Above all else, Anna wanted to sleep. The teenage protagonist of Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli’s film—surname lost to time, or drug-addled memory (or simply to the fault of men who never bothered to ask)—turns up in Rome’s Piazza Navona, hailing from an impecunious neighborhood in Sardinia, without a place to stay. She is pregnant from an abusive relationship, actively using narcotics, and her long hair is riddled with lice. The men of Navona’s public square, a chorus of layabout leftists, most of them disenchanted and fresh-out-of-jail from sentences imposed during Italy’s “Hot Autumn” of 1969, will not let her rest. Male actors, artists, and thinkers hover around her; fretting, chatting, and touching like furtive insects, as if the creative class had taken an interest, or at the least a superficial accord, with the houseless for the first time, only to have it immediately revealed as a solely prurient one.
Experimental filmmaker Alberto Grifi begin filming Anna in 1972 at the beckoning of Massimo Sarchielli, a prolific actor who appeared in everything from works by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Federico Fellini, to National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985) and Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). He had happened upon Anna that winter. Grifi was in possession of a ¼” open reel video-recorder, one of the first units of its kind sold in Italy (Grifi then transferred the picture to 16mm film in a sort of reverse-Telecine that he constructed himself). For the next three years, Grifi taped as Sarchielli conducted a social experiment: he charitably invited Anna, her pregnant belly quickly swelling, to live with her in his apartment.
Most writing on Anna stops just shy of saying this and so I feel compelled to definitively offer: Sarchielli is vile. While he denies to friends that he ever had an improper thought about sheltering a “sixteen and a half” year-old girl in his home, he squeezes her pregnant breast, picks fights with her ex-boyfriend, and delights in her calling him “daddy” (he is over twice her age). In close-ups of Anna, Sarchielli’s balding head frequently ducks into frame, leering inches from her body. His conversations with friends and comrades about the moral and legal implications of his choice to “consensually harbor a minor” have an air of amused irony.
Anna and Sarchielli’s unorthodox cohabitation is juxtaposed against long scenes—reveling in the freedom allowed by videotape—set in the public square, where debates erupt among locals and passersby, often about how Anna’s plight would be handled by Italy’s various institutions: the church, the unions, the police, and the hospitals. The filming of Anna coincided with Italy’s most heated political upheaval, in which factory workers, the unemployed, and childrearing women all found their interests inextricably intertwined in an uprising known as Autonomia.
I first heard about Anna a little over ten years ago, when I—retreating from the disintegrating encampments of Zuccotti Park—took solace in the romans à clef of yesterday’s uprisings, most notably the contemporary novels of Elena Ferrante and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, as well as the reprinting of Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything, all of which are set within the Autonomia, concurrent with post-’68 student uprisings, strikes at automobile factories, the death of Pasolini, and mass arrests of poets and protestors under charges of terrorism. “At some point you become a pain and they jail you,” says a man on camera in Anna. “Seeing as Italian law doesn’t acknowledge political crimes, as we are a democratic republic… they’ll blame you for a common crime.” A brilliantly observed sequence recounts the women’s march for reproductive rights and fair labor options on March 8, 1972—a nationwide event that was more recently depicted in HBO’s adaptation of Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay—and sharply witnesses the police’s brutal and heavily-armed response.
The friction between these two narratives—that of the young house-guest and that of Italy’s proletariat—and the filmmakers’ hard-nosed commitment to presenting Anna as an exemplary metaphor-in-progress for the era makes the film endlessly compelling, even as the girl refuses to become the emblematic putty that the film desires her to be. She is frustrated, lively, and searching for an escape. She also infests the film crew with her lice and becomes involved with the film’s electrician. When Anna eventually vanishes, leaving the men in disarray, the remaining lingering ghostly close-ups captured by Grifi do not succeed in portraying her as a cypher, only in telegraphing the filmmakers’ desire to have Anna embody one.
Anna screens this evening, January 26, and on February 1, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Wandering Women.”
