Gian Maria Volonté was born in Milan on April 9, 1933. After graduating from Rome's national academy of dramatic art in 1957, he entered upon a professional theatrical career, distinguishing himself in a wide range of productions, from the classics, including Shakespeare and Racine, to contemporary works such as "Sacco and Vanzetti" and Hochhuth's "The Deputy." He subsequently received critical acclaim for a series of TV performances, including productions of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot."
Volonté's first major film roles were in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Un Uomo da Bruciare (1962) and Gianfranco de Bosio's Il Terrorista (1963). The best known of his early screen performances, however, are those as the villains in the Sergio Leone "spaghetti westerns," A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), although his name appears in the credits under the anglicized pseudonym of "John Welles." But then, at that early date, even Sergio Leone was known as "Bob Robertson." It was the international financial success of these films which established Volonté ‘s commercial status and later allowed him greater choice in his film roles.
From the mid-1960s, Volonté worked with some of the foremost leftist directors in Italy and France - with Elio Petri on Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971), with Jean-Luc Godard on Wind from the East (1970), with Yves Boisset on The Assassination (1972), with Marco Bellocchio on Slap the Monster on Page One (1972), and with Francesco Rosi on Many Wars Ago (1970), The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973). Volonté also worked in Mexico, where he completed a starring role in Actas de Marusia (1976), a historical film on Chile (with contemporary parallels) directed by exiled Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin.
The following interview, conducted by Guy Braucourt (who has deleted his own questions), originally appeared in the French publication, Ecran, and has been translated for Cineaste by Renée Delforge.
I don't really choose my roles - I either accept a film or not according to my conception of the cinema. And I don't intend here to give a definition of political cinema, a category I don't believe in anyway because every film, in a general manner, is political. An "apolitical cinema" is an invention of poor journalism. I only hope that the films I make say something about the mechanisms of our society, that they engage in the research for a bit of truth. For me, it is essential to consider the cinema - as well as theatre and television - as a means of mass communication.
It is true that I have made films, particularly westerns, that do not exactly correspond to this conception. But at that time I was at a stage in my career when I had to establish myself on the market, especially because the films "with content" that I had shot - Un Uoma da Bruciare (A Man to Burn) and Il Terrorista (The Terrorist) - were ignored by the distribution system and the public. A Bullet for the General (1966), the western directed by Damiano Damiani, was a different case since that script actually dealt with north American imperialism and the role of the CIA in Latin America. But generally speaking, the western is a tiring genre for an actor and one which personally doesn't interest me.
Being an actor is a question of choice which poses itself first on an existential level - either you express all the conservative structures for the society and content yourself with being a robot in the hands of the establishment, or you turn toward the progressive elements of the society and try to establish a revolutionary rapport between art and life. From that point, it is obvious that the fact of being a star gives me the objective possibility of choosing my films, but I see no contradiction between my conception of the cinema and this status. Without a doubt I'm worth anywhere from 100 to 120 million lire per film [approximately $160,000-$200,000] but I don't indulge myself in the typical life-style of a movie star. And then, as Petri says, we are ready to accept a lower salary if the other financial aspects of the cinema are also diminished. Otherwise, who would profit from the reduction of the salaries of actors and directors - the producers, distributors, and others who exploit them, in short, the bosses!
I don't believe in the definition of political cinema fostered by bourgeois critics, but rather in the existence of a politics of the cinema. In Rome, for example, there is a businessman who owns 60 movie theatres, and distribution in Italy is so concentrated that the fate of films is totally out of the hands of the creators. The Working Class Goes to Heaven didn't do well because it was poorly distributed, while The Mattei Affair was as successful as a James Bond picture. The situation of the cinema is very different in socialist countries where the business is nationalized. And, essentially, there isn't all that much to do in this area beyond taking away the power from the producers, distributors and other businessmen, from those who enrich themselves at other's expense.
Even the politics of "art" cinema, though useful, is not sufficient, these theatres are situated in the centers of big cities and therefore reach only a circumscribed public, small circles of two or three hundred people, mainly intellectuals. On the other hand, a distribution circuit with immense possibilities is that of A.R.C.I. [Italian Cultural and Recreational Association] which is tied to the left unions and parties and which consists of several thousand movie theatres throughout the country which are independent of the commercial circuit. But these theatres are poorly utilized and have again one confronts the problem of decentralization which so heavily stamps Italian cultural life.
The investigation pursued by Rosi in The Mattei Affair consists of analyzing the political line of the Mattei character - his struggle with the oil-producing countries against the U.S. monopoly, his contracts with the Eastern countries, his support of the politics of nationalization. He is a character, however, who is seen critically - he's a man who, despite his political line, eventually yields to a certain demagogy and who mistakenly thinks he can struggle by him self. Moravia has written accurately that there has never been a sufficiently enlightened bourgeoisie in Italy to support such a man and such a dialectical process between capitalism and the state.
The Working Class Goes to Heaven by Petri is also a dialectical film, not a propaganda film. It is a critical analysis, somewhat expressionistic, of the situation of a "non-conscious" working class. We tried to make an X-ray of working class reality, in its professional surrounding (the factory) and its private one (women, children, leisure). The communist critics criticized the film for misrepresenting the relationship between the workers and the party, but this is a dimension we intentionally overlooked in favor of another aspect of the problem - the worker taken in by the traps and seductions of consumer society, whose goals are limited to the car, the TV, the sports on Sunday, and who even in times of union conflict doesn't get involved politically. I think the film reflects a particular aspect of reality today - it is a critical discourse on consumerism as an attempt to lull one's consciousness to sleep. The worker character that I play is not conscious of this process but he continually pays with his self and each time he plays he discovers another aspect of his condition.
Petri is without a doubt the director who has the least hierarchical conception of cinematic work, and the one who establishes the best dialectical relationship with all the members of the crew. For him, a film is a collective in which everyone contributes in terms of ideas; and it's an economic collective, too, the crew actually being the owners of the film.
Generally speaking, I develop my characters in the fashion of an investigator who collects all the possible documentation on the issue which interests him. My presentation, then, is done more on a journalistic than on a dramatic level, and utilizes the same material the writer collects and uses to construct his subject. I worked this way, for instance, in creating the inspector in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion - his way of walking, his attitudes, his language, even the way he combs his hair, which corresponds to a specific custom in Italy, one which goes back to the time of the bourbons and which one still sees today in the ministries. For the worker in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, I talked at length with factory workers about illnesses specific to their condition such as neuroses, deforming arthritis and pulmonary diseases.
The next stage is a sort of critical, analytical preparation of the character, of his psychology, to determine the general attitude I must have in the film. Then comes the normal dialectical relationship between the actor and the director - we get together and talk until we reach a common view of the problem to be solved, it being understood that the director always has the final say. The psychological analysis of the character is also involved at the level of the dialog, line for line. I think this sort of analysis is part of my work as an actor even in everyday life, that is, on a continuous basis.
The French cinema suffers, I believe, from two illnesses - its inspiration is too literary and it is produced by directors from well-off backgrounds. It is a cinema of the bourgeois class. In Italy the relationship of the film-maker to the political dialect of the society is more direct, the social problems are too vital to make a cinema which doesn’t take into account what is happening around us.
Godard, of course, is a separate case. When I worked with him on Wind from the East, he was at a stage of his career when he was questioning himself. He was really trying to do the impossible - to negate himself as a director and see what would happen. He experimented with the possibilities of interaction between the traditional relationships within a film crew and the need for a less authoritarian and more collective work process, but to the point that he wanted to just give the camera to anyone to let them do their part of the film. For me, Godard is the last bastion of a bourgeois conception of the cinema, a bastion who is at one and the same time the most enlightened and the most masochistic of his class. He is too preoccupied with only one type of problem - his problems - which makes him forget the essential - the function of the cinema as a means of communication with the masses, the relationships between creation, production and distribution.
Our contracts were quite limited. He would plant the camera there, and me in front of it, supposedly representing the symbol of American imperialism. His goal was to break the actor, to destroy this form of mediation with the viewer. and he was constantly asking me questions like whether Stalin or Mao contributed most to destroying democracy, to which I answered "Harlequin," and since one doesn't break Harlequin... I think that, in the end, it will be for his contributions in the area of cinematic language and not ideology that Godard will be most noted.
FOR A MILITANT CINEMANeither TV nor the commercial cinema in Italy are doing any serious information work , addressing themselves to the whole country. In fact, to take only one example, when Sacco and Vanzetti was broadcast on TV, the word "anarchist" was not used once, instead they would say "radical." So it has become necessary to provide real information - in fact to counteract the official information - and disseminate it through the parallel distribution circuits such as the ARCI theaters.
It was in this spirit that about five years ago an anti-repression film committee was established which brought together about half of the directors, both from the left, such as Nelo Risi, Nanni Loy, Petri, Damiani, and from the right, such as Visconti - yes, I know that Visconti says he's a Marxist, but it's not what you pretend to be that really matters! For the same reasons, the film December 12 was made collectively after the bombing attempts in Milan in December 1969 and the "suicide" by the police of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. It's a film made on the spur of the moment perhaps a bit rashly, and is no doubt quite naïve, but it's something that had to be done quickly to tell and show people what TV and the newspapers were hiding from them.
Another example of this sort of counter-information is the one-hour documentary, La Tenda in Plazza, that I myself filmed in 16mm in the factories occupied by the workers in Rome. It's a film which allowed us to establish a new type of information between the workers in the unions which work throughout the country, sometimes even in the same town, without any contract with one another, and also between this class in struggle against capitalism and other social categories, such as students, to whom the film was shown in certain universities. But I had to produce this film myself, outside the capitalist production/distribution system, whereas it should have been up to a worker’s organization to undertake this kind of cinematic information work! There are so many people and things in this area to agitate around. Another form of action for me as an actor consists of going into the streets to organize provocation performances, to force people to look, to listen. I've been practicing this type of theatre which has become the cultural artifact of a class, and which I think a critique by our group has accurately defined as the "sad nocturnal rites of the bourgeoisie."
But even without engaging in this form of militant art, the actor can assume his role in society by his choice. when I played Sacco in the theatre, then Vanzetti in the cinema, it is evident that I didn't content myself with merely a professional participation. Which doesn't mean either that I was concerned at a personal political level, because I'm not an anarchist and I have never been tempted by this doctrine, but it so happens that the anarchists are currently the militants most exposed to repression. Likewise, December 12, the film on Pinelli and Valpredra, was not actually conceived as a film on anarchism but more on justice and the free functioning of democracy.
In any case, as a militant of the communist party, I don't pose this kind of dogmatic problem for myself. I'm fighting above all for the freedom of expression and for the causes which I feel important to support, without worrying about adhering to party lines or having to give an account of myself. For me, in the same way that the actor's job is only one means among others to do political work within society, being a communist means defending as well as possible the values of democracy.
[This is a slightly edited version of 'Gian Maria Volonte Talks About Cinema and Politics,' originally published in Cineaste (Vol. VII, No. 1, pp. 10-13). The movie stills accompanied the original article.]
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