When we talk about oral history, we mainly refer to the research of a sociologist, an anthropologist or a historian. Also, the psychologist in the field of psychotherapy, the journalist, the documentary filmmaker, and of course many visual artists, often focus on telling the personal and family memories of an individual, using interviews and documents or the images and sounds of everyday life. All these professionals play an important role in preserving the oral tradition of an entire community, albeit with the epistemological principles of the discipline producing the research, oriented by the disciplinary context to which the scholar-producer refers.

So what are the semantic and methodological characteristics of the artist, what are the aspects of artists’ narrative and visual research, the points of contact and the differences from other forms of storytelling?

First of all, there is a big difference between understanding that the private is also political, as the cliché claims, between understanding that the uniqueness of a personal story is never separated from the events of a community in a specific historical moment, and exploiting the storytelling to demonstrate a sociological theory or, even more, a partisan political interpretation, or to indulge in journalistic sensationalism. An artist is always aware that it is different to ‘make a film politically from making a political film’, as Godard put it. Approaching the life of an individual for a contingent purpose is a ballast that cannot be reconciled with the universality of the work of art. A clear example of this is the different approach that can be taken to the story of a refugee by the media, often influenced by the selfishness of the majority and the need to gain an audience, or in the context of a socially committed artistic practice that focuses on their stories as human beings, to learn not about their past traumas but their present feelings, maintaining a creative balance between empathy and independence, between reality and the poetry of the everyday. Orson Welles wrote that ‘a film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet’.

It is just as different to focus on the historiographic objectivity of a story, a necessary aspect of a historian’s research, or to favour the intimate, subjective element of storytelling, the possibility of giving voice to unheard stories without worrying that sometimes memories undergo a necessary cathartic process of past traumas, or are hidden among the nuances of language for the modesty of the present. An obvious example are ‘al hawadith’, the private images of the events of the Lebanese civil war, totally deconstructed by official historiography and, on the contrary, rich in humanity and poetry in the images of Lebanese artists such as Akram Zaatari.

Telling the story of the protagonist of one’s own film certainly poses questions of method, narrative structure and communication for each artist (and often of the ‘lost in translation’ in the narration that arises from a dialogue). There are often the risks of an orientalist approach to the life of the other, and certainly also ethical and confidentiality problems both in the filming phase and in post-production. In the post-production phase, in fact, the images or words of a story are often combined or separated, creating a new fictional narrative that does not necessarily reflect the reality of the events, but only the creative freedom of the artist. The aspects of authorship must also be taken into account, since storytelling places two individuals in a dialogue, the artist and the protagonist, and these two authorial individualities are joined by the creative contributions of the production and post-production technicians.

Over the last 25 years, my artistic production has been that of a visual storyteller of stories of marginality or borders, of lives compromised by the impact of the dehumanising forces of globalisation, of women who have made a major contribution to their community while remaining in the shadows. These stories can sometimes be hidden within the structure of a fairy tale, as is the case of the Albanian Roma I lived with in 2003: their ‚paramisa‘ blend personal and family history into children’s stories with a  semantic structure defined by tradition, thus ensuring that they are not lost.

In my work, storytelling is essentially defined in two ways. In films such as Murat ve Ismail (2005), or Al Intithar (2013), which may seem more documentary, the fictionalisation phase takes place at the moment of post-production. It is during editing that a story and a narrativity are created. While I’m shooting, I don’t give any kind of indication to the protagonists, but then the films have a structure in which everything seems to happen according to a precise script. So I start from pre-existing images and complete the writing process later.

In other works, such as Kauther (2014) and impermanent (2007), about the Palestinian exile Ali Akilah, it is the protagonist who narrates in the first person, in a form of direct testimony that makes it possible to fix and pass on a story that would otherwise be lost.

In The Little Lantern (2019), on the other hand, I felt it was important to give Anni Høver Kanafani the chance to tell her story and to highlight the salient moments in first person, but at the same time I felt it necessary to construct a narrative structure that would allow me to underline the educational and identity value of her action. I therefore combined the documentary and fictional elements through the children who attend one of the Kanafani Foundation’s kindergartens in the Burj el Barajneh camp.

My talk will reflect on various aspects of storytelling with the help of excerpts from my films and a filmic homage to the work of Brazilian documentary filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, in particular his masterpiece film Master: A Building in Copacabana.

When we talk about oral history, we mainly refer to the research of a sociologist, an anthropologist or a historian. Also, the psychologist in the field of psychotherapy, the journalist, the documentary filmmaker, and of course many visual artists, often focus on telling the personal and family memories of an individual, using interviews and documents or the images and sounds of everyday life. All these professionals play an important role in preserving the oral tradition of an entire community, albeit with the epistemological principles of the discipline producing the research, oriented by the disciplinary context to which the scholar-producer refers.

So what are the semantic and methodological characteristics of the artist, what are the aspects of artists’ narrative and visual research, the points of contact and the differences from other forms of storytelling?

First of all, there is a big difference between understanding that the private is also political, as the cliché claims, between understanding that the uniqueness of a personal story is never separated from the events of a community in a specific historical moment, and exploiting the storytelling to demonstrate a sociological theory or, even more, a partisan political interpretation, or to indulge in journalistic sensationalism. An artist is always aware that it is different to ‘make a film politically from making a political film’, as Godard put it. Approaching the life of an individual for a contingent purpose is a ballast that cannot be reconciled with the universality of the work of art. A clear example of this is the different approach that can be taken to the story of a refugee by the media, often influenced by the selfishness of the majority and the need to gain an audience, or in the context of a socially committed artistic practice that focuses on their stories as human beings, to learn not about their past traumas but their present feelings, maintaining a creative balance between empathy and independence, between reality and the poetry of the everyday. Orson Welles wrote that ‘a film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet’.

It is just as different to focus on the historiographic objectivity of a story, a necessary aspect of a historian’s research, or to favour the intimate, subjective element of storytelling, the possibility of giving voice to unheard stories without worrying that sometimes memories undergo a necessary cathartic process of past traumas, or are hidden among the nuances of language for the modesty of the present. An obvious example are ‘al hawadith’, the private images of the events of the Lebanese civil war, totally deconstructed by official historiography and, on the contrary, rich in humanity and poetry in the images of Lebanese artists such as Akram Zaatari.

Telling the story of the protagonist of one’s own film certainly poses questions of method, narrative structure and communication for each artist (and often of the ‘lost in translation’ in the narration that arises from a dialogue). There are often the risks of an orientalist approach to the life of the other, and certainly also ethical and confidentiality problems both in the filming phase and in post-production. In the post-production phase, in fact, the images or words of a story are often combined or separated, creating a new fictional narrative that does not necessarily reflect the reality of the events, but only the creative freedom of the artist. The aspects of authorship must also be taken into account, since storytelling places two individuals in a dialogue, the artist and the protagonist, and these two authorial individualities are joined by the creative contributions of the production and post-production technicians.

Over the last 25 years, my artistic production has been that of a visual storyteller of stories of marginality or borders, of lives compromised by the impact of the dehumanising forces of globalisation, of women who have made a major contribution to their community while remaining in the shadows. These stories can sometimes be hidden within the structure of a fairy tale, as is the case of the Albanian Roma I lived with in 2003: their ‚paramisa‘ blend personal and family history into children’s stories with a  semantic structure defined by tradition, thus ensuring that they are not lost.

In my work, storytelling is essentially defined in two ways. In films such as Murat ve Ismail (2005), or Al Intithar (2013), which may seem more documentary, the fictionalisation phase takes place at the moment of post-production. It is during editing that a story and a narrativity are created. While I’m shooting, I don’t give any kind of indication to the protagonists, but then the films have a structure in which everything seems to happen according to a precise script. So I start from pre-existing images and complete the writing process later.

In other works, such as Kauther (2014) and impermanent (2007), about the Palestinian exile Ali Akilah, it is the protagonist who narrates in the first person, in a form of direct testimony that makes it possible to fix and pass on a story that would otherwise be lost.

In The Little Lantern (2019), on the other hand, I felt it was important to give Anni Høver Kanafani the chance to tell her story and to highlight the salient moments in first person, but at the same time I felt it necessary to construct a narrative structure that would allow me to underline the educational and identity value of her action. I therefore combined the documentary and fictional elements through the children who attend one of the Kanafani Foundation’s kindergartens in the Burj el Barajneh camp.

My talk will reflect on various aspects of storytelling with the help of excerpts from my films and a filmic homage to the work of Brazilian documentary filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, in particular his masterpiece film Master: A Building in Copacabana.

Mario Rizzi, The darker the berry the sweeter it is, 2003. Courtesy the artist