"The sky of the moon" (Il cielo della luna) is a film which "is concerned with an alternative form of communication and an alternative language which we are no longer used to". This is how one film critic defined Massimo Fagioli's film after its Rome preview. What emerges from the film, apart from its profound meaning, is its investigation of imagery. Images and human identity, the relationship between communication and film, these are the questions Massimo Fagioli touched on in his press conference on 1st June.

Question: Why is your main character a woman and not a man?

Massimo Fagioli: Ah! Because the central point of my life is the search for the female image.

Q.: That which you will never be able to understand...

M. F.: Yes, that which isn't... Right, exactly. Why? Well, I have a theory about that. The discourse of reason is essentially masculine and has brought us to a certain point, but whe zn we are concerned with psychic reality, human reality, not to mention unconscious reality, reason doesn't understand anything. You need unconscious fantasy, which has a very close connection to female imagery. I'm convinced that reason has lived these 2500 years of civilisation by denying the female image and that of woman. Think for instance about the theoretical formulations of Marx and of modern scientists who believe that human reality begins with words. That means that a six month old baby is not part of human reality. Reason has said this for 2500 years and nobody objected or considered the rather tragic consequences, that if a baby is not human reality, he or she might easily be killed, as animals are.

Q.: You said that your research concerns the female figure, why?

M. F.: For just this reason. If we want to add the personal and private aspect of the thing, maybe as a ì man I feel guilty and so have to come to grips with female imagery and female identity. I certainly can't deny that I too am a product of these 2500 years of culture, and so I have to come to grips with a possible unconscious negation of women on my part. So I do these things, and let's see if there is an unconscious negation, let's see if there is negation in the film, if the construction of a female image of this type includes negation. Or else it has to be constructed in another way, it has to be thought out, lived, imagined in another way.

Q.: To what extent have films helped you understand?

M. F.: They have helped me in the sense that they offer me a means of communication which the articulate word doesn't have. More than that, the media of films offers me a situation of being able to communicate, think, and be without verbalising. And so films are perfectly in tune with what I was saying, th e child can communicate, although he or she isn't verbal yet. And then again we know that women have also always been culturally denied speech, even though not naturally.

Q.: For you, in the relationship between thought and images, has thought had an over-riding value, or has imagery been stronger?

M. F.: I think that the image comes before thought, although my own story begins not with images, which came later, but writing books, that is with words and writing. Underneath that though there must have been an image, otherwise the words would have been abstractions and they wouldn't have allowed me to speak about psychic reality and especially about the unconscious.

Q.: People think that many directors follow their own obsessions, their own twilight zones. So what does film making mean to you, is it following your obsessions or your research?

M. F.: I've heard that the film industry began as a way of amusing people, sa way of giving them a half hour of laughs. But films have the power to carry on research, to communicate, to act on human reality, and this power is much greater that people thought in the early days. Authors like Dreyer, Tarkovskij, Bunel, and Bergman show us that. What I'm saying is that I'm glad for an Antonioni who sends me home after a film with some questions rather than full of satisfaction. There's a way of making images which is just photographic and there is another way which creates new images instead, particular images, images that say something, that are drawings so to speak, pictures. I'm interested in making images in which a woman tells a story and expresses possibilities, an image, affects, a way of creating a human relationship which to me, the viewer, says: this is new, here is something other than the usual mutual boredom between men and women.