Aussi loin que mon enfance

(As Far Back as My Childhood, Marilù Parolini, France/Italy, 1970)

A simple but striking – and very cinematic – idea: it’s when you see (especially inside a car) the back of Bulle Ogier’s head, and the recorded tone of her voice changes (not much; just a little), it’s then that we hear her thoughts on the soundtrack. Not, pointedly, when we see a close-up of her face, mixed with other typically heavy-handed cues of an introspective turn in the narration.

The alteration of convention here is eloquent: something even more secretive and somber than common garden variety ‘private thoughts’ is being communicated to us in Marilù Parolini’s precious work of film direction, 26 minutes long, which has only recently resurfaced after five decades of obscurity. It’s the first of only three she made, all in the ‘70s. It can be watched here on the invaluable Henri page of the Cinémathèque française, above an excellent essay by Philippe Azoury and a note by Luc Moullet (who donated the print); its date is sometimes erroneously given as 1976, since it was then that it achieved a small release on a French double-bill with the latter’s Anatomy of a Relationship.

Ogier plays a person who is, more or less, associated with a group of young militants; they are on their way to protest USA President Nixon’s visit to Rome. Getting together and then travelling by car through the night, they may seem like a united group. But Parolini’s focus is on Ogier – apparently, an alter ego, as this is based on auto-fictional experience (Moullet recalls that she was embarrassed at the thought that her family in Italy might see it). This woman is somewhat withdrawn, melancholic, depressed, mainly unengaged with her comrades – when three of them start singing together during the trip, Ogier deflates the vibe by barking out a different song.

Things are not going well between her and a boyfriend, who appears to be the central motivator of this righteous mission. He flirts (and worse) with other women, completely in view of his partner; that’s why the back of Ogier’s head is burning during the long voyage into the night. The tension between them swiftly becomes something more general, and not merely specific to the late 1960s/early ‘70s period: his politics carries a macho mantle of free love and non-possession; hers is about travelling inward, to the psyche, and figuring out the ground there.

It’s a mysterious, haunting jewel of a film: the title remains an enigmatic allusion; the credited, scrawled names don’t indicate who does what in cast or crew; and the opening and closing cards (charmingly handmade, as in the work of the nominal producer, Moullet) frame the story (with a deliberate mislead) as purely an ‘on the street’ reportage of insurgent demonstration and police suppression. It’s as if the central female consciousness slips past and escapes even this public-facing statement of collective, political purpose.

It’s a rough job in both image and sound departments (the editing, according to external information, is by Jean Eustache, who some perhaps exaggeratedly hint was both co-writer and co-director on the project); many lines are post-sync, and the lighting in the car at night appears to be a single bulb of illumination puncturing the inky blackness of the surrounding highway. But these glitch-effects, too, become eloquent in their immediacy and fragility. Something intense and dark is communicated by Aussi loin que mon enfance.

Maria Ludovica Parolini (1931-2012) is a fascinating, too-little-known figure in film history. Her first involvement with cinema is her memorable appearance in the essay-documentary Chronicle of a Summer (1961) by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch. According to Moullet’s recollection, she was the girlfriend of Morin (who, Dario Bellini writes, “never ceased being in love with her”) – until she encountered Jacques Rivette at the Cahiers du cinéma office, where she worked as secretary until 1967.

Accounts of this relationship differ: a remarkable Italian research thesis from 2012 on Parolini’s life and career by Irene Pozzi (subtitled “memories and visions of cinema and photography”) states that the couple were married for a while (3 years, according to Bellini); but Véronique Manniez-Rivette (who is in the best position to know!) corrects this assumption to “they were engaged for a year, from 1961 to 1962” (see the booklet in the superb 2024 Radiance release of L’amour fou [1968]).

As friends, Parolini and Rivette collaborated, essentially on scripts, until L’amour par terre in 1984 (she had a crew involvement on Hurlevent the following year). She also worked in various capacities (often as an uncredited on-set photographer) with Godard, Varda, Truffaut, Eduardo de Gregorio, Pascal Bonitzer, Helma-Sanders Brahms, Pasolini, Bertolucci and Huillet/Straub. Her film credits end with the script for a thriller, The Keys, in 1992; there is a 2009 documentary devoted to her, L’amica della rondini (“friend of the swallows”) also by Pozzi. Bellini’s fond recollection of Parolini in ‘70s Italy and beyond appeared in a 2023 issue of Il manifesto.

It seems that, at the time of her death, Parolini had lived in relative solitude for a long while, coping with debilitating illness. Her eventual withdrawal from the various very lively cultural scenes in Italy and France in which she once prominently moved is eerily prefigured in the quicksilver, off-the-cuff but unforgettable, twilight poetry of Aussi loin que mon enfance.

© Adrian Martin 9 May 2025