A former film importer who wrote reviews and a study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder before turning director, Davide Ferrario has spent a lifetime in cinema. Since debuting with The End of the Night (1989), he has made such acclaimed (and occasionally contentious) pictures as We All Fall Down (1997), Guardami (1999), After Midnight (2004), and Blood on the Crown (2021), which starred Harvey Keitel and Malcolm McDowell in an account of a notorious moment in British imperial history in post-Great War Malta.
Oliver Parker has also adapted one of Ferrario's novels as Fade to Black (2006) and books are very much to the fore in the documentary, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, which is the latest offering from CinemaItaliaUK. It helps to have a working knowledge of Eco's writings and thought outside The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, which both Stanley Kubrick and Miloš Forman strove vain to adapt after the author had been disappointed by Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 adaptation of the medieval whodunit that had starred Sean Connery as Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville.
As widow Renate Eco Ramgea and daughter Carlotta recall the tributes paid after Umberto Eco died in 2016, we see the library in his apartment in Milan that contains 30,000 volumes, including many rare and esoteric titles. A tracking shot follows the author through the labyrinth of shelves before he describes a library as `a symbol and reality of universal memory' and alludes to Dante's The Divine Comedy in claiming God as the `library of all libraries'.
Carlotta and brother Stefano point out the various sections, which cover everything from alchemy and language to occultism and the souls of animals. As books were made from trees, Eco called their content `vegetal memory' to distinguish it from the `organic memory' held in our minds and the `material memory' stored on silicon chips. Such was his attachment to their physicality that he was convinced they could never be replaced by digital receptacles.
Grandson Pietro joins Bologna academic Riccardo Fedriga in leafing through a book whose macabre drawings had proved both fascinating and frightening in childhood. A montage of monochrome illustrations leads into a reflection on 17th-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, whose Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae is a key text in the prehistory of cinema. In a glorious dark wood library, actor Giuseppe Cederna reads Eco's passage celebrating Kircher's curiosity, voracious appetite for knowledge, and priceless genius for writing with authority on things he has misunderstood. He particularly loves the fact he writes with the same gravitas on dragons and giants as he does on science and theology. This affinity with misconstructions prompts Eco to prefer Ptolemy's vision of the solar system to Galileo Galilei's.
In lectures and interviews, Eco questions the value of storing knowledge on digital systems that become almost instantly obsolete. He also reveals his dislike of mobile phones and the mass retention and instant accessibility of information because selecting what needs to be remembered and discarding what does not heeds the warning contained in Jorge Luis Borges's short story, `Funes the Memorius', which centres on a man who goes mad because he is doomed to recall every tiny detail of his existence. Without filters, Eco reckoned that human communication would break down because the communality of knowledge would be lost and six million people would be left to surf the Internet in isolation on the basis of their interpretation of what is worth knowing.
Paolo Giangrasso recites Eco's views on `text, paratext, epitext, and peritext' and the semiological disputes they have caused. Rather than trying to keep up, he seeks sanctuary in The Masterpiece of an Unknown, a 1714 tome by Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe written under the nom de plume, Dr Crisostome Mathanasius. At its heart is a silly ditty about a man called Colin who can't sleep because he's lovesick. However, the author treats the text as a major work of art and creates a 200-page footnotes on the supposed significance of every word. Eight subsequent editions followed, with the last running to 643 pages, as Mathanasius found new meaning in his previous allusions. According to Eco, this is a bold cultural critique on the hype that books attract that serves as little more than an excuse for the reader to not bother reading.
As a boy, Eco used to read library books to his grandmother. She didn't discern between pulp and literature and he recalls with pleasure the time he spent reading purely for entertainment. A montage of cartoon representations of Eco ensues before Niccolò Ferrero relates a marvellous anecdote about the student Eco always having to miss the endings of plays to avoid being locked out of college at midnight, while his friend in the box office only got to see the action from midway through. So, they agree in retirement to sit on a bench and discuss beginnings and endings.
Although Eco's library was organised by topic, books could crop up anywhere within them, as he didn't insist on alphabetical order because the collection was a living thing. Walter Leonardi delivers a passage in praise of self-published authors before we move on to Eco's first attempt at fiction, The Name of the Rose, and the approach he took to the conventions of novel writing and the dislike he eventually developed for his bestseller. In interviews, he claims to prefer `fake' books that got things wrong and a sequence of Gilliamesque animations follows, created from Robert Fludd's illustrations for God's Creation by the 16th-century philosopher, Robertus de Fluctibus.
Fedriga notes how the text compares the Creation to music emanating from a recorder played by God and Eco concedes that he also plays the instrument, albeit somewhat inexpertly. As the author of The Book of Legendary Lands, he also admits to a love of books containing maps of the imagined places that explorers like Christopher Columbus thought they were going to find. Eco believed that the great strength of language is its ability to describe what's not there and Zoe Tavarelli (with the aid of an amusing cartoon) regales us with Eco's verdict on the question of whether Francis Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.
Recalling Alexandre Dumas's contention that historians summoned ghosts while novelists created flesh and blood characters, Eco explains his fixation with lying and his theory that hate is a more generous and honest emotion than love, which is selfish and selective. Not that he had time for things like racism and anti-Semitism, however, and he wrote Foucault's Pendulum to expose the dangers of conspiracy theories, while The Prague Cemetery pondered the origins and impact of that perfidious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He quotes Karl Popper and G.K. Chesterton in averring that the decline of religious faith has led people to start believing in anything. Eco jokes that Dan Brown took seriously the myths on which he had mischievously based his own novel and Mariella Valentini dresses in a raincoat and sunglasses to view Leonardo Da Vinci's `The Last Supper' in order to explore Albanian writer Milo Temesvar's interpretation of the fresco. There are now website devoted to this shady character, but Stefano Eco reveals that he was entirely fictitious and had been born at the Frankfurt Book Fair when his father was working for publisher Valentino Bompiani and they invented him to see how quickly and widely the hoax would spread. In order to sustain the ruse, Eco would publish reviews of Temesvar's nonexistent books and Valentini is amusingly depicted in a hall of mirrors to reflect the cod opus, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess.
A shot of a library room box leads us into the epilogue, in which Eco uses the Book of Kings to prove that God can't be found in noisy places. Instead, he can be detected in libraries where quiet research is taking place, sanctuaries of curiosity like those that Ferrario allows Andrea Zambelli and Andrea Zanoli's cameras to glide through during the film, namely Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Biblioteca Braidense in Milan, Biblioteca Arturo Graf in Bologna, Biblioteca Comunale in Imola, Accademia della Scienze in Turin, Stadtbibliothek in Ulm, Bibliotheksaal in Wiblingen, Stadtbibliothek in Stuttgart, Stadtbibliothek in St Gallen, Biblioteca Norberto Bobbio in Turin, Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, and the Binhai Library in Tianjin.
In 2015, the Venice Film Festival commissioned Ferrario to make a video installation about Eco and this encounter served as the director's unofficial audition for a documentary that looks set to stand alongside the masterly Primo Levi's Journey (2006). The footage of the family guiding us round a library that has been donated to the Italian nation is deftly complemented by close-ups of the contents of some of Eco's favourite tomes. The readings from his texts are also adroitly done, as they strive to capture the spirit of the writing while passing annotational asides. But the fascination lies in the utterances of the great man himself, whether in Ferrario's interviews or in archive clips showing Eco being scholarly, contentious, and playful.
The score's mix of works by Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman reinforces this sense of weightiness and wit that makes this profile profound and provocative, sophisticated and exuberant, and curiously challenging and accessible. Once upon a time, it would have been snapped up by the BBC or Channel 4. But their remits to provide intellectual stimulation have long been replaced by cosier notions and, consequently, fine films like this will only reach a limited audience. All credit to CinemaItaliaUK for programming it. If only others had recognised its worth at a time when the lines between fact and fiction are becoming ever more dangerously blurred.