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. “Hugo in Africa” won the Bisato d’Oro for best director in Venice’s Horizons section in 2009, and “Hugo in Argentina” screened in Venice Days in 2021. “Hugo in Venice” is produced by Fiumi Film in co-production with Swiss public broadcaster RSI.
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.
With this film, your 20-year trilogy on Pratt comes to a close. How did this trilogy change, and change you, along the way?
Knuchel: Each film has really been about overcoming something. The first was his childhood in Ethiopia with a fascist father, finding his own ethic inside an unethical situation. The second, Argentina, is about becoming an artist, and accepting that as both an opportunity and a burden. The third is about facing your own mortality, and realizing your legacy already came before you, through everything you inherited. I was genuinely scared of that one. Then reality caught up with me. I lost a lot of people in my own family while making it, and I related much more to the questions Pratt was facing near the end. Working on Pratt for 20 years completely changed my relationship to the world. I’m someone who could stay six months on my couch reading a book, and yet I ended up in a conflict zone in Djibouti, in the president’s helicopter. That’s what a great artist does: gives you another view of the world.
How did you approach reframing Pratt as a literary figure rather than “just” a cartoonist?
Knuchel: Pratt basically invented the graphic novel. His first long story, “Una Ballata del Mare Salato,” didn’t sell at first, because comics weren’t supposed to be that long. A young editor sent to find out why went to the shops, saw it shelved next to regular comics, and realized it needed an entirely different format. So they published it in black and white, in a large format, and coined the term “graphic novel” so it would sit under “novels,” not comics. That changed the whole perception of the medium. As a kid, three people went into my brain: Fellini, Buñuel and Pratt, and he was the only one not making cinema, yet he brought cinema’s timing into comics. A character leaves the frame and the camera stays on the empty space. That had never been done in comics before. There’s a tiny drawing from one of his books that I blew up huge for the cinema screen and did a slow pan across. And it looked amazing! For many comics, this doesn’t work. It becomes pop art. That’s the balance in Pratt: his hand and his spirit.
Can you talk about Venice itself in the film’s visual language? Did you prefer treating it biographically, or leaning into the myth of the city?
Knuchel: Pratt wasn’t born in Venice and didn’t die there. He moved constantly, but Venice got into his psyche. That’s why I open with his own line: “I’m Venetian, so I trust the water.” The water is the subconscious, what you don’t control. I wanted to show Venice as a mirage rising out of the mud of the lagoon, then sinking back into it, because that’s the whole story: you rise from the water for a while, then go back into it forever. I worked with anthropologists rather than a film crew. It took two years to find the right place to get that feeling. Nothing in the documentary is invented. The ’30s archive footage is real and restored. The lodge we enter is the actual lodge he joined in ’74. The Nazi bunkers at the bottom of the lagoon are real too, things people have simply never seen of Venice. At one point I wanted to shoot in the Pacific, but there wasn’t the budget. Then I realized that before Pratt ever went to the Pacific, he dreamed about it for years, in the lagoon. So instead I mirrored archival footage of him in the Pacific with our own footage of Patrizia walking through lagoon spaces that resemble it. I’m happier with that outcome. You make better films without money, because you have to think twice before you shoot.
What is the lasting reflection you have after such an extensive project, and what do you hope others take away as well?
Knuchel: Something very simple: the world is an incredible place, and it’s all about how you look at it. Working on Pratt for 20 years took me to Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kuwait, and a whole club of people around the world who loved him for various reasons. Near the end of the film he says that if you understand the exact composition of an eggshell, you can write an entire story within it. He also loved to quote a Persian poet who said “great poets, they come to the world, say one thing, and they leave.” I think that’s what Pratt was saying too: What’s in front of you is beautiful, just look at it. That’s the lesson I keep learning from his work. I hope the film is uplifting. I just want people to feel better.