Stefano Knuchel‘s “Il desiderio di essere inutile – Hugo a Venezia” (“A Longing to Be of No Use – Hugo in Venice”) will premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 12, in a special screening jointly presented by La Biennale di Venezia, the International Critics’ Week and the Giornate degli Autori. The film is the third and final installment in Knuchel’s trilogy on Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt, following “Hugo in Africa” (2009) and “Hugo in Argentina” (2021), with its premiere timed ahead of the centennial of Pratt’s birth in 2027. Knuchel’s earlier work on Pratt has already been recognized on the Lido.
The film draws on previously unheard recorded conversations between Pratt and his biographer, Dominique Petitfaux, whose book of interviews with the artist supplies the film’s title. It also features participation from key figures connected to Pratt’s legacy, including Patrizia Zanotti, managing director of Cong SA, the company that has managed the rights to Pratt’s work since 1995, and writer Marco Steiner, who worked alongside Pratt in his final years and has since written several continuations of the Corto Maltese story. Variety spoke with Knuchel ahead of the film’s premiere at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.
The title comes from Petitfaux’s recorded conversations with Pratt. What meaning is born of the translation, “a longing to be of no use”? Stefano Knuchel: It was a tricky one.
The title is beautiful in Italian and French, but “useless” sounds rude in English. It’s really a philosophical provocation. People today try to affirm their own usefulness, and this goes the other way.
Like a tarot card, it reads in two directions. One is about transmission, how you inherit a culture and pass something on. Making a 20-year trilogy about transmission is almost punk, working on a completely different rhythm than everything else right now.
The other reading comes from Pratt himself. When Petitfaux asked him about people who dismiss comics as a worthless art form, Pratt said that in the face of these people, he was proud to be useless. For the English title we leaned toward a Yeats-like translation, because Pratt loved English culture, and it felt more like poetry that way.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
