Past the feast – the Venice Film Festival – and gabbato lo santo, that is, the spectators, who have to watch the descent into the underworld of Italian cinema. This is what one should talk about, now that the curtain has come down on the kermesse. Is Quentin Tarantino right to say that the Italian films of the last few years are “crazy crap” (cit.)? The only one who said it clearly was the Nanni Moretti of “Dear Diary,” although he then cited mostly American splatter and B-movies.
There are those who would like more state “control” over cinema, but that is an idea from the Soviet Union and other dictatorships. Today, rather, the problem is the spread in all educational cycles — from junior high to film schools — of a cult for the socially “correct” that wants no alternatives, since it stands under the sign of the absolute good, in the style of the Council of Trent. Thus, with education increasingly the enemy of intelligence and independent reasoning, how does one write decent film subjects that are not the same as a thousand others? How can one make successful films that combine the pleasure of images with content that is pluralistic and divergent from Single Thought? If I scroll through the titles and plots, I find confirmation that the current bad cinema is the result of the subjugation of the artistic message to the politicking of “good and obvious ideas,” which is the death of the “liberal” arts.
Yet American cinema is always going strong, perhaps because it is private and does not want to “educate the people.” Sure, the new Hollywood can invest heavily in creating captivating stories, thanks to huge numbers: 300 million potential viewers in the mother country, plus the world’s English-speaking population. But that was the case even in the 1960s, when Italian productions were second in the world. Then a law effectively blocked co-productions with “foreign” subjects and everything collapsed. It was not only the fault of Andreotti and Berlinguer, protectionists in economics and standard-bearers of a cinema designed to bring ideological content to the cine-television masses, with the only alternative being sinful films and cinepanettoni.
Even today, our film and serial production is as state-supported as it was at the time of the founding of Cinecittà , apart from the blockbuster market and apart from the few authors who are competitive abroad like Carlo Verdone and Sorrentino. When subsidized cinema propagates the idea of a general 1968 protest that is not seen today, this is perhaps precisely because of scripts that speak of youth redemption, or the exact opposite, with broken families and young criminals. The result is that no one sees these kinds of films.
Is it possible that no one tells filmmakers that young people should never be told what to do? In fact, everyone sees internationally produced series and films, while the “aid” to Italian “young and quality cinema” has wrecked young and quality cinema. Added to this is the inability to find good screenplay writers, as is also the case for writers in the publishing field.
Yesterday I saw the film “Mud,” by Jeff Nichols (who is not the son of Mike, director of The Graduate). At 34, he has made a work that is unblemished, flawless, realistic, and full of non-educational, and therefore educational, content.
Today I went to reread the “Chosen for You” movie column in the weekly Il Venerdi of la Repubblica, and I found there–aside from five American productions–two Italian and one French film. Well, the recommended French film was “The Truth According to…,” with Isabelle Huppert playing a trade unionist for a multinational nuclear company. The protagonist of course discovers a “conspiracy” and away she goes dying of boredom. The first Italian film suggested is Marco Risi’s “Il punto di rugiada,” set in an Rsa where two boys, sentenced to a year of “social work,” come into contact with the guests and are converted to “good.” An example of an “unrealistic” film (not all boys do social work in Rsa’s), quite different from Nichols’ Mud, which instead offers realistic, solid, believable cinema even as it peers into the lives of families living illegally on barges at anchor in the Mississippi River.
“Il Sorpasso” by Dino Risi, Marco’s father, was of a different cloth: that 1962 film fatally intersects the life of a forty-something bumbling, fanatic and juvenile with that of a well-educated, sociopathic college student. It is still modern, enjoyable and with a specific message that is not meant to “educate” but “only” to be a mirror of reality, a quality that is still grasped today. Better than glorifying the “poor but beautiful” is to show them similar in virtues and faults to the rich, beautiful and educated, as is the case with Ettore Scola’s beautiful and raw “Ugly, Dirty and Bad.” “The Dew Point” in the plot is about as palatable as a priest’s sermon that dozes a class in religion class, while dealing with God (and sorry if that’s not enough).
The second Italian film recommended by Il Venerdi was Giorgia Cecere’s “In a Beautiful Place,” the plot of which is: 1) Piedmont province; 2) Lucia, a bored mother and wife, seeks an escape from the obvious everyday, finding it in her friendship with immigrant Ahmed. For goodness sake, boredom is a “realistic” theme as is the confrontation with the Other, but do you want to put “The Graduate” or Antonioni’s films, or the confrontation between gringos and the Mexican army in “The Wild Bunch,” or boredom in Moravia’s novels, or “Kiss Me, Stupid” with Kim Novak, with the comedy of errors juxtaposition between a housewife and a whore?
Back in 2007 Tarantino stated, “The Italian films I have seen in the last three years all look the same. All they talk about is: boy growing up, girl growing up, couple in crisis, parents, vacation for the mentally handicapped. What has happened? I loved so much the Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and some films of the 1980s, and now I feel it’s all over. A real tragedy.”
Quentin Tarantino a Los Angeles nel luglio 2023 | via Shutterstock
The fault, I repeat, is in the standardization of a cultural product, through Rai and state funding, not forgetting the funds for regional Film Commissions, born in Italy in the 1990s, forty years after the American ones. This is why plots always have the same frames and the same script, like Andy Warhol’s series of a thousand Marilyn Monroes or like Ford’s assembly line, inaugurated in 1913. Why diverge creatively if funding is more easily obtained with a standard, capital-raising product, even when it talks about the Cuban revolution? What is proposed in Italy-and even in Europe-is a self-referential and purgative cinema, since it would like to cleanse the masses of their vices. Of course, then the same masses carefully avoid it, since both the beautiful and the dirty society enjoy only when they can bask in their own vices and flaws.
Nor can we say that it is all the fault of the digitization of daily life. I hope for a culture that frees us from the counterproductive plethora of virtuous and politically correct messages-as well as from lousy and politically incorrect messages-leaving freedom for authors and filmmakers to create and shoot the best stories. But will this ever be the case?
I hypothesize a future politics no longer divided between left and right, or between the few liberals and the too many illiberals. I prophesy two parties: the first would be the PD, or the Digital Party, which would like to entrust the presidency of the World Republic (RM) to the Artificial Intelligence Network… “The only one that is honest and can never be wrong!” as the slogan of the future PD would read.
The second world party would be the PA, or Analog Party, which would propose a definitive exit from online and a return to a romantic Bohéme. Perhaps this idea hooked me because someone else has already thought of it for a film or series. Maybe in a few years it will really come to such an option.
Whichever way it goes, our cinema is in danger of becoming more and more invisible and trivial: it is moving further and further away from the reality being told and from the cine-television market, because it prefers to describe it with the microsphere of low politics and poor creativity.
The article Venice Film Festival: past the feast, gabbato lo santo comes from TheNewyorker.
