Martin Eden

Martin Eden tells our story, the story of people who weren’t educated by their families or in school, but on the road. It’s the novel of the self-taught and those who believed in education as an instrument of emancipation, but were somehow let down by it. Going beyond this first reading, however, «Martin Eden» not only tells the story of a young proletarian who falls in love with a young woman of a higher social class and begins to dream of becoming a writer, it also paints the portrait of a successful artist (a shadowy self-portrait of Jack London himself), who inevitably loses the sense of his own art.

We loosely interpreted London’s novel and took «Martin Eden» to be a fresco that foresaw the 20th-century’s perversions and torments, as well as its crucial themes: the relationship between the individual and society, the role of mass culture, the class struggle… In the movie, the parable of the negative hero created by London opens with footage of the anarchist Errico Malatesta, then draws parallels with the lives and works of a number of the poète maudit writers of the 1900s, from Vladímir Majakóvskij to Stig Dagerman and Nora May French. We imagined our Martin crossing the 1900s, or rather a crasis, a dreamlike transposition of the 20th century, without time constraints, no longer in the original California of the novel but in a Naples that could be any city, anywhere in the world.