01  SUMMER 2025

I would like to define I cento cavalieri as a phenomenological film. Indeed, if the century that preceded us was the century of metaphysics, our century is the century of phenomenology. This is not to say that my film is beautiful, only that it is a film that observes, examines and considers. But it doesn’t judge. It doesn’t affirm or condemn. I cento cavalieri is a phenomenological representation of the occupation and liberation of a village in Spain around the year 1000. The narrative doesn’t follow a preordained, conceptual construction, but observes the facts as they happen, at the moment they happen. This is why contradictions appear; why there are not goodies and baddies, but only more or less bad men; why the story develops by chance instead of causality; and why the characters are partial, fragmentary and sometimes even contradictory. Naturally, we can define the film in another way, as an epico-picaresque film, or epipicaresque for short. Even shorter? Epicaresque. What does this mean? I’m not sure yet, but I think I’ll find out in the end. If you see this film, you may know before I do.

Our image, our life, our history seen through the virtual image of the past, deformed and for that reason, paradoxically, faithful. A way of rethinking ourselves and judging ourselves without putting ourselves on trial. An impudent and hypocritical way of talking about ourselves, among ourselves, a way of making myths and giants out of us. This is why, in the historical films I direct, I try to set us straight, to reduce heroes to their modest and sometimes ridiculous human dimensions. And this is why I then try to free man from these limits in order to observe him in the immense stature he bears as a creature of God. But only for a few rare and privileged moments. Usually at the moment of death. It’s Shakespeare who taught us this.

When I was little, I read in a schoolbook that Alexander the Great pacified Persia. Then I learned that he had killed all the warriors and reduced the population to slavery. It’s against this kind of pacification that I make so-called ‘historical’ films. Alexander and the other ‘greats’ of the world were the ‘greats’ of murder, violence, abuse of power and the art of reducing those who weren’t ‘greats’ to slavery. They were industrialists of massacre. Ours is the age of the reevaluation of man in his singularity and simplicity. We must destroy the myth of the superman and the ‘Wille zur Macht’. Each clearer view of the smaller dimensions of man, of his weakness, makes us love him more. My instinct drives me to search for the reason of the humble, of those who don’t make ‘history’ but who bear the consequences of the actions of those who make ‘history’. I look for the characters who are examples without being exemplary.

When making I cento cavalieri, I didn’t think about the general public above everything else, but among everything else, I did. A film that doesn’t reach the viewer makes no sense: we make films to communicate with as many viewers as possible. It’s true that very often we don’t succeed. It’s a pity.

In this film, I placed a lot of importance on dialogue because, unlike my other films, I found myself among characters who had a damned desire to talk. I had a lot of trouble keeping them within certain limits — especially the Count of Castille and Sheikh Abengalbon, son of Abengalbon the Great. I explained to them that in a film you shouldn’t make political or moral speeches, but should simply be political or moral, and that the audience understands much better through the meaning of images rather than words. Even so, they still wanted to talk too much.

It’s more about groups than characters: peasants, landowners, Arabs, monks, bandits. courtisans, warriors (or rather, what’s left of the warriors, sans arms, sans legs, sans eyes, or at least sans one eye), the Count of Castille’s Court of Miracles. From these groups, several individuals stand out, who we can call characters. The Count of Castille, for example, shows how those who hold the reins of power gradually lose contact with their people, with the world around them, to the point of losing themselves in conceptual abstractions. (‘My method of government is waiting’. And this is true more than ever, in ministries, in prefectures, etc. The method of government continues to be waiting.) And he arrives at an atomic eureka moment in the face of the marvelous war machine that has only just been invented: armor. Death that is dealt and received without ever seeing the face of another. Death that can be dealt from a distance, from ever greater distances, without sweat, blood or mud. Not a dirty death, but, in the future, a clean death, which arrives at home, in the fields, in the workshops, henceforth handled only by the specialized hands of a few technicians and decided on by the enlightened minds of the bosses. From now on, he will be lost in a fog of abstract and metaphysical musings. On the other hand, Brother Carmelo, instead of probing the mysteries of God, throws himself into the concrete, into the contingency of a popular revolt against the Arab occupier, and, in betraying his primary choice in life, resembles all of us, who are always ready to betray our choices for other ones, dictated by feeling or self-interest (but rarely by reason). Don Gonzalo is the true ‘hero’, not because he is one, but because he imagines himself as one so forcefully that he ends up becoming one when he decides – when he realizes with astonishment, as if faced with a revelation – that his soul is about to vomit up the body that has hampered him his whole life.

The start of the battle is a feast of colors and sounds. But after the cavalry clash, when the massacre begins, the color slowly fades, almost inadvertently, as if to suggest that, when man performs the greatest act of violence, the highest betrayal one man can commit against another — that is to say, when he kills, when he falls prey to that ‘raptus’ that tears him away from the world around him — nature itself withdraws, losing its most joyful characteristic: color. As if to suggest that by killing we transgress the boundaries of our reality, which we have strenuously conquered in pain, anguish, hunger and fear. This is why, during the battle, the characters almost disappear, the murders take place between unknown people whose faces we don’t recognize, and it becomes difficult to distinguish Arabs from peasants, so that the viewer is not emotionally caught up in the event, but can form a conscious, critical judgement about what is happening.

In I cento cavalieri, I tried to apply the ideas of ‘new epic style’ to cinematic language. This is why the film begins and ends with a monologue from a painter who addresses the viewer. It’s why tragedy and farce alternate to the point that one almost takes on the color of the other. It’s why the actors don’t identify with their characters but portray them as detached from themselves. And the dialogues exist outside of their historical time, always tending towards an ambivalence in meaning, so as not to allow the spectator to escape into the fable, but rather to force him to remain outside the narrative, to try to clarify the meaning of facts and ideas and, finally, make a choice.

I’m trying to convince producers to make films that are ahead of the trend towards which today’s cinema is moving, at least as I see it. That is to say, towards ‘remorse’ films and ‘invective’ films. Since the world is becoming increasingly aware of the tight and intimate web that binds one human to another, and since it now knows that every guilty act reflects on other people as if seeking their consent — this unintended co-responsibility is the source of endless human psychoses, because not to oppose is already to consent — I believe that the conscience troubled by faults that are not committed, but admitted to, is now ripe for collective remorse, shared through the cinematic spectacle. The other parallel route that can free us from remorse is that of the satirical, ironic, comic tonic, which represents evil in its grotesque and ridiculous manifestations and elicits exorcising laughter, which frees man from fear, which restores to the human face the divine faculty of reflecting the soul. The theme I’m working on is ‘wealth’: as violence done to man, as the instrument of the slavery, not of the body — that wouldn’t be serious – but of the soul, of thought. And then, I would like to tackle the myth of the ‘self’, the egotist will of the affirmation of oneself over others, and its possible and frightening transformation into collective egotism.

Comments recorded by Paul Gilles.

‘Vittorio Cottafavi parle des « Cent Cavaliers »’,
Cahiers du cinéma, 207, December 1962, pp. 75–77.