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Meeting number one: Script. Scene 1: Ugo Giorgetti is in front of the audience in the Auditorium of the General Directorate of Administration (DGA) Unicamp. Open plan for the auditorium: there are cameras and cell phones ready to record and registered students waiting to learn from the filmmaker. American plan on Dean Marcelo Knobel: he welcomes him and says it is a pleasure to welcome the São Paulo filmmaker as the first guest of the Unicamp Resident Artist Program “Hilda Hilst”.
Scene 2: It's time to talk about Professor Anderson Fauth, deputy coordinator of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA) at Unicamp. He gives a brief presentation of the program and the filmmaker: “Ugo was born in 1942. Ugo César Giorgetti. Ugo grew up in São Paulo, he knows São Paulo. He has 19 films, won several awards. He actually started doing philosophy and then went to work in advertising... ”.
Cut to Ugo Giorgetti. He receives a microphone but prefers to speak without the equipment, which generates some protests from those sitting further back. He immediately warns that he has no teaching skills and that no one is going to learn how to write a script there: something that, in theory, anyone who knows how to write would already be qualified to do, he says. The filmmaker will hold twelve more meetings with different themes.
Returning to the script: a provisional piece, something that serves to give an idea of the costs of a film, but a piece of seduction. These are some of Giorgetti's definitions. Between behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Brazilian film production and various tidbits about films and directors, the filmmaker described, without pretense, how European cinema scripts were produced in the post-war period, especially in France and Italy, in comparison to the United States. “I’m very old. I belong to a cinema that has transformed,” he said.
Giorgetti's old days go back to the 1960s, when Europe produced a “reborn” cinema from the Second World War, with few resources and great enthusiasm. Italy comes with Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola; France with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut. The São Paulo filmmaker plays with the preposition “de”, which linked “a film” to the name of a certain director. Because it would be a myth to believe that the public was watching a film “by” Roberto Rossellini.
“The film was about a team. There were four or five writers who were friends and worked together. Literates were part of the group. It was an informal intellectuality that resulted in interesting, free cinema.” European cinema was almost cooperative cinema. It was, according to Giorgetti, the school that most influenced cinema in Brazil. “We had a cinema as disorganized as Italy.”
Giorgetti commented on “the only course he took in his life on screenwriting”, when he went to work, somewhat by chance, and for the first time, in an advertising agency. “On the first day I was asked to write a script for a commercial and I didn’t know what it was about.” The boss then explained in two minutes what a close-up, an American shot, a medium shot was and the course was 'completed'.
With his group of students he did things differently. And although he said that there was nothing to teach and that there was no teaching, he distributed the necessary clues. “The dialogue cannot be careless and needs to take into account the characteristics of the actor. Dialogue is music.”
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