The Notes of Anna Azzori / A Mirror That Travels Through Time (Constanze Ruhm, 2020)

Say, have you heard about essay films? They are all the rage right now. In fact, the Currents section of the New York Film Festival featured five of them, with their combinations of fact and fiction, their meta-textual analysis of a given topic (often a matter of representation), and their insistent exploration of the impact that the past has on the present. In fact, these films are so ubiquitous right now that you might think that they reflect a certain kind of artistic / intellectual production that flatters the prejudices of film programmers and grant panels, since they much more obviously address "issues" than, say, works of pure abstraction.

Like any trend, some of the current crop of essay films are better than others, and that brings us to Austrian filmmaker Constanze Ruhm's latest work, The Notes of Anna Azzori. While not exactly perfect, this is a film that clarifies what can be accomplished when a film is used as a tool to critique another film, and by extension an entire mode of looking. Ruhm's film is a poetic deconstruction of a 1975 Italian direct-cinema effort called Anna by the duo of Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli. That film, which runs nearly four hours, seems to have a pretty high reputation in European circles. And it is perhaps for this reason that Ruhm felt the need to take it to task.

Anna is about 16-year-old Anna Azzori, a homeless, pregnant drug addict who agreed to let Grifi and Sarchielli make a film about her in exchange for food and shelter. Reading about the film, it is clear that there is exploitation happening under the guise of documentary neutrality. Sarchielli makes lewd overtures toward Anna, and one of the crew members ends up having a relationship with her, despite her being underage. In Ruhm's film, we see clips from the original Anna film, surrounded by contemporary "auditions" with young women aiming to take part in what appears to be a fictionalized reenactment of Anna.

But in fact, Ruhm is instead working to assemble a collective of feminist-minded collaborators who will mirror the relationships present in a very different set of film images. The Notes of Anna Azzori partially replaces the Anna footage with film shot by women who were taking part in feminist protests in the mid-seventies in Rome, around the same time Grifi and Sarchielli were filming Anna. So without needing to announce it, Ruhm's project becomes rather clear. She is producing a counter-history, wondering aloud what might have happened if these radical young women had found Anna, instead of Grifi and Sarchielli. And, barring that, Ruhm's own film reinscribes Anna within that feminist counter-history, as an attempt to retroactively redress her exploitation.

Of course, one could legitimately claim that Ruhm is herself using Azzori for her own ends, just as Grifi and Sarchielli did. But then, "Anna" is gone, reduced to a set of images, and so she can only be grasped as a site for contestation. Thinking that documentary could provide "the real Anna" is a fiction that traditional documentary uses to cement its own power, and Ruhm is careful to avoid redoubling that exploitation. Unlike those who came before, she lays her cards on the table.