mark the beginning of an extraordinary career, spanning seven decades and many different creative approaches, from her involvement with Free Cinema, to writing, and from painting to puppetry. 1961’s Il Cielo cade -- The Sky Is Falling – one of a series of successful auto fictional novels, is being republished in November 2022 by Another Gaze Editions, in a new translation by Livia Franchini and with an introduction by Ali Smith. In interviews, Mazzetti defined herself as ‘una ragazza sull’orlo della pazzia’ (‘a girl on the brink of madness’), which well summarises the unique blend of kinetic energy, ‘naive ingenuity’ (a the critic Francesca Massarenti put it), and an unflinching, yet poetical dedication to exploring themes of alienation, trauma and survival.

Our guests today are Brighid Lowe and Henry K. Miller, makers of the documentary Together with Larenza Mazzetti, currently in post-production and due to premiere in May 2023, at the forum of the Future Festival in Porto, Portugal. The film features a long interview with Mazzetti shot in 2019, the final year of her life, as well as extraordinary, previously unseen images from a very first film The Country Doctor, which was believed lost for many years. Brighid Lowe is an artist who lives and works in London using a variety of media and formats, including texts, photography, sculpture, and drawing. She's exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Kunstmuseum Alton, Switzerland, Baltic 39 in Newcastle and at the Jerwood Foundation, and Tate Britain in London. Last year, she contributed to On the Western Windowpane at the van Gogh House in London, following a solo exhibition at Coleman Projects in 2018. She was a recipient of a Paul Hamlin award for artists in 1998 and is an associate professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. In addition to all this, she collaborates on the Slade Film project with Henry K. Miller, researching the Slade School's unique relationship to film as an art form. As for Henry K. Miller, as well as working on the Slade Film project, and as an honorary research associate at Slade, he is a critic and historian of film culture and the author of The First True Hitchcock, published by University of California Press earlier this year. His other books are The Essential Raymond Dennett as editor, and as co-editor Dwoskino, The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin. He is a regular critic for Sight and Sound, The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement. But today is all about an Lorenza Mazzetti and I'm delighted that Brighid and Henry join us now to tell us more. Hello, and thank you both for being here.

Brighid
Hi, thanks for inviting us.

Thea
It's such a pleasure. So there's a funny story about Lorenza Mazzetti's arrival at the Slade, which if we hadn't heard it from her and we hear it again in your film, in fact, we might kind of dismiss it as apocryphal. Can you tell us that story because it does sort of give us certain insight, I think, of the kind of person and an artist she was.

Brighid
Certainly. Lorenza arrived in London and was sort of moving from I think, job to job, and when she decided that she wanted to apply to the Slade School of Fine Art and she turned up with, I think, some drawings, but she turned up after the start of term. So by then, the students had already enrolled and she could, she arrived in the Slade office and she spoke to a woman there, who's obviously that one of the secretaries at the Slade and she asked if she could well, she probably demanded to speak to the director of the Slade and she was told no you can't see the director and Lorenza kept demanding and shouting and she said she was shouting. And the secretary was shouting and then Lorenza shouted back and eventually a man came out of a room in braces and a shirt and said what's what's going on? What you know what's happening and he brought Lorenza into his room and said: What's what's happening show, you know? And she said, I want to come to the Slade, I want, I want to see the director. I brought these drawings and he said: But why should you come to the Slade? And she says - she said: Because I am a genius. And he said, the man said: Well, then you must come if you are a genius. And then she said: But I want to speak to the director of the Slade. And the man says: I am the director of the Slade. And that was William Coldstream, who was the Slade professor and chair and who went on to be a pivotal figure in in in Lorenza's this time in London and, you know, had opportunities to begin to make films.

Thea
A pretty strong start to, to the to the whole story really. Histories of British cinema in the 1950s, they often relegate Free Cinema to the margins as a kind of experiment that was significant mainly as a precursor to the social realism of the British New Wave in the '60s, and when it is discussed the spotlight's usually on Lindsay Anderson, you know, he's but he's best known for his 1968 film If and he's framed as the one who brought the group together under a manifesto. Mazzetti though she tends to be erased or perhaps just briefly mentioned as the Italian filmmaker who made only the one film even though in reality, she'd made two other shorts inspired by Kafka while at the Slade. So can you tell us more about the significance of Mazzetti in the '50s in British filmmaking then and especially in the London scene that that gathered around the Slade.

Henry
It's important to say that she wasn't marginalised at the time, when Free Cinema broke out in 1956. Lorenza's film Together is, it's the longest film and it gets the most attention. It's shown at the Cannes Film Festival, you know, it's shown at the Academy Cinema in London. It's a major art cinema at the time. So she only becomes marginalised within that history later, when her contemporaries - Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson - when they started having big time, feature careers in the late '50s and early '60s, which, as you say, are, have this sort of social realist character that are associated with the Kitchen Sink novelists with sort of representations of working class life in Britain, which Lorenza might, in a different universe have fit into because Together is shot on location in the East End with lots of non-actors. But it doesn't, it doesn't really fit into the pattern of social realist film, she doesn't have the same sort of political concerns as her contemporaries. This is very much a study of alienation, and it is set in London but at the same time it, London is more of a symbolic space in the film that Brighid and I's interested in here is not really as a sort of, someone who didn't become a feature film director. We're interested in her as an artist who becomes a filmmaker. And it's the catalyst for that really taking off now it's totally accepted that artists make films. And Lorenza is a pioneer of that in this country.

Thea
And can we talk about Together then, the film for which Mazzetti is known, as you said, it kind of presents this, this perspective on London. We see the bombed out East End through the eyes of two deaf men that, played by the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and the artists who she knew from the Slade, Michael Andrews. And how important was it to Mazzetti personally and artistically to centre this film on outsiders, do you think?

Henry
It's extremely important to her because, to put it bluntly, she's representing herself and her her twin sister, Paola, in the figures of these two sort of very physically contrasting men, Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews. And so yes, she could have bound up in a different city making a similar film. I think it's the, the particularity of it being the East End is is maybe not all that significant to her. The that have feelings of being an outsider, not really primarily because she's an Italian in London, necessarily, but because her war experience which is so traumatic, and so impossible to communicate to people makes her profoundly alienated from everyone around her. And so she's not able to tell her closest, the people who are closest to her, including Lindsay Anderson, she's not really able to tell him directly what happened to her and to her family during the war. So carrying around that weight as a young woman in London, that's what cuts her off from people. And I think that's really what makes her make this film.

Brighid
So that outsider sense is, as Henry said, a sort of internalised sense of being an outsider. It's a psychological state. That I think is then she mirrors in the alien landscape of London, which and she talks about London as being so different to Florence. You know, there's these terrible forks and pollution and the noise of the East End, all the bombed out sites that she films in. So there is that sense of a different landscape. But it's also an inner landscape that she projects on to London.

Thea
And it's really quite ominous, isn't it? I mean, at the end of that film, there's you, we hear the sirens. And that's kind of juxtaposed with these lively cries of children playing. And quite apart from the fact that you're - spoiler alert - children here are to be feared, you know. Towards the end of your documentary, Mazzetti states: You're lucky to see me here. She was a woman very aware of, of mortality and kind of the thinness of the line, I suppose between life and death, wasn't she?

Henry
Very much say sorry, I was taken aback. This is a probing question, but I think that's very true. At the same time, she said that with a huge glint in her eye. So there's a, there's a humour, and I think there's really a, there's something slightly comical about the, these malevolent children as well. But you have to keep both in your head with her.

Brighid
Yeah, I mean, I think that even, I mean, I was rereading the new translation of The Sky Falls last night that Another Gaze will will soon be reissuing and publishing, and the cruelty of children, the cruelty and the kindnesses of children runs all the way through that. And I think, you know, children appear in all of her work. She I mean, I'm not sure that she ever, ever lost. I mean, when you when you met Lorenza, she was, she retained something that was childlike, right up to the end. It was done in a very canny way, she has, I think she deployed it with great skill, but that definitely her ability to psychologically re-inhabit the mindset of a child where things are, you know, good and evil is pronounced through the work or what whilst simultaneously being incredibly sophist-, you know, actually very sophisticated. But she plays between both.

Thea
I think - a slight aside - but I think one of my favourite scenes in your, in your documentary is the one where she's sitting side by side with her sister Paola, on a sofa, and you give them each a small gift and and you see that kind of childlike quality that you're, that you're talking about the kind of a cheekiness and an excitement that takes hold of them both. And they it's important to say, I think that they both worked with children or wanted to work with children for their whole lives, didn't they? Because Paola became a child psychologist, I think.

Henry
Yes. Lorenza was - we're discovering more and more about this - but Lorenza as well was sort of involved in that. And her last, her last book for many years in the mid-1970s, Theatre of the Mind, is about her, her work with children. They were putting on sorts of theatrical performances as a mode of therapy, so far as I understand it. There is extraordinary photographs of this, but it's a very, very little known part of her work. And we also I mean, we recently located a film that she made for RAI, the Italian national broadcaster, in 1960, which is all about children. It was broadcast on Christmas Day 1960. And the film is asking children, how do you feel about the event? What was what made you happy this year? Or how do you feel about the events of the last year? This sort of thing anyway. So it's a persistent interest. It's a bit of a mild word for it running throughout all of her career, but also all the different endeavours that she's involved in filmmaking, writing and therapy.

Thea
Absolutely. And I think that it's rooted in the fact that she had such horrific experiences as as a child. So it's got a very personal foundation. The Manifesto for Free Cinema, just to jump back to that a second, it states 'No film can be too personal'. Everything that we've said so far makes it clear how, how profoundly rooted in her own psychology and past much of all of her work was and it seems to emerge that, that personal aspect seems to emerge from the very outset in the style of The Country Doctor. A film made at the Slade in which had been presumed totally lost. Scenes from the film appear in your documentary, so I'm wondering what you can tell us about it and about, about how you came to find it.

Brighid
Well, Henry did a lot of research, which he might speak about in more length, in preparation before we went to Rome. So it's, it's to submit, to a great extent it's down to Henry, finding a reference to this film and then Henry asking her in detail about this film and extracting from Lorenza that Amos Vogel had, had potentially, she did lent it to him to look at, which Henry will explain far more. But when I was rewatching, all the footage, which was a very, very scattered and very compromised footage, a lot of it, I just picked up on that and I just started hunting and I'm not the researcher in this, I mean Henry's, Henry's the academic researcher, but I, I found a letter online from Amos Vogel which he mentioned that, that he did have in his possession The Country Doctor and then I handed it over to Henry.

Henry
The full story would take hours to get into but what Brighid actually did was, manually goes through a catalogue of material held at Columbia in New York, which, in which Lorenza's name was misspelt. So you would not have found her name through a word search these days, a lot of this sort of stuff is done online with word searches. So Brighid had not gone through that and seen the reference, we would never have got our hands on this letter, which wasn't, it was...a...it was, we had to make a special request and very complicated. And eventually, we were in touch with yes, the Amos Vogel estate we had to trace, we had to chase this through multiple university archives. Until eventually, it was way out there in Wisconsin, which is where the Amos Vogel archive ended up. I mean, to be clear, this film was, there's only about maybe two or three published references to it tops. I'd seen a reference to it. It's something that Lorenza wrote in 1956, many many years ago. I had sort of wondered what happened to that [unclear] The Country Doctor but there's, there's almost nothing else about it anywhere at all. So it's you know, missing/presumed lost, the classic story. And so yeah, when we went out it was one of the most important things on our list, when we went to Rome, was to ask her what happened and, as Brighid's saying, she was amazingly coherent and had an incredible recall of it. She didn't remember everything in such detail, but she really described the film for us, which at that point we hadn't seen. And using this clue about, about Amos Vogel we went away and, and after these arduous labours that we've both been trying to describe, although we're probably missing out large sections, eventually that we're able to find it in Wisconsin. So it's, it, this is often the way with film discoveries we're not claiming exactly to have discovered it because it was sitting in an archive. It's just that it doesn't...it's not, it's not on any filmography. It doesn't, it's not in any kind of publicly available catalogue or anything like that. And Wisconsin didn't know that they they had it.

Thea
And so presume-, presumably nobody had watched it for years and years and years and years and years. So what I mean, what was it like to watch it and what what is it? I mean for, for our listeners.

Brighid
I mean, it what no, I mean, it's she hadn't seen it, Lorenza herself hadn't seen for almost 60 years. I don't think anyone had seen it for 60 years, her family and people who were close to Lorenza had never ever heard even mentioned it. They didn't know it existed. You know, it was sort of completely invisible really. Henry had great, that's good to great, great lengths to get, to get, to pay the money in order to get the digital file. But when we did get the digital file from Wisconsin, it what you know, we also the film is, is quite an it's how long?

Unknown Speaker
It's only 10 minutes.

Unknown Speaker
It's only 10 minutes, but it's it's very, very intense film and it's got some extraordinary shots. And it's based on this Kafka short story which, which Lorenza herself described, says in our in our interview, it's not really a story, it's more like an atmosphere, which I, you know, I went and got hold of the, of The Country Doctor by Kafka, and it's true, it is a very strange story. And she has some extraordinary camera shots in it. And we also, were still trying to work out exactly and where in London she filmed it because she managed to acquire a white horse, which she brought inside the room of an Italian friend of hers at the time, who apparently was very unhappy about it. So it's, it's an extraordinary film. It's due to be restored by the BFI.

Thea
So is there can you say, is there a plan for it to be viewable through BFI or is it too soon to say?

Henry
Yeah, Lord willing.

Thea
Okay, well maybe we should leave it there we don't want to jinx matters it's already had a torturous journey as it is.

Henry
Yeah.

Unknown Speaker
Exactly. No, I mean, it's, it was due to happen actually it was already scheduled and in the BFI but then COVID came along.

Thea
There's an irony in that The Country Doctor and...

Henry
That is true. He says the doctor can't, it stars the artist Victor Willing, Willing, the husband of, of Paula Rego. And I still believe that Brighid doesn't I still believe that Lucien Freud, isn't it? She worked with Lucien Freud. It says so in a document from 1956. He's not visible in any of her films, except The Country Doctor rides a horse. And I'd like to believe that that's Lucien Freud he was, as is well known, a keen horseman.

Thea
And he would definitely help to kind of bring atmosphere to the making of any film, I imagine.

Henry
Well, there's a whole Kafka connection, I forget who it is, it's either Bacon's portrait of Lucien Freud is based on an image of Kafka or vice versa. That is a real, this is from the same years I should say. So there is a real link there.

Thea
Henry, I think you're gonna have to write a side project for you think you're gonna have to write a piece on this?

Henry
Yes.

Thea
Okay, now back to Lorenza, then, back to Mazzetti. On her return to Italy, as you said, she briefly worked for RAI, the Italian national broadcaster, and she, she was championed by Cesare Zavattini, who is one of the key figures in postwar Italian literature, and cinema. But she found it difficult to keep working as a filmmaker and so she moved on to writing. And this again, this is linked to her own psychology, her psychoanalytical journey, but also to the obstacles that she experienced as a woman in the industry in in Italy. There's a 1966 magazine interview where she affirms that the state of the Italian film, film industry at the time would have made her directorial debut with a film like Together completely impossible. Did she discuss all of that in your interviews?

Unknown Speaker
I mean, not as much, I think, as we would have liked. I mean, it seems to me that she does get written out of Free Cinema's history, she's definitely often not mentioned or, or barely touched upon. And I do think that she, she would not have been supported in the same way as other male film directors. I just think it's a fact. And it is one of the key motivations for me to redress that injustice as someone who, whose work should be much better known, but also because she's occupies a fairly unique position as a woman making films at that period that there are very few, but she's from that generation that doesn't necessarily identify as being a feminist in our sort of contemporary terms. But I think she was acutely aware of the, of the different trajectories and passages free life that men and women at the time has. And I think she was, she also analysed the dreams of mainly women, wasn't it?

Henry
The magazine. Yeah.

Thea
Oh, yes. She had a column, didn't she?

Unknown Speaker
Yes, in but I'm not going to pronounce its name in Italian because my Italian is so poor. But yeah, so I think she certainly, when we talked to her about that, and then we did we, I haven't included that in the film, because she isn't. It's not very coherent, what she's saying. And we're at a disadvantage, because neither of us speak Italian really, or can read Italian. So we didn't have the sort of depth of research and knowledge to understand quite what she was saying to us. And it's a shame, because I think there was, there's more there that we, that I think we could have got out of it.

Henry
It felt to me that it was a tender point. And we were spending four days with her in her home. And these interviews are quite, they're quite, it's quite an emotionally intense experience to level with you. And you aren't going in there like in interrogating. So there are certain areas where you feel it's painful, because I'm sure that she would have liked to have made more films. And her response isn't kind of a dry or an analytical one to that question. And also, I think Brighid's right, that her response would not be a sort of...a contemporary one to that question. She didn't especially, I don't think she wanted to be bracketed as, as a woman filmmaker, really. So she, she there were occasional that the first significant festival of women filmmakers in New York in 1972. She actually was invited to that, but it wasn't, she just didn't really seem to be that interested in that sort of participation.

Thea
Is it I wonder whether because, as you as you said, Brighid, because she, she wouldn't have sort of narrated it to herself as a modern day feminist or, you know, someone who identified as being on a particular wave of feminism that sort of might have made it even harder for her to, to explain it to herself what happened, but she was effectively being made an outsider again, you know, being pushed back to the margins and sort of made to start again.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I think in Italy when she returned, but, you know, we're not, we don't have a fully clear picture. We're trying to find out more about what happened when she returned. I mean, I think she was always aware. I mean, even when you read her, her novels, there's often references to the fact that, you know, when she's taken in one, I think, is it in Rage when she dresses up as a boy? And then is taken aback by a, I think, composer to his flat. And he makes sort of sexual advances to believing that she's a boy. And I think she was very aware, I think she enjoyed playing, you know, being aware of the differences between men and women. And she had a sense of fairness and unfairness. But I think she also was quite, I mean, she says herself, I was in love with men, and she liked men. So, and she knew it was a man's world, maybe.

Henry
It's always I, we've slightly neglected to say there's, there's also the question of what sort of film she might have wanted to make. And she didn't necessarily want to make, you know, an hour and a half long, 100-minute long feature films, which on the whole, the other Free Cinema directors ended up doing. It's possible to imagine a totally different type of cinema and her films from the '50s gesture towards it. But it was even more difficult making those sorts of films than it would have been for, you know, a woman to, in the Italian film industry to, to become a director. So she's sort of stymied in two different ways, possibly, that we don't have a clear sense of what film she might have had in mind. But something like this idea of 'No film can be too personal.' And we do know that in the late '50s, in Britain, she wanted to make an essentially autobiographical film or too fictional film, if you like, about being a young Italian woman in London. That's, you know, she writes a pitch for that, that that didn't get anywhere with the BFI. But that, you know, that sort of film would be extremely difficult to make from both points of view, both from a commercial point of view, and, you know, by being a woman in the film industry in the 1960s.

Thea
Even with the support of the BFI, which she did genuinely have, I think. Let's talk about her writing. Then let's talk about Il cielo cade, The Sky Is Falling, which was a first autobiographical novella centred on the horrific events of 1944. The book won the Premio Viareggio, one of Italy's most prestigious prizes, in 1962. And after it, she published several autobiographical novels in quick succession, which is to say, as we've been saying, she stopped making films and concentrated on books. It's her writing that she's best known for in Italy, in fact, but Mazzetti probably wouldn't have seen it as a as a break, necessarily, you know, from you know, that she stopped making films and she started something completely different in the sense that she was always interested in continuities and cross-pollination between different art forms, wasn't she?

Unknown Speaker
I mean, she also ran a puppet theatre, and made her own puppets. And I think that she saw, she...she was a storyteller to me. I mean, that's how I think of Lorenza and she was a storyteller when you met her, she was extremely good at incredibly entertaining and mischievous and was able to imbue any, any story with life and you would often be kind of transfixed by her incredibly charming. And I think that she just sees every for you know, whether it's a film, a novel, a puppet theatre or a play working with children, it she's telling stories and to think more deeply about people's psychological. Well, other people's psychological states but I, I sort of feel that she's almost retelling her own cycle of, you know, understanding her own psychological state over and over again in different forms.

Thea
And in her painting as well...

Henry
Her paintings but also her, her drawings which some of those will appear in in Another Gaze Editions, a book of the new translation of The Sky Is Falling, which are remarkable and definitely seem to relate to her story but also to the films, these sort of slightly comical figures within them and the kind of also but also quite macabre imagery. I think they give a real insight in into her state of mind. And for me that's, that's more what her project is, especially with Rage. The second autobiographical novel, which I think in particular resonates with the, with the two Kafka films is these stories of extremely alienated people have to go through Together too. But in Rage it's the story of her is sort of in late adolescence, I suppose, in Florence after the war, and this feeling that the world is sort of going back to normal, but she can't I mean, and she really can't.

Brighid
For you know, whether it's a film a novel, a puppet theatre or a play working with children it she's telling stories and to think more deeply about people's psychological well other people's psychological states but I sort of feel that she's almost retelling her own cycle or you know, understanding her own psychological state over and over again in different forms

and in her painting as well

Henry
paintings but also her her drawings which some of those will appear in in other gates editions a book that the new translation of the sky is falling which are remarkable and definitely seem to relate to her story but also to the film's these sort of slightly comical figures within them and the kind of also but also quite macabre imagery. I think they give a real insight into her state of mind and for me, that's, that's more what her project is, especially with rage, the second dose of biographical novel, which I think in particular resonates with the with a to Kafka films is these stories of extremely alienated people who have to go through together to but in rage, it's the story of her is sort of in late adolescence, I suppose, in Florence after the war and this feeling that the world isn't sort of going back to normal that she can't I mean, and she really can't

Brighid
And she became, I think, when she first started. So we should say, actually, that Il cielo case, The Sky Is Falling, stemmed from a therapeutic writing exercise, it was recommended by her psychotherapist at the time, Barry Simmons, to help process the traumatic loss of her family. We've not expressly stated what those events were, but she lost her uncle and her auntie and her two cousins who were her guardians, she lived, her and her sister Paola lived with them in the countryside in Tuscany after her mother died and her father entrusted his daughters to their care. So these horrific events and yeah, so it was, it was, it started as this this therapeutic exercise. And at first I think Mazzetti was, she didn't really state that clearly for everyone to see that came later, didn't it? There was a subsequent edition, I think Sellerio brought it out again, a few years after the original publication, in which she wrote a personal dedication at the end of the book to her, to her family. I'm just wondering if you can tell us a bit more about, about her prose and her, her relation to it, so to speak, you know, how did she develop that narrative voice of hers? It's both childlike and self-aware at the same time, and it runs through everything that she did, but how do you think she? How did she feel about it?

In our interview, she almost sounds surprised by her, you know, by herself, it was something that kind of erupted. And I mean, she, she didn't even I mean, it took her friend, who was writing with her to sort of pick up the the papers that she was [unclear] and saying no, no, you're writing as if it is a child like a child. And actually this is works. This is really good. And then she said she then wrote it, you know, incredibly fast. So it's not a kind of, I don't know, the kind of writer the way that consciously sets out to think, okay, I'm going to write a novel. This, this kind of novel in this kind of style, or that in this genre, and I will, I'm going to do a draft and then I'm going to work on the draft and I'm you know, I mean, if it's, it's difficult to tell because she may, you know, she's, she is quite playful with what she would present to us. And there's a certain self- mythologizing, I think to her own personality.

Henry
I think it's a profoundly difficult question, because it is something which does seem to come out, erupted her, erupts from her in this way, quite suddenly, and without precursors. I don't think that she was an aspiring writer before she became a novelist. For example, I don't think there's evidence of trying to write fiction before then. But the actual novel itself is profound exercising control, it's an extraordinary literary novel. So it isn't something which is like automatic writing. So we don't know about the intricacy of that process and the costs, you know, the, the process of rewriting which it must have, like any fiction have undergone. I wasn't really able to do justice to the way that she was talking to us about it when we saw her in Rome, because it was still some of the most emotional parts of the interview on her part. It was something that was not easy for her to talk about at all. So it did, she was giving the impression of something that was she'd, you know, absolutely. That she'd torn it out of herself and that it was this partly therapeutic exercise or exorcism, that sort of thing. But it is not anything like that on the page isn't an uncontrolled piece of writing at all. That's the profound ambiguity of everything.

Brighid
That's what interests me so much is because we have this story of how the creation of the work came about that she and her friend both sat down in a port, I think it was at a table having a coffee, and they were both working on something they were both writing and her friend was writing way confidently and she was just writing and tearing it up or chucking it on the floor, scrambled up, scrambled into a into a ball. And as you said, Brighid, it was this friend who then said: No, this is what you have to do. You have to continue this you have to you know, picking a scrap of paper up and saying this is what you need to continue. And I suppose what yeah, what, what interests me is how you can hold in the one hand that image of her as someone who needed that external validation and kind of confidence boost for want of a better way of putting it. And on the other hand, we have this image of her walking into the Slade and saying: I'm a genius. I'm a genius. I have to come here tomorrow. Thank you very much. And I suppose that's the thing about her is that she perfectly encapsulates this thing of how you can be both simultaneously, which you can see why Ali Smith would be so attracted to her work, but how she encapsulates this bothness, you know, to the extreme vulnerability, as well as the extreme self-confidence and belief, self-belief.

Henry
Yes, that's very well for because we only have fragments or scraps of information about how she went about making these films, but even watching them you're thinking, somehow this young woman has kind of corralled an entire East End pub into doing her bidding. There's no one getting paid for this film. But whole pubs are taken over, whole streets are taken over by this tiny film crew. It's essentially been, it's not going to be many people at all. It's her and Hamad Al Hadari, who is a student filmmaker, they'd both, they'd worked on the Slade films together. So it's tiny crew. And Lorenza is sort of persuading all sorts of people to to take part in her film. But if you read The London Diaries, she's like an emotional wreck and terribly tumultuous relationship with her boyfriend is breaking up during the making of the film, all this kind of thing. But in order to produce these works, she must have had a lot of self-confidence and the ability to get people to do what she asked.

Brighid
I mean, I think that goes back to Lorenza's charm. And I think Lorenza and Paola, were both quite extraordinary women. There's no two ways about it. They are quite unique people. And I mean, rereading The Sky Falls last night, I mean, she sustains that child's voice. She never ever falters. That's a really difficult thing to do. You know, there's no sort of false notes, she's in its, she navigates such extreme events. And the ending is so enigmatic and odd and which it's never stated, it's an English soldier that finds the twins being hidden by the peasants in the woods. And I think they are, yeah, they're over the grave of their family who have been murdered by the SS, but the English soldier is Don Quixote. That I mean, there's there's such sophistication, as well as you know, the, that's needed in order to pull this off. It's quite enigmatic. It's quite difficult to sort of decode and understand how she does it, actually.

So much of what you've been saying now that that that charm, that confidence, that control, and at the same time, the the kind of playfulness, the childlikeness in that scene that we mentioned before with her and her sister, for example, so much of that comes through in your documentary, Together with Lorenza Mazzetti. It's just an incredible testament to, to that vitality and wit, which she had, you know, well into her 90s. It must have just been so fantastic to meet her and to be in her home in that way.

Henry
It was an extraordinary experience doing it so yes, it was sort of four days in her apartment. I was listening to some of the tapes the other day with desperately trying to find this bit that may or may not have been filmed but, anyway, the ambience in there in the film doesn't really portray what was going on at the time, which is the two sisters Paola and Lorenza shared kind of their link departments, I suppose. And Paola was, who sadly died this year, that she was still working as a therapist and they kind of kept open house to some extent; there were all sorts of people coming in and out all the time. They're very active. Very much the social centre is in the middle of Rome. So trying to conduct an interview with with this going on, I'm not complaining, but it was a quite an unusual experience.

Brighid
I can't help but feel that she might have done that on purpose just to talk to you guys.

Henry
Well, yeah, that was a huge elements in general of, of the interview that she's, she's still very playful character and doesn't want to be...doesn't want to be bored with the same questions. At the same time there is, there's a tension between interviewer and interviewee, partly because like many people who've been interviewed before, and she's a storyteller, as Brighid says, she has a story, she has a story to tell about her life. And in fact, she's published parts of it in her fiction. And then in this, this more recent book, London Diaries, which is called, it's called The London Diaries, it seems like it's going to be a chronicle of her time in London. And so we're going in there, asking about things that she's not been asked about before, and with sort of with the things that we found in archives, to present her with, and that's, that's not necessarily what she wants to hear in, in some respects, because she's sort of used to telling her story, as everybody, as everybody walks around with, with their own story that they, that they tell to people. And so there's definitely a playfulness, and a slight edge to some of what's going on in the film. But it was mean, she said, she said at the end, she says to us, you know, you're lucky to have spoken to me, but like, I mean, we knew that at the time, of course, we knew that it was true,

Brighid
But it's good to have someone state it to you so clearly.

I mean, the actual experience of filming, as Henry said, it was crazy. I mean, the environment was just crazy. There were people ringing on the phone, there were people ringing the bell, because of the way these two apartments sort of are connected, but they're connected through all sorts of strange channels. So people would suddenly appear behind you that you couldn't understand how they got in. There was a crazy seagull that was trying to get into the kitchen. There was the cat.

Henry
There were the bells, which I loved, but it's not great for recording.

Brighid
There's a church. That's the bells. Right? Yeah. And it was, I mean, we, we came, we had very, we we did it on a shoestring budget, we didn't intend to make a film. We were just really recording oral history.

Henry
I've been thinking about this. Obviously, on some level, we did intend to make film in that we've had it filmed. But the film that Brighid's made, which is a kind of highly constructed, and well structured piece of work, no, we didn't have that in mind. It was more to, to document what she told us. But we didn't know what the, what the thing in the end would be.

Brighid
No, I think it's, I mean, it's taken a huge amount of time in the editing, because there were very few, there are some passages where it's coherent, and you can understand what, you know, follow the story. But there are other parts where you absolutely can't. So I've had to just like, have all these fragments, and then try and join together fragments of different answers on different days, in order to, and chop out sections, etc. And then try and find images to cover those edits, in order to make a kind of cake, to give it a kind of coherence. Because her story is, you know, you do need to understand what happened to her and she didn't want, quite understandably, she, she likes said quite clearly, like don't want to talk about the events in detail of the massacre of her family, as she she didn't want to. And we totally respected that. And I did, you know. So what we've ended up with is a lot more substantial and has been a complete labour of love to get to this point. But I hope when people do watch it, because most most of the moving image is, is our extracts from her films. And that's all I could really use. And it's taken a long time to get, to get permission to use those. And I'm very grateful to the BFI that they've allowed me to use Together. It really deepens your access to her work to hear her talking about her films and her life story and see the images that she's created in tandem with what she...her voice.

It really does. I mean, you call it a labour of love and so that, the warmth involved in that does come across but at the same time it's, it's a really, really fascinating documentary. It's really it really is insightful. You really do get to see her the way she moves, the way she speaks that, that I think you said it before, earlier, Henry that kind of glint in her in her eye. So yeah, I mean I recommend it to everyone. Brighid Lowe and Henry K. Miller. Thank you. Thank you so much for capturing her for us in the nick of time, as it turned out, and for talking to us today. I'm still reeling from the news that the seagull didn't make the cut but I make my peace with that.

Henry
Thank you. It was great being on.

Brighid
Together with Lorenza Mazzetti will premiere next spring, after which we hope it will go far and wide, and The Sky Is Falling, in translation by Livia Franchini, published by Another Gaze will be out soon, too. That's it for today's episode. You've been listening to The Italian Files, produced by Emily Naylor. More from us in two weeks time.