Writer and Director: Costanza Quatriglio
The Secret Drawer (Il segreto cassetto) is a documentary by Italian film director, Costanza Quatriglio about her father, Giuseppe Quatriglio, a well-known Sicilian journalist for Il Giornale di Sicilia, as well as being a photographer and writer. He will probably not be familiar to audiences outside Italy, however, and The Secret Drawer may well leave us wondering about his ultimate cultural significance. The film gives us snap shots of his frequent travels, his meeting with a host of film stars and the occasional world famous politican (there are glimpses of Churchill).
But its five-part structure arranges material in seemingly arbitrary chapters and there is a lot of repetition. Overall the film, both in its story-telling and its cinematography, is deliberately hazy and impressionistic, Costanza Quatriglio making no attempt to persuade us of her father’s possible importance. Her project, rather, is a deeply personal one. In 2010, some years before Giuseppe’s death, she filmed him in his study, where he potters about looking for bits and pieces and occasionally volunteering something gnomic. He will not have been the first person to look at crowded book shelves and reveal that although they’re lacking in order, he knows where things are. This is the basic material Costanza puts in her ‘secret drawer’ and which she has now developed into for this strange two-hour account of her father’s enormous library being packed up to be archived.
There probably are film goers who will enjoy nothing more than watching piles of dusty books being taken down off shelves, endless drawers being explored, and fresh piles of stuff being created. They may even thrill to long sequences in which a packer stops, opens a book or an envelope and settles down to study the contents. But for those of us with painful memories of having to clear out an elderly relative’s lifetime of hoarded treasures, this can all border on nightmarish. For much of this long film there is little apparent progress. Old piles are turned into new piles; a hidden box reveals – oh joy – reel after reel of photographic negatives (there will turn out to be some 60,000). Giuseppe, in some of the original footage, happens upon a container of colour slides and begins conscientiously examining them, one by one. At one stage – and one hopes this is not a spoiler alert – a gigantic bookshelf detaches itself from the wall and comes to rest leaning crookedly across the room.
Meanwhile Costanza’s chosen camera work is deliberately tricksy. She favours out-of-focus shots, filming things lying sideways or upside down. The camera sometimes whirls round and round or lurches drunkenly in search of its subject. It’s hard to see quite what she is trying to achieve. As the film progresses, she includes photographs and cine film of herself as a baby, a toddler, a young child, a teenager. It must have been delightful finding this material amongst her father’s possessions, but it’s hard to see its inclusion as anything other than self-indulgent as does a scene in which she dances in the now-emptied study.
There certainly are interesting parts of the film. Giuseppe Quatriglio photographed in the chilling aftermath of Sicily’s Belice earthquake in 1968 which left 100,000 homeless and the film loops round to this several times. Towards the end we see Costanza herself walking in the extraordinary piece of land art by Alberto Burri, a vast concrete labyrinth, where once the small city of Gibellina stood, but she offers no comment on the fact that the planned new town remains unfinished. She seems deliberately to avoid anything political. Also intriguing is Giuseppe’s discovery in 1964 of some extraordinary graffiti in a prison used by the Spanish Inquisition.
The film is presented as a testament to the power of story-telling, Costanza saying “His library talks to me, his archive tells me stories.” But it is hard for us to hear threads of stories amongst the burdensome images of yet more shelves of old books.
The Secret Drawer is screening at the 3rd Cinecittà Italian Doc Season, 20-21 July at Bertha DocHouse.
Decluttering nightmare
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