Contempt - Alberto Moravia [36]
“That’s it, exactly,” confirmed Rheingold, not without an expression of slight anxiety on his smiling face.
“To you Mediterranean peoples,” continued Battista, still quoting Rheingold, “Homer is what the Bible is to the Anglo Saxons...And so why shouldn’t we make a film from, for instance, the Odyssey?”
There was silence. Astonished, I wanted to gain time, and so I asked, with an effort: “The whole Odyssey, or an episode from the Odyssey?”
“We’ve discussed the matter,” Battista answered promptly, “and we’ve come to the conclusion that it will be best to take into consideration the Odyssey as a whole. But that doesn’t matter. What matters most,” he went on, raising his voice, “is that, in re-reading the Odyssey, I’ve at last understood what I’ve been looking for for so long without realizing it...something that I felt could not be found in neo-realistic films—something, for instance, that I’ve never found in the subjects that you, Molteni, have suggested to me from time to time recently...something that I, in fact, have been feeling—without being able to explain it to myself—have been feeling was needed in the cinema as it is needed in life—poetry.”
I looked again at Rheingold: he was still smiling, perhaps a little more broadly than before, and was nodding his approval. I hazarded, rather dryly: “In the Odyssey, as one knows, there is plenty of poetry. The difficulty is to get it over into the film.”
“Quite right,” said Battista, taking up a ruler from the desk and pointing it at me; “quite right...but to do that, there are you two, you and Rheingold. I know there’s poetry in it...it’s up to you to pull it out.”
I replied: “The Odyssey is a world in itself...one can get out of it what one wants. It depends what point of view one brings to it.”
Battista seemed now to be disconcerted by my lack of enthusiasm, and was examining me with ponderous intentness as though trying to guess what purposes I was concealing behind my coldness. At last he appeared to be postponing his scrutiny to a later occasion, for he rose to his feet and, making his way around the table, started walking up and down the room, his head held high, his hands thrust into the hip pockets of his trousers. We turned to look at him; and, still walking up and down, he resumed: “What struck me above all in the Odyssey is that Homer’s poetry is always spectacular...and when I say spectacular, I mean it has something in it that infallibly pleases the public. Take for example the Nausicaa episode. All those lovely girls dressed in nothing at all, splashing about in the water under the eyes of Ulysses who is hiding behind a bush. There, with slight variations, you have a complete Bathing Beauties scene. Or take Polyphemus: a monster with only one eye, a giant, an ogre...why, it’s King Kong, one of the greatest pre-war successes. Or take again Circe, in her castle...why, she’s Antinea, in Atlantis. That’s what I call spectacle. And this spectacle, as I said, is not merely spectacle but poetry too...” Much excited, Battista stopped in front of us and said solemnly: “That’s how I see a film of the Odyssey produced by Triumph Films.”
I said nothing. I realized that, to Battista, poetry meant something very different from what I understood by it; and that, according to his conception of it, the Odyssey of Triumph Films would be a film based upon the big Biblical and costume films of Hollywood, with monsters, naked women, seduction scenes, eroticism and grandiloquence. Fundamentally, I told myself, Battista’s taste was still that of the Italian producers of the time of D’Annunzio, how indeed could it have been otherwise? In the meantime he had made his way back around the desk and sat down again, and was saying to me: “Well, Molteni, what do you say to it?”
Anyone who knows the world of the cinema knows that there are films of which one can be certain, even before a single word of the script has been written, that they will be brought to a final conclusion; while there are others which, even after the contract has been signed and hundreds of pages of