08/09/2021 - VENICE 2021: Tommaso Landucci pays tribute to a man who turned his delicate and courageous art into a veritable testimony

Having served as assistant director to high-calibre filmmakers along the lines of Luca Guadagnino and Claudio Giovannesi, Tommaso Landucci is now presenting his astonishing first feature film  Caveman – The Hidden Giant [+see also:
trailer
interview: Tommaso Landucci
film profile] in a world premiere within Venice’s Giornate degli Autori. The film looks back on the final years of Italian sculptor Filippo Dobrilla, examining his private life and revealing, without ever jumping the gun on an artistic relationship which has turned into a lasting friendship, what it really is that feeds his insatiable but discreet creativity.

Caveman is underpinned by Landucci’s meticulous and sincere approach and Dobrilla’s quiet and mysterious force, an ideal fusion which gives rise to a deeply moving film. Bathed in a Caravaggio-style light (Francesca Zonars signs her name to the movie’s photography, alongside Tullio Bernabei for the speleological shots), it drills down into the meanders of the Italian sculptor and speleologist’s mind in a sense both metaphorical and real. Indeed, it’s 650 metres down, in the bowels of the earth, that Dobrilla’s masterpiece can be found, a gigantic sleeping nude who hides away from the world, much like his creator. It’s a “guilty” pleasure which the sculptor has secretly enjoyed alongside the person who seems to have been the biggest love of his youth.

Like many men born into societies which are still overwhelmingly patriarchal and heteronormative, Dobrilla played the perverse game of “normality”, without actually hiding his true nature: introverted, introspective and free from categorisation, whether in terms of gender, sex, social status or any other. Conscious of the difficulties linked to his position as “an unemployed artist who won’t ever stop sculpting”, to borrow his words, the film’s protagonist nonetheless found himself forced to contend with, and, reluctantly, become an accessory to an art world which was still disinclined towards sincerity, weakness and “diversity”. His meeting with the influential Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi (who discovered him and launched his career in the art world at the end of the 90s), who was himself surrounded by rugged “assistants” and youthful lackeys, is emblematic in this respect. The cave in which Dobrilla’s giant lies still acts as a refuge for him, but also as an echo chamber for an inner world full of contradictions and countless grey zones. Elusive, solitary and courageous, the artist escapes all categorisation: he’s mystical, nigh-on naive and a huge admirer of the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, a quick-tempered and violent man who was nonetheless capable of creating incredibly sophisticated objects. Such complexity and ambiguity are a constant in Landucci’s film, which treats us to a sincere portrait of an artist and exceptional man whose mystery will never be fully revealed, but instead guarded and preserved for eternity by an imposing yet quiet and solitary giant who lies in the entrails of the earth. An insatiable creator of marble, clay and bronze characters (often inspired by his own moving body) who don’t have to answer to anyone, Dobrilla never stopped looking for his place in a society which was too often boisterous, at times hostile and undoubtedly exclusive.

After spending more than four years following the sculptor’s adventures, up until the latter’s tragic passing, it’s now the discreet anarchist who was fully aware of his choices that Landucci brings to the surface in his film; an artist and human being who struggled not only with the rules imposed upon him by society, but also with his own deeply rooted contradictions.

Caveman – The Hidden Giant is produced by Rome-based outfit DocLab and Zurich’s Contrast Film, in co-production with RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera. International sales are entrusted to Deckert Distribution.

(Translated from Italian)