«I made this movie for him, not for myself»

“I made this movie for him, not for myself”. The documentary Bobò, which Pippo Delbono dedicated to his long-time friend and collaborator Vincenzo Cannavacciuolo, known as Bobò, who died in 2019 after playing for many years in his theatre company, is a declared act of pure love. Their relationship was so intense that their separation was extremely painful, and it took five years before the director was able to watch the footage of him again and hear his voice, finally giving shape to one of those incredible stories that are worth telling: Delbono had discovered Bobò’s artistic talent in a psychiatric hospital.

Although the Basaglia Law brought historic changes in Italy’s approach to mental illness, for some people, not much changed in the immediate term. Bobò was one of those people “forgotten” by the progress of the Basaglia Law: born mute and with microcephaly, he had always lived in the Aversa asylum, never leaving the institution for more than forty years nor having knowledge of the outside world. Delbono, during a difficult period in his life (due to depression and the discovery that he was HIV-positive, at a time when there was still no cure), met Bobò during a theatre workshop inside the asylum, and not only sensed his instinctive expressive talent, but also realised how good it was for his mental health to be around him. He immediately decided that he would involve him in his theatre work, but he had to wait for the death of Bobò’s guardian, who had always opposed any change in his lifestyle. Instead, Delbono, who imagined accompanying Bobò on a journey of discovery of the world and learning in turn to see the world with fresh eyes thanks to him, took him away and made him an integral part of his theather company, bringing him on Italian and foreign stages.

If we watched Bobò’s videos without knowing anything about him, what would we think? That he is an ill person who moves in an uncoordinated way, perhaps feeling a little compassion for him? When we see him in Delbono’s footage – many sequences are get by his amateur videos taken in private life or during rehearsals – Bobò instead shows that instinctive and sincere artistic beauty that the great director had perfectly seen in him. Therefore is it all a matter of gaze education? Or humanity education? How is it possible that Delbono was able to understand in a few minutes the potential of Bobò went unnoticed by everyone for four decades in the asylum? Perhaps it takes a particular sensitivity, and certainly a bias-free mentality: observing Bobò on stage, with his movements miraculously always “precise” (even though he could not hear the music or the director’s instructions) and his verses, which the audience perceived as magnetically mysterious (even though he was unable to articulate words or express himself with sign language, which he had never learned), it is not surprising that he became famous and appreciated by audiences and collegues in international theatre circles, even more so than in Italy. Be enough to remind that the French Wikipedia entry on him is more complete than the Italian.

A scene from “Bobò” by Pippo Delbono

Delbono’s fisthand narration does not separate the actor Bobò from the man Bobò, because an artist is always his art too: but he does not forget to mention that his years of contact with other human beings, with other actors and with the public, with people from many different countries, making experiences long denied, had gradually changed him for the better, as if his understanding of life had increased as soon as his life had become full and complete, no longer conditioned by the heavy limitations of the asylum. The magic of Delbono’s memory is capable of erasing any initial prejudice derived from the origins of this relationship: as the minutes pass, through the shots taken over three decades, Bobò can no longer be perceived as a “sick person”, but more correctly as an artist, a friend, a human being with strengths and weaknesses, not so different from those who surround him on stage or watch him from the audience (of the theatre or cinema).

Nowadays Delbono, like his friend in the past, has difficulty walking, but this did not prevent him from fearlessly showing his fragility to the audience at the Locarno Film Festival, where his film was premiered. Despite undeniable struggle, in order to enrich and complete his archive footage, he decided to return personally to where it all began and film the asylum in Aversa: he found only the ruins of a silent, abandoned and decaying building. Perhaps there is cause for joy in observing the fate of a place that imprisoned so much pain, often without any human understanding; however, time has not erased the memory of the reason to close it, which is in keeping with the words of Basaglia’s daughter, recalled by Delbono, that her father had fought his battle precisely to help people like Bobò. Basaglia and Delbono’s ability to observe human potential may be rare, but we should not consider it exceptional: a film like this has an intimate and personal value – the director’s voice, when he remembers Bobò, releases an emotion that is impossible to remain unmoved by – but it is also a way of helping to discover the invisible. The precious videos that Delbono has transformed from personal memory into shared memory are there to prove it: when Bobò danced, he was happy, and the possibility of being happy should not be denied to anyone.