MONTEZUMA - Le Interviste Impossibili

Facebook Page:   / intervisteimpossibil   Broadcast on September 6, 1974 An impossible interview with the Aztec ruler Montezuma (1466-1520), played by actor and playwright Carmelo Bene, with the participation of writer Italo Calvino as the interviewer. Directed by Vittorio Sermonti. END OF INTERVIEW Montezuma: () Real wars and real peace do not take place on earth but among the gods. Calvino: Montezuma, by now you've explained to me why it was impossible for you to win. The war among the gods means that behind Cortés's adventurers lay the idea of ​​the West, a history that never stops, that advances by incorporating other civilizations, those for whom history has stopped. Montezuma: You too superimpose your gods on facts. What is this you call history? Perhaps it's just a lack of balance. While where human coexistence finds a lasting balance, there you say that history has stopped. If with your history you had succeeded in making yourselves less enslaved, you would not now come to reproach me for not having stopped you in time. What do you want from me? You have realized that you no longer know what your history is and you wonder if it could not have taken another course. And in your opinion, should I have given this other course to history? And how? By starting to think with your own head? You too need to classify under the names of your gods every new thing that upsets your horizons, and you are never sure whether they are true gods or evil spirits, and you soon fall captive to them. The laws of material forces appear clear to you, but this does not mean that you cease to expect the plan of the world's destiny to be revealed behind them. Yes, it is true, at that beginning of your sixteenth century, perhaps the fate of the world was not decided. Your civilization of perpetual motion didn't yet know where it was going, just as it doesn't know where to go today, and we, the civilization of permanence and balance, could still incorporate it into our harmony. Calvino: It was too late! It should have been you Aztecs who landed near Seville and invaded Extremadura! History has a meaning that cannot be changed! Montezuma: A meaning you want to impose on it, white man! Otherwise, the world will crumble beneath your feet. I, too, had a world that supported me, a world that wasn't yours. I, too, wanted the meaning of all this not to be lost. Calvino: I know why you cared. Because if the meaning of your world was lost, then even the mountains of skulls piled up in the ossuaries of the temples would no longer have any meaning, and the stone of the altars would become a butcher's bench smeared with innocent human blood! Montezuma: (pause) So today you look at your carnage, white man. -------------------------------------------------------- The Impossible Interviews is the title of a program on the second Rai radio network, broadcast from 1973 to 1975 and curated by Lidia Motta. In it, real contemporary intellectuals pretend to interview 82 reborn ghosts of people from another era, impossible to meet in reality—hence the title. Valentino Bompiani published a selection of the program in two volumes in 1975. RAI subsequently rerun it. If you would like to purchase the text with the eighty-two impossible interviews, published by Adelphi, edited by Giorgio Manganelli ----- https://www.ibs.it/interviste-impossi... Montezuma https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montezuma Italo Calvino https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_C... Carmelo Bene https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmelo... Vittorio Sermonti https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittori... I do not own the rights to this program and I do not intend to profit from this film. All rights reserved to Rai. http://www.teche.rai.it/2015/02/inter...