Director: Matteo Borgardt
With Charles Bukowski
51min | US | Doc
Not really much to be learnt from Silvia Bizio’s seventies interview with the legendary American writer who appears here in LA surrounded by a psycophantic wntourage of his young chain smoking wife Linda Lee and a photographer. Interspersed with Bokowski’s maxims and truisms to a collage of grim photos of down and outs in LA – Jem Cohen style without the irony – Bizio attempts to ask leading questions as they all get drunk together, but is met with a stream of largely uninformative answers laced with plenty of references to the sex that Bukowski is clearly not getting, or managing: pithy it is not. One of two revelations emerge: He puts his candour and insight down to prolonged beatings by his father and dislikes talking to other writers describing it as “like sitting in a bath drinking water”. Bizio was right, her tapes are in poor condition and the sound in Sala Perla was screachingly loud. Stick to his books is the advice here.
SCREENING DURING VENICE FILM FESTIVAL until 10 SEPTEMBER 2016