La prima volta che ci siamo incontrati era in un bar, a Firenze. Era un ragazzo magro, due anni più grande di me. Lui ventotto anni, io ventisei. La sera prima avevano applaudito “Voci d’Europa”, il suo primo film. Un viaggio in tre posti di confine. Un viaggio fatto con la cinepresa, quasi senza storia. Alla Wenders, ma ancora più vicino alla normalità, qualche volta anche alla banalità della vita vera. Li avrebbe sempre fatti così, i suoi film. Inseguendo i confini del mondo. Inseguendo la sostanza stessa del tempo. In quel bar parlammo di Fiesole, dove era cresciuto. Sentivo odore di liceo buono nel suo parlare, di borghesia seria, rigorosa. Il suo cognome lo conoscevo: Salani erano le edizioni dei libri per ragazzi più famosi. Un mondo di fiabe, di cose da imparare, con calma, per diventare grandi. Suo nonno, editore. Mi parlò della sua Vespa. Avevamo tutti e due la passione per la Vespa.
Però di tempo doveva essercene tanto altro. Per lui. Per noi, con lui. Ho sempre pensato che i tuoi film, i tuoi appunti di viaggio, erano le prove generali di un film bellissimo che avresti fatto. O che, un frammento dopo l’altro, avresti composto una mappa del mondo raccontato da te. Un confine dopo l’altro. Un cinema di confini. Una geografia immaginaria, quasi quanto quelle di Calvino e di Borges.
Ci siamo visti per il film di Federico Bondi, “Mar Nero”, e mentre giravi la serie sul mostro di Firenze. Si parlava di Fiorentina. Ci si trovava subito, con quel parlare fiorentino che basta un attimo e, anche dopo un anno che non ci si sente, sei già in sintonia. E ora dove sei andato. Che confine sei andato ad esplorare.
We first met in a bar in Florence. He was a skinny guy, two years older than me—he was 28, I 26. The night before, his first film, Voci d’Europa [Voices of Europe] had been applauded. It was about a journey through three border places, a journey made through the movie camera, almost without a story. It was like a Wim Wenders film, but even closer to normality, even sometimes to the banality of real life. All his films would end up being made like that: following the world’s frontiers, following time itself. In that bar we chatted about Fiesole, where he had grown up. I detected a good secondary school in his speech, and a serious, rigorous middle class background. His surname was familiar to me: Salani was the publisher of the most famous children’s books. It was a world of fairy tales and things to be learnt, without haste, in order to become a grown-up. His grandfather had been the editor. He told me about his Vespa, we shared a passion for them.
He has really travelled, always in the same way: almost as a solitary explorer , against the wind. Cinema discovered him as an actor shortly afterwards. First in Muro di Gomma, with Marco Risi, and then again with Marco Risi in Nel Continente Nero. I phoned him, and asked what it was like to film in Africa, in Kenya. He said: “Well, we take lots of strolls...”—Corso wasn’t interested in raising the bar, no exotica, just “strolls”, and the mozzarella cheese of an Italian guy who lived there. And for him, acting had been just watching Abatantuono, feeling like a spectator of an overwhelming natural phenomenon—watching Abatantuono act. Although the protagonist of the film, Corso almost felt he wasn’t in it.
Perhaps being an actor never mattered to him that much. He was called by other directors, he made other films, but always as if he were only lending his mask, his face, without passion. Passion he put into his own films, at the borders of the world, telling stories of travels, of falling in love with an actress. Then his obsessions would become visible, they would actually become the plot of the film—as in Palabras, the film he shot in South America.
I remember his very beautiful film Gli Occhi Stanchi, another one balanced on the ridge between fiction and reality, shot in Italy and in Eastern Europe. It was the story of a migrant from Eastern Europe, the camera lingering on her face for almost the whole movie. Corso never got tired of framing faces—faces and roads, faces and landscapes, faces and nights, faces and motorway cafes. Car headlights, small hotels, desolate countryside.
Mainly, he enjoyed the process of making films: their path through festivals, cinema theatres and television was secondary, capturing the essence of time was more important.
Sometimes we met at his house, in Rome, near the Colosseum. The last time it was for a book reading. I was surprised that he put on a pair of glasses with big lenses—I thought we were getting old, but only for a moment. Other times we met at my house in Florence. He shot a video for me. I was meant to show the solitude of a man, and naturally it was all improvised. In one scene, he opened my fridge, and all there was in it was a single, dried-up carrot. He stood looking at the carrot, looking resigned, desperate and comically disconcerted. That day there really was only an old carrot in the fridge.
His obstinately marginal cinema has always avoided the ingredients considered necessary for a ‘likeable’ film: cool locations, music, beguiling storylines, constructed dialogues. Nevertheless, I have always found his films very beautiful, with their uncertain wanderings, their appearance of lacking an ending, or a story. I found his locations beautiful, as well as the moments he shot: blue, end-of-the-night moments and draining twilights, or moments of waiting, where nothing appears to happen. Corso’s cinema was a drawing of time itself.
There should have been much more time, for him, and for us with him. I always thought that your films and your journey notes were a dress rehearsal for a magnificent film you were going to make; or that each movie would be a fragment leading eventually to a complete picture of your world, one border after another. You would have created a whole cinema of borders, an imaginary geography, almost like those of Calvino and Borges.
You were always in your films: tall, straight, almost detached. Perhaps only once you let the viewers understand how much commitment, dedication, even suffering, there was in your films/non-films, and that was in Palabras, if I am not mistaken. You begin with a long, pitiless, sorrowful monologue on what making films means for you, making them in that way. And you say how painful it was when people did not understand our project, or didn’t care, or merely waited for an instruction to shoot without passion or putting anything of their own into it.
We saw each other for Federico Bondi’s film Back Sea, and when you were shooting the series on the Florence monster. We would talk about Fiorentina and immediately get on together, with our Florentine speech that brings you together no matter how long you haven’t seen each other. And now, where are you? What borders have you gone to explore?
