I am impressed by the Sicilian communist in Baarìa. Here at the Venice Film Festival, it is Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore who is behind the Italian opening film. The drama spans three generations from 1930 onwards, but centres primarily on the communist Peppino’s lifelong struggle against landowners, fascist oppression and burgeoning neoliberalism. The film tells a heart-warming story of love, family and friendship. The landscape and atmosphere are reminiscent of Bertolucci’s 1900, only more romantic. The local street is the meeting place – for the beggars, the madman and his mother, for the friendly shouts of children, play and family life. The film follows the characters’ upbringing and discoveries: as in the scene where the classroom window is filled with the boys’ noses pressed against the glass in front of a bespectacled teacher, gazing across the street at an erotically dressed woman in a passionate embrace on a building site.
The epic film begins with Cicco, the shepherd who also has a flair for poetry, then introduces us to his unemployed son Peppino, who has a flair for politics, before ending with his grandson Pietro, who has a flair for studying – something his father never managed to do: ‘What’s a reformist, Dad?’ ‘Well, it must be someone who realises that if he bangs his head against the wall long enough, he’ll crack his skull.’ His father’s struggle was perhaps too much for him. Did the Italians really care about revolution, anyway? The unemployed communist Peppino stands in the square shouting about equal rights whilst the camera pans over to the ice-cream eaters at the local restaurant. And towards the end of the film, the greying communist Peppino says goodbye at the railway station to his son, who is setting out into the world. The son asks: “Why do they call us redheads, Dad?” The father replies: “Well, actually, we’re the stupid ones. We just want to embrace the world. But it turns out our arms aren’t long enough.” A few minutes later, we see the political idealist with grey hair and a grey suit running from the corner – too late – along the crowded platform, alongside the train; in slow motion, he waves and shouts desperately, like a man whose life is over, after his beloved son who is disappearing. A moving, existential scene.
Just as in Cinema Paradiso, where the local madman is displaced by a car park, here it is the poor boy who wanders bewildered through Palermo’s modern city streets in the 1980s – where motorbikes, cars and people are rushing about. Modern, efficient society has replaced the old, emotionally rich community. The film’s ending is a far cry from all the little stories from the realm of childhood, from the world of wonder and from director Tornatore’s own childhood home at 114 Gioacchino Guttuso in Palermo – on the film’s ‘hundred-metre street’ where all manner of people turned up.
FILMS ARE USUALLY about emotions, and this is also the case at the 66th Mostra film festival out on the Lido. I scour the cinemas for films of an ethical and political nature and for personal stories: I seize the opportunity to see the great Italian director Franco Rossi’s black-and-white film about one of Pasolini’s fictional characters in Morte di un amico (1959). Briefly outlined, the film depicts the transition from the old to the new, from the countryside to the city, into the urban world of small-time gangsters, nightlife, booze and prostitutes. Not unlike Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), it is here the young men who adapt to urban life, confronted with the world of trust and the underworld. Or, from the same period here on the Lido: Damiano Damiani’s La rimpatriata (1963) about Italian immigrants trying to survive in Germany, about men in suits who band together in semi-criminal circles – quick-witted con artists, bar music, women’s laughter. Once again, it is the immigrant, a country bumpkin who, with a sceptical eye, quickly learns the rules of the game.
Such good old-fashioned ‘film noir’ from old Italy is completely overshadowed by Berlusconi’s contemporary world in the film Videocracy In Swedish-Italian director #Erik-Gandini’s (1) documentary, the media empire the president has built around himself is laid bare. The ideal of womanhood is hordes of girls auditioning to become hip- and breast-wiggling 30-second eye-catchers (‘Velinas’) surrounding male presenters – one of these female bodies, as is well known, became Berlusconi’s Minister for Women. Plenty of skin on display and sky-high heels are supposed to do the trick. Just as silly as those high-heeled, unsteady women struggling along the cobblestones of old Venice.
In Videocracy, the male, body-obsessed circle around Berlusconi is laid bare. Or rather, they’re all already stripped down by the swimming pool, where parties, drugs and women’s admiration are the naked truth about Berlusconi’s values. Appearances count, no matter how shallow they may be. But I need look no further than outside the cinema to see this fascist-like Italy with its array of guards, security personnel and police out on the Lido: the festival area is dominated by black-clad Carabinieri, green-clad Guardia di Finanza and the blue uniforms of the Polizia di Stato. All the police forces’ colourfully variegated versions of authoritarian uniforms include a gun in the belt, a truncheon on the hip and a stern, scrutinising gaze through sunglasses – at a cultural event! Before the screening of Videocracy, 20 police officers came running with plastic shields and lined up at the cinema entrance. But there were no terrorists this time either.
My thoughts turn to Pasolini, who pointed out that police officers are often illiterate men from southern Italy. He said this out of sympathy for these poor lads, the proletariat, who have few other options; that is why he nodded and smiled at the police contingent, even though they had thick necks, tangled wires and a look as dark as sunglasses.
THE POLICE ARE ALSO the subject of #Werner-Herzog’s two new films here in Venice: Nicolas Cage plays a constantly cocaine-snorting police officer in Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call New Orleans. At the press conference, I ask whether he is Herzog’s new sparring partner, just as Klaus Kinski was once both an inspiration and a troublemaker for Herzog? The director is said to have once pointed a gun at Kinski to get him to finish filming Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) in the Amazon. Well, if you flatter Cage, you get a response: he had great respect for Kinski and had studied him closely in Herzog’s earlier films.
Both Cage and Herzog swore that they had never used, nor were they currently using, drugs. But Cage’s extremely authentic drug-addict role – in which Kinski’s intensity can be glimpsed – suggested otherwise. Cage’s character becomes increasingly extreme; like a lone wolf, he finds solace with a prostitute; they find comfort in each other, and are gradually brought back into the fold of a conventional life and police promotions – or are they?
Unfortunately, Herzog disappoints; many now believe he has abandoned all his youthful ideals. (I have long admired Herzog’s films and would love to interview him, but that would require a ‘bribe’ of 75,000 kroner from three people in a joint interview.) (2) The experimental director previously shunned popular culture. Thirty-seven years after Kaspar Hauser (in Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle), he is happily married and living in Los Angeles. If we nevertheless notice a few small twitches from his wayward past in the Venice film – a few absurdly humorous scenes featuring staring reptiles from New Orleans – they are too random to function as a Brechtian alienation effect. But as an ordinary, somewhat film noir-esque thriller, both the cinematography and the narrative work well.
In Herzog’s second film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, the police lieutenant is the proper sort. Willem Dafoe’s ever-expressive, worried face keeps the tension going. In the film, the ‘son’ has killed his overprotective and controlling mother – like most men here in Italy, he was still living at home. He has barricaded himself at the crime scene with a couple of hostages. Through flashbacks, the film constantly revisits key preceding events, which build up to and explain the impending climax. Eventually, the police SWAT team arrives at a run, before it all wraps up with a surprisingly comical twist.
Another director who has disappointed is Oliver Stone with his new documentary South of the Border. The film largely presents superficial observations through light-hearted chats with South American presidents. Why can’t Stone manage to have more meaningful conversations? Is he too busy with Gekko in Wall Street 2? For why ask Venezuela’s Chávez how late he works at night, whether he reads fiction, or whether that nice room is where the meetings are held? Or a smiling Morales about how coca leaves aren’t actually cocaine? And, Raúl Castro, I know you believe that the entire population stood behind the revolution. And yes, I know that most people support Chávez’s ‘Bolivarian revolutionary’ ideas. Why do you disappoint by being such a repetitive Stone? The footage of the coup attempt against Chávez is thoroughly documented in both The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2003) and John Pilger’s War on Democracy (2008). You underestimate many of us by spending the film’s first quarter of an hour on such a rehash.
And I’ll briefly mention a third American: Michael Moore. His new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story is yet another instalment in the populist provocateur’s battle against the greed of the financial elite. (3)
BUT HIGH QUALITY DOES EXIST. Lebanon makes the strongest impression. This feature film is about life inside an Israeli tank in Lebanon in 1982. This dimly lit, sweaty and cramped steel hell is still physically felt long after I step out into the intense Italian sun.
This is an anti-war film, much like last year’s Waltz with Bashir, only more intense and less self-absorbed. War is still the worst kind as long as one can see the appalling violence at close quarters, or understand how many people are psychologically devastated.
Lebanon is based on a true story – the director’s own. Samuel Maoz was a gunner during the First Lebanon War in June 1982. He was part of the armoured corps, the ‘proletariat’ of the Israeli Defence Forces. Maoz trained in filmmaking after the war, but it took him 25 years to come to terms with his war memories – he could smell the stench of charred human flesh the moment he sat down to write. Now he has, almost therapeutically, written it all out.
In the film, we feel the terror of the grubby twenty-year-old soldiers, as they refuse to carry out orders or scream at one another, drenched in panic. The sign inside the tank strikes us as ironic: ‘You are the steel, the tank is just iron’. These inexperienced young men drive the killing machine into an enemy territory that has recently been bombed by Israeli aircraft. The director does not present a plot in the conventional sense, but rather offers us a 93-minute-long experience. Beyond killing people, souls are slaughtered and left with open psychological wounds.
The film’s experience is lived from inside the tank; the world outside is seen only through the gun sight. The clanging of metal is deafening as the turret rotates, revealing its square-framed view of the surroundings. Flanked by infantry, the tank advances towards Beirut. They constantly fire at approaching vehicles. In one scene, a farmer lies thrashing about outside the shattered wreck of a car, waving his remaining arm on a torso-like, dying body – surrounded by crates of vegetables, dead poultry and hopping hens. A soldier shakes his head at the gunner, then finishes off the farmer with a shot to the head.
Later, the tank strays into a Syrian-controlled area. Suddenly, screaming Arabs open fire on them from a bombed-out building directly ahead – they are holding a family hostage. Once again, the noise from the turret is deafening; the lens focuses, the crosshairs on the oiled glass plate closing in on the crying little girl high up in the building. Samuel Maoz’s character fires. The girl’s father spins downwards through the air in slow motion. Her mother eventually comes down alive, passes her husband’s dead body, wanders around in shock, grabs a soldier, weeping, and cries out for her daughter. She stands half-naked in rags that suddenly catch fire. Her gaze is fixed on the gun sight, endless, hateful. Her daughter is dead.
The armoured soldiers themselves lose their innocence when they kill the innocent. Will Israel become a state of mentally crippled men, or will a remnant of humanity survive? Towards the end of the film, a captured Syrian inside the half-darkness of the vehicle shouts several times that he needs to urinate: It is completely silent, the engine is switched off, a small metal box is pushed in front of him, the man with his hands tied behind his back is helped with his fly and penis – the sound of urination in that raw metal hell is deafening.
From within the tank’s cramped interior, filled with empty and full metal casings, music is suddenly heard from outside in the darkness of the night, lending the whole scene the air of a hallucination – is not the very unreality of this chaos the essence of the experience of war? The soldiers now start the engine in a panic and drive as fast as the tracks and gears will allow them out of the area. Morning breaks, and they wake peacefully surrounded by sunflowers in a field. For the first time, I see the tank.
Lebanon was the winning film at Venice.
THE IRANIAN ARTIST Shirin Neshat, based in New York, made her feature film debut at Venice with Women Without Men The film revolves around the historic moment when the Shah seized dictatorial power in 1953, supported by Britain in collaboration with the CIA. The political reality is juxtaposed with the fates of four women – they all withdraw from male domination, into exile, a sort of Garden of Eden. The film is poetically told in two colour palettes: blue-green in the women’s world and yellowish in the political and military historical reality. Neshat won the award for Best Director. (4)
The demonstrations of 1953 echo this summer’s events in Iran: in Hana #Makhmalbaf’s semi-documentary Green Days, she explores this year’s elections and the optimism associated with them. The protagonist Ava’s self-examining face is shown in parallel with the film’s political theme. We follow the passage of time from the early optimism, via former President Khatami’s speech at a football stadium: ‘Election day will be our day of freedom!’ We hear that the country has 27 per cent inflation, that people are deeply dissatisfied with the previous eight years. Here in Tehran, it is said that only illiterate people in the countryside allow themselves to be taken in by Ahmadinejad. There is singing and dancing in the streets. We see an interesting clip in which a tally (possibly an opinion poll?) gives Mousavi 19 million votes against Ahmadinejad’s 5.6 million – 40 per cent to 12 per cent.
We all know how it turned out. There are cries of electoral fraud; the atmosphere is electric. Makhmalbaf uses documentary footage from mobile phones showing demonstrators being beaten, shot and killed. Hundreds were killed by the police, 11,000 arrested and many tortured. In personal footage, Ava is ashamed that Iran is a police state, a country full of tears, a country the world looks down on. Nightmares have replaced her childhood dreams.
Under Ahmadinejad’s dictatorship, theatre and the visual arts are condemned, but in the film Makhmalbaf stages a play featuring three girls who can no longer bear to live. To think that it is now fifty years since this country had a democratically elected government.
Similar dictatorial abuses are recognisable in Felice Kappa’s Song for Anna Politkovskaya: here, popular protest and the press’s struggle for freedom of expression are explored through a memory sequence in which the actress Ottavia Piccolo reads out #Politkovskaya’s words whilst wandering amongst the ruins of a war zone. She also reminds us of the reporter Natalia Estemiroya and two activists, the couple Zarema Sadulaieva and Alik Dzhabrailov, who were all murdered for drawing attention to Russian abuses in Chechnya.
THIS YEAR’S VENICE FILM FESTIVAL presents a series of personal political testimonies – from the Italy, Lebanon or Iran of the past, or new testimonies from contemporary Iran or Italy. These testimonies explore the political and moral commitment to a life of dignity. To give you food for thought, I shall conclude here with Le Ombre Rosse by Francesco Maselli:
An old theatre on the outskirts of the city is occupied by young radicals – the banner above the entrance in this dark grey-green landscape reads ‘We shall change the world’. It provides shelter for the homeless, children are given an education, and passionate discussions take place. A well-known elderly professor of philosophy comes to visit. He turns out to be the occupiers’ role model. Their visual art and political slogans are displayed along the walls whilst the camera lens follows them through the corridors, up and down the stairs and into a large hall. A raucous concert is taking place there, and the professor is asked to read from his famous essay ‘The Irrational’ – ideas that the group in the occupied house are trying to live up to. The philosopher is fascinated and later mentions the initiative to his friends in the cultural elite. These former ’68ers suddenly become very enthusiastic, secure a star architect for the building, raise funds through their politician friends, and appear on TV debates, declaring that André Malraux’s old idea of a ‘cultural centre’ is now to be realised. (5) A hundred of them, if possible! But when the cultural elite then meet the young radicals, they are not welcome; they must not be allowed to ‘colonise’ the burgeoning scene. Revealing scenes follow, particularly when, over their glasses of wine at the star architect’s home, the cultural elite finally admit that, deep down, they do not really care about the young people. They were merely tools to give the well-positioned intellectuals a renewed zest for life.
Exactly. Here we are at the heart of the film’s significance. The Italians truly master the art of bringing emotions to life.
© Norwegian LMD.
Footnotes:
1 Gandini and the film will be screened at Filmens hus on 7–8 October.
2 According to a Polish journalist who tried.
3 See ‘Moore or less’, Dagsavisen, 12 September. Premiere 30 October.
4 See my interview with Neshat in the film magazine Rushprint this month.
5 A most vibrant idea: the European House for Culture has just opened in Brussels. See www.efa-aef.eu/en/activities/european-house-for-culture
