Freely inspired by the biography written by Rechus (XII century) Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa, the film tells the story of the mental journey of a student of our times, who identifies himself with a young farmer who lived in XI century in Nepal. While waiting for rescues after a car accident, Leo recites to Prof. Bennett the life story of the great Tibetan meditation master Milarepa, that he has just translated, and that seems to mirror in many ways his own. The clearly geometric film structure, which was greatly esteemed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is divided in three chapters: the black magic (Mila, driven by his vengeful mother, induces the death of their rich persecutors); the white magic (thanks to harsh exercises, Mila can set out for the way to wisdom); the transfiguration (Mila, turned to a Buddha, reveals the secret of happiness: the complete detachment from every material reality).

/ Screenplay Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati
/ Photography (colour) Armando Nannuzzi
/ Editing Franco Arcalli
/ Music Daniele Paris
Cast Lajos Balazsovits, Marisa Fabbri, Paolo Bonacelli, George Wang, Marcella Michelangeli
Production Lotar, RAI TV
Year of production 1974
Running time 108’
Format 35mm
Copy / Print Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale, Roma

Liliana Cavani

Born in Carpi, Emilia, Italy, she studied Ancient Arts in Bologna and Film Directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Won the public competition at RAI 1963, she started working for the television on documentaries on historical, social and politic issues. 1966 she made her feature film debut with Francesco Di Assisi. After 1979 she directed also numerous opera plays. She won various awards, such as the Gold Lion in Venice for her documentaries, the Coppa Volpi, the David di Donatello. Many retrospectives worldwide have been dedicated to her work. 1996-1998 she was in the Board of Directors of RAI. 1999 the LUMSA University in Rome conferred on her the honorary degree.

What an extraordinary experience (partly forgotten) to watch a truly beautiful film. Cinema is like life: that’s the reason why while we are watching a truly beautiful film we feel its artfulness, but, afterwards, it arises again in our memory as something real, even if dreamt. Milarepa, by Liliana Cavani, is among these absolutely rare films. We don’t remember it as a film but as a perfect Geometry where a visual experience lived in the reality has synthetized and crystallized herself. Odd experience. In real life, in fact, we are condemned to live an “eternal subjective”: the camera is always on our eye, the angle is always determined by the position that we occupy in space and our field of vision has always our body in its center. In a film, instead, the eyewitness who’s watching the scene is master of all possible angles and he is at the center of every possible space. He can see at the same time Milarepa’s mother in her village and Milarepa in a monastery one hundred of kilometres far away from there.

The experience of reality lived by cinema eyewitness is the experience of an omnipresent, ubiquitous spirit who sometimes sees the character as an object, sometimes identifies himself with it, thus becoming a subject and consequently seeing as an object the place that was before is point of observation. Those who remember a film not as a film (that’s partly what it is, while they are watching it) but as an experience of reality that has really been lived, can concentrate, in a sole observing and living subject, several diametrically opposed experiences. So, for instance, the experiences: of Milarepa seeing his mother; of Milarepa’s mother seeing Milarepa; of the ultimate witness (the camera) seeing both of them, Milarepa and Milarepa’s mother, at the same time. But in memories all of these experiences are melted together: and reality presents herself as seen simultaneously by innumerable perspectives, without at the same time loosing the characteristics of reality that we all know, that is to say the fact of being lived from a single point of view (our subjective one). Now, I would never had the idea of creating such a preamble for any other film but Milarepa. It has been a long time since we didn’t have on the screen such a beautiful film able to enhance in such a manifest manner cinema expressive qualities. But this is not all. The Geometry capable of synthesising all of Milarepa’s points of view (seen and seen living) has technically, how to say it, the characteristics of a religious vision of reality, that is precisely always multiple and omni comprehensive (the look of “rational” sanctity is the one of an exquisite and perfect cubist painter who sees simultaneously all the surfaces of an objective reality). Milarepa’s coming and going, his research of knowledge or of an inaugural model of knowledge crystallizes herself in Cavani’s film in the form of a series of almost rigidly rhythmical lines: a sequence of still shots, of panoramic shots, irregular most of the times (where some zoom movements are also justified), on a “profilmic” world that is strangely geometrical too: a bare and blue Abruzzo, often with clouds and mist wandering on a wasted land of rocks lost in a solitude that is particularly profound.

Even in the modern part, which is the frame and the basis of Milarepa’s religious experience, and has the function of rendering it expressly dreamlike, the Geometry (I repeat it, technically irregular) is perfect. Dreamlike too. A dream that is the basis of an other dream. What is Milarepa’s religious experience? Literally, it is a classical mystical experience, typical of every Late era or Late Middle Ages: typical of every agrarian world culture that is very restricted on a social point of view and may be immense on a physical point of view. It is the decision of cancelling reality, of searching oneself, it is the concentration of every physical phenomenon into a unique Sense that can assure its perfect circularity (the eternal return) or, even better, the total contemporaneity and identification; and the consequent ritual of practical life as a renunciation, a refusal of the world, etc. But Liliana Cavani is not fundamentally religious: she is deeply impressed by religion as a practical or aesthetical matter. She is not capable of catching religion rationality, or irrationality that destroys and throws everything into confusion. Almost without taking notice of it, she told us not Milarepa’s life, but his apprenticeship. That’s what rendered the film deeply and miraculously intimate. Cavani, in fact, projected into it a personal image of an idealised adolescent (that was and is true) who’s looking for a master and, through him, for the Knowledge: whatever the knowledge, this is the point. It doesn’t matter if this knowledge is secular or religious, rational or irrational, sacred or profane, academic or practical (maybe even up to the superficial factual knowledge or to the fact of getting used to success). Every kind of knowledge is the same for the boy willing to be initiated (and who therefore knows only his unknowledge). This is the reason why Milarepa passes with a certain indifference, or with an undifferentiated anxiety, from a master to an other. When Milarepa eventually finds the master that a certain already reached maturity allows him to recognise as “his” master and to choose him definitively, the most extraordinary part of the film begins: it’s the story of the relationship between the boy who doesn’t know and wants to know and the master who knows and is afraid of his knowledge. [...]

Pier Paolo Pasolini, «Cinema Nuovo», n. 229, may-june 1974