Oriana Fallaci / The art of the interview

 

Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci

The art of the interview

It can be adversarial, revelatory, somewhere between conversation and interrogation. This month we showcase a triumph of the genre.

OSMAN SAMIUDDIN  |  MARCH 2016

O

f the many aspirations of an interview, one is that it be as much like a regular conversation as possible. Sadly, that rarely happens. A conversation is a consensual experience, with a sense of equality usually underpinning it - it does not happen if one does not want it to, and, in principle, it is not competitive. Unlike a conversation, an interview is not necessarily an exchange of ideas and arguments.

Alfred Hitchcock: Mr. Chastity by Oriana Fallaci

 

Alfred Hitchcock and Oriana Fallaci

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: MR. CHASTITY BY ORIANA FALLACI

June 14, 2016

Oriana Fallaci interviewed Alfred Hitchcock in 1963 when his movie The Birds screened in Cannes

Oriana Fallaci interviewed the British suspense master in 1963 when his movie The Birds screened in Cannes, but while she had a good understanding of the cruelty beneath the surface of the filmmaker she so admired, she clearly was hoodwinked by his narrative of being a devoted, even sexless, husband, entitling the piece, “Mr. Chastity.”

***

by Oriana Fallaci

For years I had been wanting to meet Hitchcock. For years I had been to every Hitchcock film, read every article about Hitchcock, basked in contemplation of every photograph of Hitchcock: the one of him hanging by his own tie, the one of him reflected in a pool of blood, the one of him playing with a skull immersed in a bathtub. I liked everything about him: his big, Father Christmas paunch, his twinkling little pig eyes, his blotchy, alcoholic complexion, his mummified corpses, his corpses shut inside wardrobes, his corpses chopped into pieces and shut inside suitcases, his corpses temporarily buried beneath beds of roses, his anguished flights, his crimes, his suspense, those typically English jokes that make even death ridiculous and even vulgarity elegant. I might be wrong, but I cannot help laughing at the story about the two actors in the cemetery watching their friend being lowered into his grave. The first one says to the other, “How old are you, Charlie?” And Charlie answers, “Eighty-nine.” The first one then observes, “Then there’s no point in your going home, Charlie.” …

Oriana Fallaci / The Rage and the Pride

• 
  

  

  Oriana Fallaci

  
  

“THE RAGE AND THE PRIDE” 

[LA RABBIA E L’ORGOGLIO] 

by Oriana Fallaci

The Rage and The Pride hit Italy with a maelstrom of emotion. It was a body blow to the country’s cravenness. Italy of course split. But it was also abruptly enfolded in an astonishing act of love that in a sense rendered it more united and more aware of its identity. Oriana went straight for the heart, forcing even those who agreed with none of her thoughts to think. Even those who, wrongly, considered her slightly racist.*

by Oriana Fallaci

You ask me to speak this time. You ask me-this time at least-to break the silence that for years I have imposed upon myself in order that my voice not get mixed up with the sound of the cicadas. And I will break that silence-because I have learned that even in Italy some have rejoiced as the Palestinians in Gaza did the other night on TV. “Victory! Victory!” Men, women, and children. I assume that those who do such a thing can be defined as men, women, and children. I have learned that some high grade cicadas, politicians or so-called politicians, intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, and others who don’t deserve to be called citizens, have behaved in the same way. “Good!” they say, “The Americans deserve it!” And I’m very, very, very angry. I’m angry with a cool, lucid, rational anger, an anger that wipes out any detachment, any indulgence, that commands me to answer, and finally to spit on them. And I do spit on them. The African- American poet Maya Angelou, herself as angry as I am, yesterday roared: “Be angry! It’s good to be angry, it’s healthy!” But whether or not it’s healthy for me I don’t know. However I do know it’s not healthy for them-I mean whoever admires the Usama bin Ladens, whoever expresses understanding, sympathy, or solidarity toward them. You’ve fired a detonator that has too long wanted to explode, with your request. You’ll see. You’ve also asked me to explain how I myself experienced this apocalypse. In sum, to furnish my own testimony. And so I shall begin with that. I was at home-my house is in the center of Manhattan, and at exactly nine o’clock I had the sensation of a danger that probably would not touch me, but that certainly concerned me. The sensation one feels in war-or rather in combat-which each pore of your skin feels the bullet or the rocket coming in at you, and you prick up your ears and shout to whoever is standing beside you “Down! Get down!” I rejected it. I was certainly not in Vietnam. I was not in one of those fucking wars that have made a torment of my life ever since the Second World War. I was in New York, for God’s sake, on a beautiful September morning in the year 2001. But the inexplicable feeling continued to possess me. Then I did something that in the morning I never do. I turned on the television. Actually, the audio wasn’t working. But the screen was. And on each channel-here you have almost a hundred of them-you saw one tower of the World Trade Center burning like a gigantic matchstick. A short circuit? A little, careless plane? Or an act of terrorism? I stared almost paralyzed and while I was staring, while I was posing those three questions to myself, a plane appeared on the screen. It was big and white. A commercial airliner. It was flying very low. And, flying very low, it turned toward the second tower as a bomber aims at its target-throws itself at its target. And I understood. I understood also because at that moment the audio came back, transmitting a chorus of wild shouts. Repeated, wild shouts. “God, oh God! Oh, God! God! God! Goooooood!” And the plane slipped into the second tower as a knife slips into a slab of butter.

Oriana Fallaci / The Rolling Stone Interview

Oriana Fallaci            

ORIANA FALLACI: THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW (1976)

How to uncloth an emperor: A talk with the greatest political interviewer of modern times

by Jonathan Cott

Little man whip a big man every time if the little man’s in the right and keeps a’ comin’.
—motto of the Texas Rangers

When Oriana Fallaci went to interview Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, the emperor’s two pet Chihuahuas, named Lulu and Papillon – sensitive antennae of the monarch’s autonomic nervous system, geiger counters registering the presence of friend or foe – stopped dead in their tracks. And after this interview (in which the emperor sounded “sick or drunk”) was published in Italy, the Ethiopian ambassador in Rome was recalled to his homeland, and no word of or from him was ever heard again.