The Projector | A filmmaker remakes a classic documentary about a homeless woman – without the male bias
- Constanze Ruhm’s version of ‘Anna’ gives a voice to the protagonist of the original film
- In doing so, she highlights the way that women have long been exploited by the film industry
When Austrian filmmaker Constanze Ruhm signed up to Living Archive, a project in which artists are encouraged to appropriate and rework the films and footage stored in the vaults of the Berlin cinematheque Arsenal, one title caught her eye. Having spent her career exploring representations of women in cinema, she was drawn to Anna, a 1975 documentary about a fragile teenager in Rome, Italy.
While Ruhm considers Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli’s documentary a masterful work of art, she also acknowledges the problematic nature of its genesis.At the time, Grifi was famed for barrier-breaking shorts about Hollywood ( Verification Uncertain, 1964) and maverick psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich (Long Live the Orgonauts!, 1970), and critics lauded Anna as an explosive piece of cinema verité.
While Anna has long been deemed a classic, it is flawed. Ruhm considers the film a mix of “empathy, detached observation and exploitation”. Even Grifi said as much about his film in the 1990s, when he described his protagonist as a “guinea pig” in an exercise driven by “poorly concealed sadism”.
All this begs the question of what to do with these tainted “classics”: the #MeToo era has brought this into sharper focus as critics debate how one should view Last Tango in Paris (1972), or all the films Roman Polanski made alluding to his self-proclaimed victimhood amid “mass hysteria”. Some call for a boycott, others try to separate the aesthetics from the approach. Ruhm opted for a third way: confronted by the controversial complexities of Anna, she produced a new film that sought to update and “repair” the story.
Making its debut last month in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section, The Notes of Anna Azzori / A Mirror that Travels through Time not only gives voice to the young woman in the original documentary – the title reveals her full name for the first time – but also to others who have been oppressed and marginalised in a predominantly male-driven film industry and society.
The original Anna began in February 1972, when Sarchielli met a homeless, heavily pregnant and drugged-up 16-year-old in Rome’s Piazza Navona. The actor-director took the teenager home and offered her food and shelter; in exchange, he and Grifi filmed her up close for a year with the intention of producing a film about her and the social circumstances that shaped her existence.
