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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.05 - AUGUST 2000
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A Letter To A Master You, Max, were a true genius. One of the most intelligent and creative people I have ever met in my whole life. You knew how to inspire, correct, stimulate, make flower, teach and encourage; you knew how to free the minds who listened to you from preconceptions that had festered in them for years. You knew how to introduce Italy to post-Disney animation, from UPA to the art of McLaren and Alexeieff. You were the charismatic mainstay of the scrawniest group that admired and promoted in our country those innovative and subversive ideas on the level of style, length and technique, so that the personal animation of the '60s and '70s developed to world-class level. You were the mainstay of the best festival of Italian animation ever organized: at Abano Terme (1970-1971), then partially moved to Lucca to combine with a comics convention. You were so cultured that any encyclopedist of any era would have envied you. There was no subject, scientific or humanistic, that you did not make yourself familiar with so that you held an original (fresh, not banal) viewpoint.
However, please note, you weren't an author. Even though your surviving files are few, and locked away in cabinets. You were a scenarist, or rather, as you taught Brdecka to say in Czech, a dramaturg. You knew how to tell stories. And you told them better, much better, aloud than in writing. In conversations you had no equal in the world, and a story told by you, person to person, was a gift of the Gods. Especially when they involved anecdotes about mathematicians with superior but disorderly minds, like Albert Einstein, Evariste Galois or Blaise Pascal. You could make people listen, too. Once you met Osvaldo Cavandoli in the square in front of the cathedral in Milan, at 10 in the morning. Osvaldo was in a hurry, a business appointment. By 3 in the afternoon, he still hadn't gotten to the subway -- he was still transfixed, hanging on your every word. Another time at a festival you started telling some paradoxical legal anecdotes at 5 in the afternoon. We ate dinner together, had coffee, sat in the lobby of the hotel. At one o'clock that night, I admitted to myself: "I'm 22 years younger than he, I can't give up before he does!" At 5 am, I interrupted you while you were explaining to me the differences between Picasso and Braque, and wrenched myself off to bed, fully clothed.
You spoke French and English (with an awful accent, it must be said). You came from a mixed marriage, half-Catholic, half-Protestant. And all that gave you a broad perspective and natural tolerance rare in your generation. For me, born after the war, it was much easier to follow in your footsteps. Animators were your family: Alexandre Alexeieff, Norman McLaren, Lotte Reiniger, John and Faith Hubley, Jiri Trnka, Jiri Brdecka, Yoji Kuri, Ion Popescu-Gopo, George Dunning, all of the artists of the Zagreb school but in particular Zelemir Matko, Jan Lenica, Peter Földes, Ernest and Gisèle Ansorge, Paul Grimault, all the Italians. Your favorites were the American Bill Littlejohn and the British-Hungarian John Halas -- your colleagues for decades on the ASIFA International administration. Halas, who would concede to friendship only with heroes and demi-gods, esteemed you as perhaps no other. For all these people, in greater and lesser degrees, you were a stimulus, an example, a point of reference. For me you were also a friend, a teacher -- along with two other of the great departed (quite different from you), the illustrator and pin-screen animator Alexandre Alexeieff, and the professor from Chicago Robert Edmonds. When you realized that animation had entered my blood (and it got me quite quickly), you did everything, with absolute discretion but without the least hesitation, to make sure that it never left me again. You escorted me into ASIFA. You counseled me freely and articulately about what to read (not just related to animation; you placed Umberto Eco into my hands...), and feigning to ask my opinion, you would manage to correct my inexperience. You introduced me to dozens of filmmakers so that I could interview them. And at every festival, conference, discussion group or cocktail party you would take me to one side and talk, talk, talk... Thus offering me another great lesson: You must doubt whether it is a historical truth when it comes from the anecdotal memory of a creative artist, even the best one, whether a filmmaker, or even yourself. Subjected to scrutiny and verification, your own memories more than once proved inexact. But you, Max, were an author of fiction, and nothing in the world could have made you give up changing a story with your imagination if the change would make it more entertaining than the truth.
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