REVIEW

Richard Dindo, is born in Zurich in 1944. He is one of the most important characters of the so-called “New Swiss Cinema” as a new current following the nouvelles vagues at the beginning of the sixties.
Thourgh an artistic personal path where the documentary rules (although the difference between fiction and reality is not well defined), Dindo researched through history pages bringing us great profiles of artists and political characters never forgiving problematics and daily conflicts of the forgotten humanity.
He probably is the most rigorous of all swiss directors. He is attached to an idea of cinema as a form of resistance and research on the meaning of history and its origins. Born in German Switzerland from italian parents, since the beginning of the seventies this director used the camera as a scalpel to dissect past and present fragments of the his homeland.
“I am a second generation italian, this is the reason why I did not feel neither swiss german nor italian. Making cinema to me was like resolving this identity problem. Through my films I tried to integrate myself to the population and the country...” (R. Dindo).
Dindo’s cinema presents itself as a gallery of “characters” who fit nicely in the same jigsaw. His work is consacrated to the memory of those men who lined up, for their own will or for historical circumstances, outside or against the schemes of a narrow-minded and mean society: from the naïf painters of Eastern Switzerland to the Swiss soldiers during the Spanish civil War alongside the Republicans, from Ernst S., the “traitor of the country”, to the four young men died by “accident” with the involvement of the police; from the intellectual Max Frisch to the unhappy artist Max Haufler from Arthur Rimbaud on his way to self-destruction through Charlotte Salomon, the young Jew woman destroyed by human bestiality in Auschwitz to ‘Che’ Guevara, defeated together with his utopia arriving to the protagonists of Mexican repression of 1968 as shown in his last “political” film Ni olvido ni perdon.
Dindo’s research, so important for the definition of our identity as men and Swiss people, is at the same time an important research of a kind of movie that does not allow to cheat on history, thus recognising the need to stage it. Pioneer and master of that genre of border that is called in German “fictive Dokumentarfilm” and that has many followers in Switzerland today, Dindo can be considered as the reality filmmaker who contaminates the documentary with some of the processes of fiction. However he never yields to the temptation of the fictional transposition of facts and he always produces documents, texts, testimonies, landscapes through an editing work that aims to develop a personal discourse beyond the illusory objectivity, an interpretation of History, a philosophy of memory.
“We have to tell historical happenings not to loose them in the oblivion” (R. Dindo). In this intervention, Dindo refers to a “documentary of creation” which is still valued and not sacrified on the altars of the so-called “Ersatz”; services and correspondences where superficial informations are accumulated. Swiss documentary is a kind of cinema who tells reality in its details trying to give back the sense and the atmosphere of certain places, the behaviour of certain characters. He uses time in a very free way, usually with the feature film, always penetrating the debated themes without the anxiety to be accepted by the public.
A documentary which gives time and dignity of a narrative film and allows the spectator to enter an unknown context with the role of a privileged interlocutor through spontaneous voices of interviewed characters.
In Dindo’s cinema the space of meaning - produced by the form in the intersection between film and spectator - is an area where the sight must move permanently. The filmic process asks for a particular reading focus: the spectator actively partecipates to the enquire. The slight passivity produces a want of sense and emotion. One of Dindo’s cinema biggest merits - and I hope of the spectator too - is being modern.

Domenico Lucchini

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