The americanist Fernanda Pivano and her struggle in Italy for "The Time Theatre" inspired by Allen Ginsberg, the Beats and the Hippies. By the author of Da Storia Nasce Storia (1991). In 2020 Istituto Luce Cinecittà produces a new version.
The first and controversial portrait of Fernanda Pivano (1917-2009), the writer who introduced Italy to four generations of American writers, from Lee Masters to Scott Fitzgerald, from Kerouac to Easton Ellis. Friends, singers and artists (from Bernardo Bertolucci to Luciano Benetton) read pages from Pivano's book of portraits "I miei quadrifogli" (My Quatrefoils). Ottavio Rosati directing small role- playings, underlines the contradiction between the Victorian education of Pivano and her love for counterculture and transgressive literature. Originally produced by Grazia Volpi (Ager3) in collaboration with Ottavio Rosati. In 2007 Plays srl has claimed all dominical rights for the exploitation of the work. The documentary, in the new version of 2020, reveals new aspects of the collaboration between Pivano and Rosati. Among these the project of "Il Teatro del Tempo", a modern version of the Psychodrama Theater that Jacob Levi Moreno created in New York in 1945.—Luca Zerilli
At the 2001 Torino Cinema Festival, this movie produced by Grazia Volpi and Plays was protected by a comic and exceptional synchronicity: Pivano said to Ottavio that the way Mario Amura photographed her was "too much romantic and full of sun and love" and that this image could be a problem for her public character. The producers were shocked because she suddenly stated to introduce with her presence at the Festival only the competing documentary by Luca Facchini where she is dressed in black as a widow and wanders through the American cemeteries around the graves of her writers. Ottavio was furious. But in Turin Festival, as soon as Pivano set foot on the red carpet for the other film, a fire broke out in the hall. The mysterious incident blocked the screening and cancelled the party in honor of the Pivano organized by the publishing house Einaudi which in 1943 published her famous translation of Spoon River Anthology. Rosati was innocent because Pivano, fearing a fight during the premiere with the other director, had invited him to leave Turin in the morning. Ottavio was in Rome, sleeping in Fernanda's bedroom in their house of Trastevere (The Kasbah).—Francesco Marzano
I met Nanda in 1972, when I was 22 and she was over 50 and she was dying of pain due to Sottsass's betrayal. She no longer died. At least three decades after which I risked dying. Since then, until the closure of her Roman house on November 2, 2002, not a day went by without Fernanda and I met or phoned morning, afternoon, evening. She kept me on the phone for three hours the night Ginsberg left. Fernanda fascinated me with her cultured beauty and her loyalty to work, peace and music. And I loved her not as a toy-boy but as a boy who couldn't save his mother's happiness. With a general protection. And I endured everything as a conceited and imprudent psychologist. Able to make mistakes. In the third decade I decided to tell the story as a director. She said yes and worked for the film with joy but when she saw it edited in a study in Cinecittà she tried to stop it. She told us, with a soft mixture of fear and tenderness: 'It is beautiful but it seems a madrigal of love not a documentary!' That was the beginning of the end. So Fernanda did to Ottavio what Ettore had done to her in 1973: she found a new young architect who knew nothing about us. Thus, after the restoration, she had also a revenge of her old trauma. Fernanda Pivano left Rome and I met her again just at her funeral in Genoa when I carried an angle of her coffin on my shoulders. There was also Tito Schipa who had done the music for Generazioni d'amore. Crying I told him that we had exchanged thousands of speeches and complexes, travels and provocations, greetings and insults, tears and screams as parrots and rabbits passed through the terrace from my house to here gnawing at her books and Coca Cola's boxes and chocolate as tall as columns. This story in Fernanda generated love but in Pivano generated the envy of a Victorian "internal object" that sowed terror. Perhaps for this reason - explained to me Bernardo Bertolucci who also lived in the same kasbah - in her two Roman novels Fernanda had split Ottavio into three characters, one of whom was a terrorist. (From the 2001 Torino Cinema Festival program)—Ottavio Rosati
"Generations of love" takes up a Pivano surrounded by various types of pet, in the animalist spirit of her friend Ottavio Rosati, the director of the movie: Teto the Cacatoa performer, Platona, an angora rabbit and a red and purple Eclectus parrot (donated by Fernanda to Rosati during the shooting) in the foreground in the sequence in which the composer Tito Schipa jr. speaks with her of the relationship between Verdi and Bob Dylan. The film contains sequences of Pivano with Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Meredith Monk and Peter Orlovsky shot in 1978 by Costanzo Allione and Alberto Grifi at the Naropa Institute in Boulder (Colorado) with an italian crew that included Fernanda and Ottavio. Many friends and testimonials contribute to the portrait with readings taken from the Pivano book "My Quadrifogli": Valeria Moriconi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luciano Benetton, Aldo Carotenuto, Chiara Caselli, Piera Degli Esposti, Alessandro Haber, Jovanotti, Luciano Ligabue, Tito Schipa jr, Milena Vukotic. Credits with the PFM song "Domo Doso" written and sung by Pivano. The film has a warm and Mediterranean atmosphere and shows the affection of and for all the friends of the Roman house called "La mia Kasbah" (especially Tito Schipa jr. and Adriana Ruvolo) where Fernanda went for thirty years of her life "to see a little of sun and spend the money I earn in Milan - " as in the drawing by Papik, a child from Trastevere who depicts her riding a bike up and down Italy: "Milano-Roma, Roma-Milano. Pedala Pedala, Fernanda Pivano".—Vittorio Castelnuovo
The documentary 'Genamore' (Generazioni d'amore) is based on a twenty-hour interview with Fernanda Pivano that Ottavio Rosati made in Rome between Trastevere, San Pietro and the Senate over two weeks in the summer of 2000. Photography by Mario Amura who directs a troupe of students of Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia from Cinecittà. Alongside the writer, Lorenzo Perpignani in the role of an enchanted and enchanting student that Pivano introduces to four generations of transgressive writers explaining the difference between Beat, Hippie, Yippie and Yuppy. Fernanda tells him various episodes from her childhood and her work to introduce American literature into Italy: from the translation of Spoon River to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the authors of the counterculture as Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac or Corso. Rosati also offers her a playful reversal of role as in Da Storia Nasce Storia (1991) by Rai3 whose central idea seems to be the same as the film: the time of tales and loves stops can stop the time of clocks. The locations of the documentary film are the John Cabot University of Rome and the two houses of Trastevere that Rosati and Pivano transformed into one. We are in the theater of the novel 'La mia Kasbah', the old palace of via della lungara described by Sandra Petrignani and Fiorella Minervino where Fernanda housed Allen Ginsberg and Rosati organized psychoplays for Harold Brodkey and the macrobiotic cuisine that saved Pivano's life when she fell ill. A theater of the time that Pivano describes thus: "In my Kasbah, here in Trastevere, I came to live fifteen years ago. It was a very ancient tower block divided into two wings, each with its own garden and each divided in turn into two wings. Each wing had a dozen apartments lined up, tiny, no more than a hundred square meters, three rooms arranged on three floors connected by a spiral staircase that ended on a small terrace with ocher-colored walls, that rose that returns to all the old Roman walls under the sunset sun ".Here Fernanda, after the separation from her husband, the famous architect Ettore Sottsass, lives with the young Ottavio a meeting/ confrontation between generations that seek each other and fight each other at full force to the point that many believe them (or would like them) married . And the boy is fortunate to grow, madly in love with a woman in love with transgressive creativity. A woman to whom he feels bound even when, after thirty years, Ottavio's passion has turned into a feeling of tenderness and protection tinged with jealousy.A new version of 'Generazioni d'amore' in 2020, testifies to Nanda's long Roman holidays and compensates for the Damnatio Memoriae of Ottavio in Pivano's Diaries. Actually, after the separation from Ettore Sottsass, she was also a 'Lustige Witwe' capable of giving and taking happiness with her enchanting musicality. After 20 years the documentary and above all the fight around it reveal the comedy, the tragedy (and sometimes the operetta) hidden behind what Pivano, thinking to the Spanish lover of Sottsass, called "La farsa Roma/Barcellona" (3 years for Barcellona/30 for Rome) and the retroactive denial. They show the splitting between alternative Fernanda and the Victorian Pivano and the moments when the two different personalities got along at the risk of turning the essayist into a new novelist.The movie presents unpublished photos from the Sottsass archive and photos from the Pivano family album that Mary Pivano (Fernanda's mother) gifted to Rosati.The first to give news of the film is the weekly 'Panorama' announcing the PFM album 'Serendipity' with which Nanda makes her debut at the age of eighty as a singer. Singing her poem 'Domo Dozo' in the credits of 'Genamore' and succeeding enough well.
