Last update - 00:00 06/11/2006
Trekking through the circles of history
By Assaf Uni
LONDON - Davide Ferrario, director of the film "Primo Levi's Journey," a documentary that reconstructs the Italian writer's trip from Auschwitz to Torino, says he would read Levi's book "The Truce" every night after filming. He was surprised to find his own thoughts written there.
"It was as if he were with us during the course of the filming, and whenever he had something to say, he would speak through the book," relates Ferrario, age 50. "It's astounding to see how little has changed, and how relevant Levi's nine-month journey behind the Iron Curtain and back to Italy still is," he says.
The film was screened last week at the London Film Festival. It follows the thousands of kilometers the writer trekked on his way home after being liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945. The journey lasted nine months, winding north and east because of destroyed railroad tracks, Russian bureaucracy and the delicate political status of the Italians stuck on the Soviet side of Europe after the war.
Like Levi, Ferrario and his crew passed through Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Germany. Like Levi, who described the journey in "The Truce," which was published in 1963 and achieved international success, Ferrario came back with a description of current events in Eastern Europe. "This isn't a film about Primo Levi," says Ferrario. "This is a film about a journey with Primo Levi."
The truce has ended
The film opens with shots of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York, a few days after the September 11 terror attacks. In the accompanying narration, Ferrario explains that just as Levi made his journey during the "truce" between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, he and the four crew members made their journey during the "truce" of our times, between the fall of the iron curtain and the start of the war on terror.
"For more than 10 years, Europe was certain it had arrived at the end of history," says Ferrario in an interview after the film screening. "We thought we had found the right way to live, without wars, in economic prosperity and with democratic values for all. But on September 11 we discovered the truce had ended, and we are again in a state of war."
Beyond that, "the situation is quite similar to the Cold War, because we don't know exactly whom we are fighting. Against radical Islam? Against ourselves? Against the Chinese? What we do know is that the public is split again, there is violence again and there is a sense of struggle again." In Italy, he relates, the film was screened under the title "The Truce Has Ended."
Today's Eastern Europe
The film passes through the places Levi describes in his book and presents a current picture of Eastern Europe. In the Czech Republic and Poland, the director depicts the collapse of the steel industry, which employed tens of thousands of workers during the Soviet era. Now a few hundred people are working for a British company. In Belarus, the last Communist country in Europe, Ferrario turns his camera on the KGB man who accompanied the filming and put pro-communist words into the mouths of the directors of kolkhozes, or collective farms.
Ferrario also stopped at Chernobyl, "Where the silence is the most shocking thing"; in remote, abandoned Romanian and Moldovan towns whose inhabitants have immigrated to the West; in the vast expanses of Ukraine, "Where Levi said he became reaccustomed to nature after the long period in Auschwitz"; and in Germany, where the director and his crew visited the offices of the NPD neo-Nazi party.
"A lot of things can be said about Germany apart from the focus on the neo-Nazis," says Ferrario, "but it is impossible to deny that they represent the ghosts of the past, which still exist and influence the Europe of today. Like the Ukrainian farmers nostalgic for the days of the Soviet Union, the neo-Nazis in Germany represent those who are nostalgic for Europe's past."
Throughout the trip, the footage is accompanied by narrations from Levi's books, which shed another light on the pictures and build a confrontation between the Europe of the past and of the present. "We weren't looking for scenes that fit Levi's words," relates Ferrario. "We tried to focus on the human elements Levi mentions, and we found them in contemporary phenomena. This is what makes the film alive, and therefore better.
"History is usually considered linear," adds Ferrario, "written page after page. As I see it, history is in fact circular, and therefore a journey like this is meaningful after the truce of our times."
Like Levi's journey, the film ends at Levi's home at Corso Re Umberto 75. There, the Italian writer arrived in October 1945 so changed that the concierge did not recognize the gaunt figure with downcast eyes. The pictures are accompanied by Levi's words about a recurrent dream in which he is sitting with his family and friends for a seemingly ordinary meal, accompanied by a vague sense of anxiety. Gradually he finds the pleasant reality fading away and he is again at Auschwitz, which never left him. The house on Corso Re Umberto was not only the last stop on Levi's journey; it was also the last stop in Levi's life. In 1987 he jumped to his death from the fourth floor.