“I
believe that our cinema must talk about us and not ape Hollywood,
where films are made solely to make money, and put together around
a table by the so-called ‘audio-visual managers’ who
refuse to consider a product if there is no profit to be made by
selling it on the market. Swiss films are made because there is
a small group of people who believe they have something to say,
to communicate, to uncover, to reveal (with the complicity of cultural
assessors and our television).”
HERMANN V., “L'apertura del
cinema svizzero”, «Corriere del Ticino, Quotidiano della
Svizzera italiana» 11 marzo 2000.
Villi Hermann: chi è
Born in Lucerne, he lives now in Lugano, Switzerland.
He studied at the London Film School, worked for
the Swiss television. He started with documentary films. He uses
often documentary and fiction elements in his films. Matlosa (1981) was his first fiction film,
for which he is director as producer.
He founded 1980 his own production company: Imagofilm Lugano.
Preface of the catalogue for the Trieste
Film Festival Alpe Adria Cinema 2005:
Hermann, who is German Swiss in origin, was born of a mother resident
in Malcantone in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and it
was here that he grew up before heading to London to study cinema,
although already directly involved in the Swiss cinema scene during
the years of its greatest social involvement. Hermann returned to
the Canton Ticino in the 1970s (in earlier years, he worked as a
graphic designer, and produced a number of exhibitions). Il Ticino
è un elemento molto importante the Ticino is an important
element because for Hermann it does not formed only a foundation
but also a supplier of material for investigation and analysis.
One of the elements used for investigating and analysing, and which
appears a constant in the cinema of the Ticino, appearing from the
earliest days of Swiss film-making, is the use of drama and the
dramatic together with the “frontier”, [...] as both
the utopia of an encounter and as an obstacle that is hard to overcome.
The aspect Hermann would now stress was the "going" and
not the "staying" of his characters, whose point in common
was not their nationality, dialect, habits, the need to work so
much as by a wandering that takes them beyond their land of birth,
towards the vaster possibilities offered by new horizons.
The Swiss documentary constitutes a form of cinema that recounts
reality in its details, which seeks to communicate the sense and
atmosphere of certain places, the character of certain figures,
using time – often that of a full-length film – in a
free manner, and always entering into the questions debated in detail,
without the worry of having to sacrifice itself to the whims of
the public.
In fact, the difference between the cinema of the real and fictional
cinema is ill defined: the borders between the two are slender and
fiction often appears in the documentary as documentary does in
fiction. Such is also maintained by Villi Hermann who makes no distinction
between the two genres. A little provocatively, one might affirm
that “the documentary is cinema par excellence”, thanks
to the fact that it is not obliged to respect the dominant expressive
codes, leaving free rein to the film-maker’s point of view.
Here, the “documented point of view” of Jean Vigo springs
to mind, and this is a concept that runs through all of Hermann’s
cinema, and which will serve us as a starting point for our analysis
of his films. Domenico Lucchini, Centro Culturale Svizzero CCS Milano
