Le Psychodrame (1956 TV Movie)

Ottavio Rosati: Rosati in 2019

Quotes 

• Rosati in 2019 : Your find is an extraordinary thing! You remind me of Aldo Carotenuto when he found the correspondence between Freud, Sabine Spielrein and Jung in Geneva. The result was "Diary of a secret symmetry". That book made it clear that without the weaknesses and the genius of these three characters the concept of transference, which today is obvious to us, would never have been born.

  Greco in 2019 : As far as Psychodrame is concerned, this film has been sought for years by psychodramatists and cinephiles. And it is thanks to the Anne Ancelin Schützenberger archive, that this could have happened, through the reorganization of which our association that is entrusted with it in Turin is working. During the cataloging we gathered some clues, some traces that led to Paris...

  Rosati in 2019 : With Rai3 in 1990 we looked for this video through Claudio Bondì, the television director of our "Da Storia Nasce Storia", who had been a pupil of Rossellini. But we didn't find it. How did you do it?

  Greco in 2019 : With the collaboration of Hélène Schützenberger, daughter of Anne, who, with the data we collected to identify it, requested the video of the INA in person, pointing out that her mother was one of the protagonists of the film. This may have been the key. What kind of key they used is not known to us... Perhaps it had been archived with old parameters. This is an experimental film shot in 1956 and not shown.

  Rosati in 2019 : The RTF could not perhaps broadcast such a complicated recovery but it has the merit of having organized the meeting between two directors / thinkers who were revolutionizing psychology and cinema. Even if it does not derive a creative collaboration but a reciprocal encumbrance. As if Hitchcock were to conduct a Gandhi conference aboard a train on the short Turin-Milan route. It is still something mythical.

  Greco in 2019 : Indeed,RTF, the France Radio Television, was a prestigious producer, but they offered Rossellini a very unsuitable set for the complex experiment to help the spontaneity of the actors grappling with the mechanism of television shooting: a challenge more than difficult. All this translates into a few improvised minutes in a rather crowded room with no lights... And the expression "Vite! Vite!", on the lips of Anne Schützenberger, watching her clock, is the refrain that underlines the need to hurry because there is no more time.

  Rosati in 2019 : Indeed. It is easy to see jumps and inconsistencies in the conduct of Moreno and Schützenberger who always watches the clock. But it is easy just because we are "Dwarfs on the shoulders of Giants" as Bernardo di Chartes says.

  Greco in 2019 : In the movie we immediately notice that there was no real group, according to our standards, nor an initial warming up of the people, or a preparation of the context; Schützenberger, perhaps safer because she already knows the environment and the language, mentions a definition of the set, making the scene build around a desk. However, the public is not used to dub, for example, or role reversals.

  Rosati in 2019 : While in "Psychodrama of a Marriage" by Moreno filmed at the Sorbonne in 1964 there is much of what he did at his Beacon's Theater in America as a director of psychodrama. There Moreno is at his best: charismatic but not directive. Instead, entering the studio of the RTF Moreno enters the wolf's den, in a futuristic factory of Cultural Conserves. He is working in the house of the enemy/friend: the Cultural Conserve producers.

  Greco in 2019 : The conduct of the protagonist also appears particular. As well as the definition of the arguments, as they arose... Topics that are, moreover, those of the attention of Man for politics, which is an active, creative interest, as he would say, for the Other... up to the entire Humanity that it can be saved only by deciding to focus on relational and creative mutual attention. Perhaps this is also why the distinction between him and the people he works with here appears more nuanced than usual.

  Rosati in 2019 : The theme of the father and of prayer, in the scene with the actor of Hungarian origin seem to be induced by a projective identification made by Moreno. At the beginning the actor protests against his father who forces him to pray and then without any elaboration embodies him as if he were offering his son an ideal mirroring. More than a psychodrama it seems to me like the staging of Moreno's book "The Words of Father". Everything happens under the gaze of Rossellini who in 1956 had already made "Roma città aperta", "Germania anno zero", "Giovanna d'Arco al rogo", "Viaggio in Italia".

  Greco in 2019 : Brilliant inventors who took advantage of the opportunity to experiment with each other... Moreno, moreover, wrote a document on the television medium in his manual, from which we deduce a singular level of competence on television, even at the technical level.

  Rosati in 2019 : It is the nucleus of a revolution that was about to change the world: the expansion of groups through networks. Not just television. Moreno did not invent Internet but he sensed it. He was its Prophet.

  Greco in 2019 : It is also on these issues that the movie questions us: the prophecy of a communication which widely spreads education and solicits rich relationships in creativity and spontaneity. In the end, how much has become a reality?

• Rosati in 2019 : This RTF experiment places Moreno in front of a problem that is not easy to solve neither in practice nor in theory: in the age of the technical reproducibility of art, what is important for art becomes important also for therapy. The Psycho-Cinema creates productive problems that Spontaneity alone cannot solve. The psychocinema is at the service of group therapy because its broadcasting multiplies the message of psychodrama and its clinical and human value. But, on the other hand, this passage has a specific feature: the practical realization of the Psychocinema brings production problems that a traditional therapist does not know: the production of what Moreno called "Cultural Conserves".

  Greco in 2019 : I see. The setting becomes also a set.

  Rosati in 2019 : Indeed. The psychodrama setting is the realm of Spontaneity, play and improvisation: a chair becomes a boat. A minute becomes one year. A patient becomes an actor. But if you create a setting-set everything changes. Play encounters Reality. You must consider the rules and the skills of an industry born to create movies, programs, dvd. Psychodrama takes the group out of space and space. Instead on a real set concrete problems of space are born: in Paris for instance the set of the Rossellini experiment is wrong. Is is too small. It is a studio for Radio not for TV and it is cluttered with too many people that disturb the shots. And the time available for the experiment is not enough.

  Greco in 2019 : Actually Schutzenberger repeats 'Vite! Vite!' And how did Rai deal with this kind of problems for 'Da Storia Nasce Storia'?

  Rosati in 2019 : In Turin we applied to Moreno's utopia the technological support that was available in the 1990s. That is four cameras, one of which was fixed. A television direction located in a space far from the set. An apparatus of lights and an audio recording technique that allowed to minimize pin microphones. And of course a year of preparation and months of production and assembly.

  Greco in 2019 : And what would it be like today?

  Rosati in 2019 : Today's technology is much more sophisticated, light and economical. Today the times are the right ones. Much better than in the Nineties. Not to mention the Fifties.

  Greco in 2019 : Yes. We told it: we are just Dwarfs on the shoulders of Giants. Moreno and Rossellini are the Giants.

• Rosati in 2019 : Last but not least, I believe that Moreno was enormously excited by the fact that he was proposing his method to the RTF which, as a Factory of 'Cultural Conserves', was the opposite of psychodrama. A space to conquer. Schutzenberger made the Trojan Horse enter in Paris. When I saw the documentary for the first time I was moved by Moreno's emotion, by his stress, by his over acting and his happiness. Moreno did an anti-psychodramatic operation: he used the poor Hungarian actor to express his - of Moreno - poetry of God as a Father in the style of a normal director. Jung would say that from the unconscious of Moreno the spirit of the Trickster surfaces with a drop of manipulation. A few moments the Jocker takes the place of the Player. That meeting in Paris was what Maslow called a Peack experience. A sacred moment. A level crossing. An encounter of two sides of the same coin: Fiction and Truth in Play. Moreover Moreno was deeply shocked by the presence of Rossellini, the great director who was for the Cinema what Moreno was for the Theater of the Twentieth Century: a seeker of truth. And who, for once, was in that small radio studio to frame Jacob Levi who spent his life to make others express themselves. And Rossellini as director did not correct Moreno's mistakes. He simply filmed them. Rossellini was the therapist.