Interview
Gabriele Gasparotti

EB: Gabriele, to begin, could you introduce yourself to the Brazilian audience? What first drew you to filmmaking and especially to experimental forms of storytelling?

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I am an Italian director and musician interested in researching new languages and experimenting with them. In 2013, I created Muga Muchū Morphing Theater, a multimedia art collective. Over the years, we’ve performed live around Italy and also shot some short films and videoclips, some of which can be found on our eponymous YouTube Channel.

EB: How did the idea for Le Porte Del Paradiso come to you? Was there a specific image, question, or emotion that sparked the creation of this film?

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The film is the result of this research. For Le Porte Del Paradiso I started by listening to some sounds I had recorded on magnetic tape, which, once edited together, were later to become the eponymous composition that’s included in my latest album, Tropismi. These sounds brought me images of two girls who were moving around different spaces, performing actions. I tried to understand what they were doing, what their story was, and even what story they were in at that moment. Trying to connect the dots, I transcribed the story I was witnessing while I was experiencing those visions, and then I filmed it.

EB: The film presents a Super 8 footage where two girls move through a mirror-like game, blurring the line between fiction and reality. How did you develop this structure where nothing is certain and everything is possible?

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After the whole writing and shooting process, I disassembled the story and then edited it without following a chronological order, only following the musicality of both the images and the actions, once I connected them one after the other. I also deleted a lot of the scenes from the original storyline, so that some actions would only be briefly alluded to and wouldn’t necessarily be seen as complete, just to give little clues of some narrative paths which compose the main plot.

This way we can only guess whether something happens before or after something else, and whether an action was completed or not. So, each viewer can rebuild a different story. Here the director chooses what to show and with which eye to show it, but it's really up to the viewers to see it.

EB: The viewer is left questioning whether we are watching a staged murder, a real one, or even something symbolic. What role does ambiguity play in your narrative intention?

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Ambiguous is life and every meaning we might assign to existence itself. In cinema, as in literature, on the contrary, we usually have certainties: characters with a name, a path, reasons behind their actions, stories with a conclusion. When it comes to commercial cinema, everything we are shown is always functional to the story, but our lives are full of unexpected events, interruptions, unnecessary actions, changes of plans, and paths that lead to nothing. Even relationships between people and people’s actions float in waters of ambiguity. It seems to me that the life of all organisms and of the Universe itself is only guided by oriented movements, tropisms, which lead them to move toward expansion. This is the path I tried to follow by working on the ideas which later developed into this short film.

 

EB: You pose questions about whether the girls are escaping fiction, escaping life, or claiming authorship. How do you personally interpret their actions, or do you prefer not to offer an answer?

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Cinema, poetry, music, erotic language, and meditation all have to do with the world of the senses, and not with sense. I'm not interested in interpreting a fictional cinematic action, I'm interested in how it is performed, in its rhythm, its beauty, in the way it can subjugate the viewer into rapture.

EB: The film resists linear storytelling. How did you approach editing and rhythm in order to guide the viewer through this fragmented, enigmatic space?

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I used the images and sequences of my story as if they were musical notes, pitches, and subtracting their meaning from them. What I was interested in was that, once combined, they created a musical narrative of rhythm and harmony.

EB: What significance does the Super 8 format have for you in this particular film? Does it contribute to the sense of uncertainty between memory, reality, and fiction?

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Super 8 and VHS are very blurry formats and they give a hazy image where outlines and colours vanish like the images and the events in our memory.

EB: Would you say your film is more about identity, authorship, death, or perception? Or do you see these themes as inseparable within the work?

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This work is about cinema, its language, and about the search for the Void.

EB: What kind of emotional or intellectual experience do you hope Le Porte Del Paradiso creates for the audience?

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I would want the audience to experience nothingness, non-knowledge – the gates of Heaven themselves.

EB: Are there specific filmmakers, artists, or writers who influenced your way of building layered and mysterious cinematic structures?

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I think I was influenced by poetry and music – they both have enigmatic structures and there’s an ineffable mystery behind their every phoneme and sound. As for literature, the so-called French anti-novel of the 1950s tried something similar. But Borges and The Sound and the Fury also come to mind – though I don’t especially love that novel, we witness some atypical narrative techniques. As for films, I can only think of Buster Keaton or Jesus Franco, two directors who were constantly en scène even though they worked behind the camera, just like the director in my film.

EB: The film seems to deal with a kind of metaphysical entrapment. Do you see cinema itself as a space where characters and perhaps even filmmakers get trapped?

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Cinematic art is a maze that connects ideas with reality. The story told in this film unfolds along the threshold between them.

EB: What are you working on now? Are you continuing to explore films that play with perception and challenge narrative logic?

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I am. I wrote a new short film where I’m going to carry on with the same narrative research I started with LPDP, though I don’t know if this is going to give any answers, or bring about new questions instead. I’m going to start filming as soon as the world tour for my latest album Tropismi (Important Records, USA) is over.