TESTO «In Italia avete tante belle isole. Ma allora perché l'Isola dei famosi non ve la andate a fare a casa vostra?». Miriam Miranda leader di Ofraneh - Organisacion Fraternal Negra de Honduras - che rappresenta gli abitanti dei Cayos Cochinos (in spagnolo isole dei maiali) è infuriata. Il reality show condotto da Simona Ventura è iniziato da appena una settimana nel Cayo Paloma - una delle isole dell'arcipelago nel nord dell'Honduras - ma ha già fatto arrabbiare la popolazione garifuna, una etnia afrodiscendente che vive nelle isole e nella costa circostante. Con l'arrivo del reality show sono stati infatti imposti nuovi divieti di navigazione che si vanno ad aggiungere ai rigidi limiti di pesca della riserva naturale in cui è situato l'arcipelago. Così Claudio Chiappucci, Raoul Casadei, Maurizia Cacciatori e gli altri improbabili naufraghi di Rai Due potrebbero trovarsi a fare i conti con la rabbia dei pescatori locali oltre che con la fame e il televoto.
I Cayos Cochinos sono un insieme di isole e atolli che per oltre duecento anni è stata la zona di pesca delle comunità garifuna costiere di Nueva Armenia e Sambo Creek. Inizialmente i pescatori utilizzavano gli atolli come base di appoggio ma a partire dagli anni '60 crearono insediamenti stabili nei cayos Chachahuate, Bulanos, Timon e nella costa orientale del Cayo Mayor. I problemi per gli abitanti cominciarono nel 1992 quando l'imprenditore svizzero Stefan Schmidheiny - inventore dell'orologio Swatch, azionista di Nestlè e ereditiero del gruppo Eternit - comprò il Cayo Paloma e il Cayo Menor grazie al sostegno dell'allora presidente honduregno Rafael Callejas che decretò la zona riserva naturale. Nel 1994 fu istituita una fondazione per la gestione dell'area finanziata da imprenditori honduregni e stranieri. La fondazione impose unilateralmente limiti di pesca molto rigidi che hanno provocato il progressivo spopolamento delle isole. Presto i garifuna cominciarono a essere vittime di minacce di sgombero e violenze. Nel 1996 scomparì misteriosamente il pescatore Domitilio Calix Arzu. Nel 2001 il sommozzatore Jesus Flores Paredes fu ferito al braccio da un colpo di fucile. Da un anno una pattuglia dell'esercito ha cominciato a sorvegliare il cayo Chachahuate (il più popolato) spaventando la popolazione.
Di fronte a questa situazione la presenza dei naufraghi di Rai Due non fa che aumentare l'indignazione della comunità. Sabato scorso Adrian Oviedo, presidente della Fondazione Cayos Cochinos che gestisce l'area in collaborazione con il Wwf è sbarcato a Chachahuate per intimare espressamente alla popolazione di non avvicinarsi all'Isola dei famosi. Per la produzione della trasmissione il timore è che qualche pescatore finisca per sbaglio nell'inquadratura rompendo l'illusione del naufragio in un'isola deserta. Per la comunità garifuna il divieto significa rinunciare a un'area di pesca che sostenta la comunità. «Crediamo che sia vergognoso il comportamento della televisione italiana - dichiara Miriam di Ofraneh - Così si sta attentando al diritto all'alimentazione della comunità».
E i malumori non sono legati soltanto alla pesca. Gli abitanti vedono nella presenza della trasmissione un nuovo esempio della gestione ipocrita della fondazione. Mentre l'organizzazione sostiene di essere impegnata nella difesa della natura l'arrivo dell'Isola dei famosi minaccia la tenuta ecologica dell'area. Il Cayo Paloma è uno dei siti dove una tartaruga a rischio di estinzione depone le sue uova. Gli abitanti di Chachahuate denunciano che è stato addirittura tirato un cavo elettrico subacqueo per alimentare le apparecchiature della troupe al seguito dei «famosi».
Un altro timore è che la trasmissione venga utilizzata dalla fondazione come un megaspot pubblicitario per aumentare il turismo nella zona senza nessun vantaggio per le popolazioni. Oggi dai turisti che arrivano nelle isole dell'arcipelago la fondazione riscuote una tariffa di ingresso tra i 5 e i 10 dollari. Quanto va alle comunità? «Neppure un centesimo» - risponde amaramente Malaka un pescatore che vive a Chachahuate da oltre 30 anni. Così l'invadente presenza dei «famosi» di Rai Due dimostra come l'arcipelago stia assumendo sempre più le caratteristiche di un paradiso privatizzato in mano a pochi ricchi. Mentre i garifuna lottano ancora per ottenere un titolo di proprietà comunitario per i territori in cui vivono, molte isole dell'arcipelago sono già state comprate da investitori europei tra cui diversi italiani, in barba alla costituzione honduregna che lo vieta espressamente. Un nobiluomo torinese, il barone Emilio Accusani di Retorto Portanova,ad esempio,è il proprietario del Cayo Culebra che fronteggia l'atollo dei «famosi».
La situazione patita dagli abitanti dei Cayos Cochinos è una spia della minaccia vissuta dai garifuna che abitano la costa nord dell'Honduras. Negli ultimi anni le zone costiere e le isole della zona sono state sottoposte a un processo di privatizzazione selvaggia nel contesto di progetti di sviluppo turistico finanziati dal Banco Mondiale e dal Banco Interamericano di sviluppo. Di fronte all'aggressione al loro territorio i garifuna stanno reagendo anche cercando di sviluppare progetti turistici comunitari. Nel cayo Chachahuate ad esempio presto comincerà la costruzione di alcune capanne per ospitare i viaggiatori. I turisti qui saranno i benvenuti quando a guadagnarne saranno le comunità garifuna che abitano in queste zone da centinaia di anni. L'«Isola dei famosi» invece perchè non ve la andate a fare a casa vostra?.
sabato 23 settembre 2006
venerdì 2 giugno 2006
Au Loin du Vietnam - Far from Vietnam
Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam) is made up of seven short films made in the ‘60s at the time of the occupation of Vietnam by celebrated political directors including Jean-luc Godard and Alain Resnais.
Paulo Gerbaudo looks at the parralels between film and war then and now Loin du Vietnam is both a failure and an inspiring experiment in war cinema. The film - a politically committed documentary dealing with the war in Vietnam - after its release in 1967 proved a commercial flop and was the victim of harsh critiques and early oblivion. One rare copy of the collaborative work of a number of great politically committed directors of the period such as the French Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, William Klein, Agnés Varda and the Netherland’s director Joris Ivens has been recently screened at Cine Lumiére of the Institut Francais.
The project of the film sprang out of the convulse atmosphere of 1967 during the escalation of military operation in Vietnam, and was the result of incipient ‘68 politics with their stress on participation, assemblies and direct democracy. The film, while dealing with a decisive political issue of the period, also aimed at questioning the French film industry and the one author canon to stress the importance of collaborative work of the film crew and of different directors. On the other hand the challenge was to realise an alternative representation of the war as seen in its multifaceted and often “distant” manifestations.
To do this Loin du Vietnam undertakes an expressive experiment in the documentary format by mixing together heterogeneous materials that compose an instable collage, notwithstanding the intelligent work of Chris Marker in the cutting room. In the film different inspirations and footage, documentary and fiction, converge. The long monologue scene by Godard about the political role of the cinematography in face of the war together with scenes from La Chinoise, interviews with Fidel Castro and Ho-chi Minh sided by brief visual clips and other cinematographic virtuosities. However some of the best moments of the film are the ones that stick more directly to documentary cinema, such as the war and everyday life in Hanoi under American bombings filmed by Joris Ivens and his wife, William Klein’s documentary footage about demonstrations in the United States and Lelouch’s sequences from an American carrier.
The film represents the war in Vietnam in the form of a historical tragedy staged on different scenes. Not only battlefields, but also North Vietnamese villages, American barracks, occupied cities, TV sets in living rooms, and demonstrations in the streets of Europe and America. Hence war emerges not as a simple military confrontation but rather as a mechanism of violence and conflict spreading its tentacles through supply lines, news programs, minds and hearts.
The two themes, evoked in the film’s title, Vietnam and distance, grasp a pair of great ideas which is what the film is all about. First of all, Vietnam within this film is not just a name for a particular country in South East Asia, 10 000 miles away from American shores, but also the name for a particular political, military, social and cultural conflict, characterised by harsh oppositions both in national and international politics. Thus the film represents Vietnam not only as a war between nations but also as a civil war, as any modern war has to be. In a long sequence by William Klein in front of Wall Street, during a huge peace demonstration in New York, a group of brokers shout “Bomb Hanoi! Bomb Hanoi!”. Demonstrants engage along the march path in harsh verbal confrontations with war supporters. New York appears kidnapped by a vibrant hysteria.
The film then slides along a theatre of operations that spans through the globe. Going from the streets of Paris crowded by demonstrants and policemen to a village in North Vietnam where people are assisting to a theatre show blaming Johnson and United States, to a paddy field where a unit of the National Liberation Army is training in hiding, to the mountains of Cuba. Distance, in turn, can be read as the description of the condition of civil populations in western country during such a war and its being exposed to a mediated war fought far away but capable, at the same time, of destabilising internal society and politics. As New Yorker reporter Michael Arlen put it, the Vietnam War, was a “living-room war”. Distance is also the principle that underlies the hypertechnological war machine deployed by the U.S. in Vietnam: a system controlling death and destruction from afar. The image that opens the film is a load of bombs being moved from a supply ship to a carrier. Lelouch’s camera follows those bombs while they are stored and eventually armed on the aircraft. In the middle of the ocean, far away from the dead bodies of the American bombings it enables, the carrier becomes a metaphor of a war machine that acts from afar. Distance thus emerges as instrumental to power. A removal of the horror of war through the media and thanks to its being out-of-sight. As one of the demonstrants appearing in the film says “Americans support the war because it is far away. Would they think the same, if their cities were attacked?”. The answer is as elusive today as it was then, best exemplified in the voting patterns of the American people post 9/11.
Notwithstanding the timely political rethorics that in some parts of the film tend to lean towards an apology to Vietnam, the work provides a vibrant description of the conflict in Vietnam and the social unrest that surrounded it. After the release the work was also criticised for its ‘easy ironies’, but it is actually through those ironies that the film shows the hypocritical goodwill justifying a distant war. This is also what the film does through the way it is cut. For example by joining a popular pro-war song with the reality of a Saigon populated by prostitutes, or by showing a speech of general Westmoreland through a damaged TV screen.
Viewing such a film today inspires a reflection about the similarities and differences between the media propagation of that war and of the current one, the war in Iraq in which the U.S. and its coalition are engaging in. Vietnam was a fortunate topic for cinema, and before that, it was extensively and crudely covered by television and newspapers. The American army had, at least initially, favoured the work of journalists and camera men on the front (much more than ever happened before and after that) for propaganda reasons. So Vietnam became the first televised war, and the war began losing consensus when too many dead corpses on the screen began to disgust the American public’s dinner time.
The Iraq war has undergone a more technically developed coverage that pretends to transmit battle images in real time (through embedded journalists) as if it were a football match and always jumps quickly to the site of an attack or a bombing. In this rapidity of news coverage something has been lost. The media war coverage of Iraq has not only censored the images of blood, tortures and body bags. It has also disminished the importance of other aspects of such a war: the conditions of the civil population in the occupied country and the unrest uniting millions of people across the world in the biggest anti-war protests ever. This erasure of such decisive aspects of war is what Au loin du Vietnam tries to overcome by following the many links that the war ties through conflicts and solidarities all around the globe.
Iraq wars have, until now, not been as fortunate as Vietnam in their representations within contemporary cinema. The only fiction titles deserving attention are David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), the recently released Jarhead (2005) by Sam Mendes both dealing with soldiers’ stories during the 1991 conflict in Kuwait when Iraq invaded. Also Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Robert Greenwalth’s Uncovered: The War On Iraq (2003), both documentary films, deal with the current war in Iraq even though focusing on its role in American politics. Moreover all these films and documentaries are somehow limited to an internal vision of war as seen through the individual experience of American soldiers, citizens and their nation’s destiny and fail in providing a radical representation of war in all its complexity.
With its real-time - as much tempestive as anaesthaetised - war representation, television has produced an overload of recurrent images about the war in Iraq, restraining any space for debate, comprehension and radical analysis. In this condition it is hard to develop a committed war cinema without getting lost in easy political pedagogy a là Michael Moore or in rank paternalism in Live 8 fashion. Au loin du Vietnam can, in contrast, be an inspiration for a cinema that intends to observe war and represent what the war in Iraq means not only in terms of military and political experiences and events, but also in everyday life’s impact, in London as in Baghdad. A cinema able to document its incumbence on western countries and its consequences on the civil population of Iraq. A cinema capable of seeing war at a distance.
Paulo Gerbaudo looks at the parralels between film and war then and now Loin du Vietnam is both a failure and an inspiring experiment in war cinema. The film - a politically committed documentary dealing with the war in Vietnam - after its release in 1967 proved a commercial flop and was the victim of harsh critiques and early oblivion. One rare copy of the collaborative work of a number of great politically committed directors of the period such as the French Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, William Klein, Agnés Varda and the Netherland’s director Joris Ivens has been recently screened at Cine Lumiére of the Institut Francais.
The project of the film sprang out of the convulse atmosphere of 1967 during the escalation of military operation in Vietnam, and was the result of incipient ‘68 politics with their stress on participation, assemblies and direct democracy. The film, while dealing with a decisive political issue of the period, also aimed at questioning the French film industry and the one author canon to stress the importance of collaborative work of the film crew and of different directors. On the other hand the challenge was to realise an alternative representation of the war as seen in its multifaceted and often “distant” manifestations.
To do this Loin du Vietnam undertakes an expressive experiment in the documentary format by mixing together heterogeneous materials that compose an instable collage, notwithstanding the intelligent work of Chris Marker in the cutting room. In the film different inspirations and footage, documentary and fiction, converge. The long monologue scene by Godard about the political role of the cinematography in face of the war together with scenes from La Chinoise, interviews with Fidel Castro and Ho-chi Minh sided by brief visual clips and other cinematographic virtuosities. However some of the best moments of the film are the ones that stick more directly to documentary cinema, such as the war and everyday life in Hanoi under American bombings filmed by Joris Ivens and his wife, William Klein’s documentary footage about demonstrations in the United States and Lelouch’s sequences from an American carrier.
The film represents the war in Vietnam in the form of a historical tragedy staged on different scenes. Not only battlefields, but also North Vietnamese villages, American barracks, occupied cities, TV sets in living rooms, and demonstrations in the streets of Europe and America. Hence war emerges not as a simple military confrontation but rather as a mechanism of violence and conflict spreading its tentacles through supply lines, news programs, minds and hearts.
The two themes, evoked in the film’s title, Vietnam and distance, grasp a pair of great ideas which is what the film is all about. First of all, Vietnam within this film is not just a name for a particular country in South East Asia, 10 000 miles away from American shores, but also the name for a particular political, military, social and cultural conflict, characterised by harsh oppositions both in national and international politics. Thus the film represents Vietnam not only as a war between nations but also as a civil war, as any modern war has to be. In a long sequence by William Klein in front of Wall Street, during a huge peace demonstration in New York, a group of brokers shout “Bomb Hanoi! Bomb Hanoi!”. Demonstrants engage along the march path in harsh verbal confrontations with war supporters. New York appears kidnapped by a vibrant hysteria.
The film then slides along a theatre of operations that spans through the globe. Going from the streets of Paris crowded by demonstrants and policemen to a village in North Vietnam where people are assisting to a theatre show blaming Johnson and United States, to a paddy field where a unit of the National Liberation Army is training in hiding, to the mountains of Cuba. Distance, in turn, can be read as the description of the condition of civil populations in western country during such a war and its being exposed to a mediated war fought far away but capable, at the same time, of destabilising internal society and politics. As New Yorker reporter Michael Arlen put it, the Vietnam War, was a “living-room war”. Distance is also the principle that underlies the hypertechnological war machine deployed by the U.S. in Vietnam: a system controlling death and destruction from afar. The image that opens the film is a load of bombs being moved from a supply ship to a carrier. Lelouch’s camera follows those bombs while they are stored and eventually armed on the aircraft. In the middle of the ocean, far away from the dead bodies of the American bombings it enables, the carrier becomes a metaphor of a war machine that acts from afar. Distance thus emerges as instrumental to power. A removal of the horror of war through the media and thanks to its being out-of-sight. As one of the demonstrants appearing in the film says “Americans support the war because it is far away. Would they think the same, if their cities were attacked?”. The answer is as elusive today as it was then, best exemplified in the voting patterns of the American people post 9/11.
Notwithstanding the timely political rethorics that in some parts of the film tend to lean towards an apology to Vietnam, the work provides a vibrant description of the conflict in Vietnam and the social unrest that surrounded it. After the release the work was also criticised for its ‘easy ironies’, but it is actually through those ironies that the film shows the hypocritical goodwill justifying a distant war. This is also what the film does through the way it is cut. For example by joining a popular pro-war song with the reality of a Saigon populated by prostitutes, or by showing a speech of general Westmoreland through a damaged TV screen.
Viewing such a film today inspires a reflection about the similarities and differences between the media propagation of that war and of the current one, the war in Iraq in which the U.S. and its coalition are engaging in. Vietnam was a fortunate topic for cinema, and before that, it was extensively and crudely covered by television and newspapers. The American army had, at least initially, favoured the work of journalists and camera men on the front (much more than ever happened before and after that) for propaganda reasons. So Vietnam became the first televised war, and the war began losing consensus when too many dead corpses on the screen began to disgust the American public’s dinner time.
The Iraq war has undergone a more technically developed coverage that pretends to transmit battle images in real time (through embedded journalists) as if it were a football match and always jumps quickly to the site of an attack or a bombing. In this rapidity of news coverage something has been lost. The media war coverage of Iraq has not only censored the images of blood, tortures and body bags. It has also disminished the importance of other aspects of such a war: the conditions of the civil population in the occupied country and the unrest uniting millions of people across the world in the biggest anti-war protests ever. This erasure of such decisive aspects of war is what Au loin du Vietnam tries to overcome by following the many links that the war ties through conflicts and solidarities all around the globe.
Iraq wars have, until now, not been as fortunate as Vietnam in their representations within contemporary cinema. The only fiction titles deserving attention are David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), the recently released Jarhead (2005) by Sam Mendes both dealing with soldiers’ stories during the 1991 conflict in Kuwait when Iraq invaded. Also Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Robert Greenwalth’s Uncovered: The War On Iraq (2003), both documentary films, deal with the current war in Iraq even though focusing on its role in American politics. Moreover all these films and documentaries are somehow limited to an internal vision of war as seen through the individual experience of American soldiers, citizens and their nation’s destiny and fail in providing a radical representation of war in all its complexity.
With its real-time - as much tempestive as anaesthaetised - war representation, television has produced an overload of recurrent images about the war in Iraq, restraining any space for debate, comprehension and radical analysis. In this condition it is hard to develop a committed war cinema without getting lost in easy political pedagogy a là Michael Moore or in rank paternalism in Live 8 fashion. Au loin du Vietnam can, in contrast, be an inspiration for a cinema that intends to observe war and represent what the war in Iraq means not only in terms of military and political experiences and events, but also in everyday life’s impact, in London as in Baghdad. A cinema able to document its incumbence on western countries and its consequences on the civil population of Iraq. A cinema capable of seeing war at a distance.
martedì 2 maggio 2006
Node: A map for London media arts scene
node.london, the city-wide media arts festival that took place throughout last March, has proved to be, under many aspects, a truly revolutionary cultural event. First of all it is not a traditional exhibition based on a limited selection of artists but rather aims at developing a comprehensive map of the media arts scene in London. In doing so it comprises over 150 projects and around 400 individuals among artists, curators, activists and theorists. Secondly, it has around 40 dispersed geographic and virtual “nodes” where different exhibitions, performances, events and projects take place. Finally, the event is sustained by an open-ended organisation, within which different people can collaborate without sticking to a pre-defined curatorial design. To accomplish this enterprise node.london aimed at fortifying already existing media arts networks providing them with an infrastructure of coordination that aspires to expand well beyond the limited temporal frame of yhe festival.
node.london proposes a showcase for a variety of practices that span from computer art, to activist media, perfomances video art, installations, visual art, music. What puts in common these different streams is the experimental use of digital or electronic technologies as tools for participation and artistic expression. Notwithstanding the international flair entailed by the event, many of the artists involved focus on London’s reality, advancing original interactions with the enviroment. For some of the artists involved the city is a stage for the display of performances and for others, it represents a space to be mapped. For some, the city is the scene for alternative media production.
Tim Jones, coordinator of the project, explains us how such an experimental project has been developed, and reports on the feedback it has received up from both public and cultural producers.
What is the purpose underlying the overall project?
The idea at the base of node.london was to create an infrastructure for different media artists to present their work. Under the definition media art we comprehend the work of artists dealing with digital electronic technologies. This term can include many different formats such as computer art, installations and performances. We felt that, in order to represent such different practices, we needed to develop a distributed and “open-source” festival rather simply organising an exhibition in an art gallery.
What feedback have you been receiving up to this point?
Very positive ones actually. People are showing much interest and already assume that there is going to be another node.london next year. Moreover there are many groups and artists that are lately requesting to interact with it.We have also been receiving visits from France and Austria.
node.london showcases many artists that deal with practices of urban interaction and mapping. Was this in some ways a choice?
No. We have opened the event to every practice pertaining to media arts. Nonetheless there are many projects that question the city and its architecture, and is interesting to see how the urban dimension is more and more considered decisive by many media artists.
Many of the participants are based in east London. Is this just a coincidence or are media artists particularly connected to east London?
Our long term commitment is to build an infrastructure for media art spanning all over London. At this stage we had to connect different media artists networks that were already active in different parts of the city and many of them are based in East London.
www..nodel.org
node.london proposes a showcase for a variety of practices that span from computer art, to activist media, perfomances video art, installations, visual art, music. What puts in common these different streams is the experimental use of digital or electronic technologies as tools for participation and artistic expression. Notwithstanding the international flair entailed by the event, many of the artists involved focus on London’s reality, advancing original interactions with the enviroment. For some of the artists involved the city is a stage for the display of performances and for others, it represents a space to be mapped. For some, the city is the scene for alternative media production.
Tim Jones, coordinator of the project, explains us how such an experimental project has been developed, and reports on the feedback it has received up from both public and cultural producers.
What is the purpose underlying the overall project?
The idea at the base of node.london was to create an infrastructure for different media artists to present their work. Under the definition media art we comprehend the work of artists dealing with digital electronic technologies. This term can include many different formats such as computer art, installations and performances. We felt that, in order to represent such different practices, we needed to develop a distributed and “open-source” festival rather simply organising an exhibition in an art gallery.
What feedback have you been receiving up to this point?
Very positive ones actually. People are showing much interest and already assume that there is going to be another node.london next year. Moreover there are many groups and artists that are lately requesting to interact with it.We have also been receiving visits from France and Austria.
node.london showcases many artists that deal with practices of urban interaction and mapping. Was this in some ways a choice?
No. We have opened the event to every practice pertaining to media arts. Nonetheless there are many projects that question the city and its architecture, and is interesting to see how the urban dimension is more and more considered decisive by many media artists.
Many of the participants are based in east London. Is this just a coincidence or are media artists particularly connected to east London?
Our long term commitment is to build an infrastructure for media art spanning all over London. At this stage we had to connect different media artists networks that were already active in different parts of the city and many of them are based in East London.
www..nodel.org
lunedì 2 gennaio 2006
Francesco Rosi
THE ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE AND THE INSTITUT FRANÇAIS LONDON RECENTLY PRESENTED A COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE OF FRANCESCO ROSI’S FILMS AT CINÉ LUMIÈRE. PAOLO GERBAUDO TALKS TO ROSI ABOUT BRITISH CINEMA, ‘DOCUMENTED FILMS,’ NATIONAL REALITIES AND HIDDEN POWER IN FILM
There was a period in Italian cinema “when we could not make films without representing the reality around us.” The cinema of Francesco Rosi flourished in that unrepeatable phase - between the end of the second world war and the end of the seventies - marking a second-wave Italian Neo-realism aimed at an analytical investigation of national politics and society.
Now Francesco Rosi is 83 years old, and together with Michelangelo Antonioni, is among the last living directors of a wonderful generation of cinema artists that ranged from Fellini and Visconti to De Sica and Rossellini. The retrospective dedicated to the Italian director by the Italian Cultural Institute and Institute François in collaboration with Conceits Holding and hosted at Cine Lumiere in South Kensington explores a fifty-year career in which Rosi has produced 16 films, from the early The Challenge (1957), to his last film The Truce (1997), based on Primo Levi’s book, starring John Turturro.
A Scene from Francesco Rosi's film of A Death Foretold
At the centre of Rosi’s rich cinematographic career stands the period of the so-called ‘cine-inchieste,’ what he himself calls “not documentary but documented films.” Films like Salvatore Giuliano (1961), The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973) - carefully based on judicial sources and dealing with controversial figures of recent Italian history. Those characters were employed to unfold the complexity of history through the stories of individual men. Powerful and tragic Italians like the national oil company entrepreneur Enrico Mattei and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano condense in themselves all the contradictions of a society suffering from Byzantine intrigues and hidden complicities between political power and organised crime.
While dealing with these characters and their mysterious lives and deaths, Rosi never tried to impose a unique solution. Their appearance on the screen is not a biographical account but much more the metaphor of a society subject to violent and obscure changes where it is hard to grasp cause-effect laws. “I always tried to represent the reality of my country with all my doubts and all my questions, questions to which I am not able to find an answer.” In his later films, there is no ‘end’: the film and all the questions it posed continue in the reality of the spectator after leaving the cinema. In the impossibility to propose a single answer and in the will to question stands the civic character of a cinema that offers deep insights into a nation and its society.
Lucky Luciano“Only by being national a film can be universal,” says Rosi. His films have become part of an analytical and mythical national narration that, for many years, Italian cinema has beenun able to reproduce. Surprisingly, the “poet of civic courage,” as Carlo Testa realistically defined him, does not seem to have many followers.
Do you think this retrospective is a late acknowledgement of your work in Britain?
Absolutely not. I have already had different occasions to present my films to the British public. After the release of The Truce, a retrospective of my work was organised in Edinburgh. I also attended a retrospective organised in Cambridge by The Guardian that put my film Salvatore Giuliano among 100 great films of the cinema history. Years ago, I organised a retrospective of my films in London at Cinema One and Cinema Two, at that time owned by American producer David Stone. But this is my first complete retrospective, which also includes my documentary Naples Diary that I produced after The Hands Over the City.
What is your relationship with British Cinema? Who are the British directors you feel closest to?
I have a high consideration for Ken Loach. I also like the work of John Boorman, particularly Point Blank, not to speak of Richardson and many other ‘myths.’
The Mattei Affair and Lucky Luciano can be considered your last “not documentary but documented” films as you defined them. Why have you decided to leave that genre in your later work?
I did not abandon the genre. I simply continued to make films about Italian reality in a way that could fit better the new topics I was interested in. For example, to narrate the wonderful book The Context by Leonardo Sciascia was something that would have not fit the ‘documented film’ format. All my films, including the inquiry ones, are first of all films about people, about human passions, about the participation of people in history to overcome oppression and pain.
You often speak of cinema as a mirror of national reality. Why do you think that, while Italian Cinema successfully undertook that task after the War and until the seventies, today it just seems to be a broken mirror?
Because today reality is much more complex. The world has changed. Television undertakes a very invasive role in people’s lives and most of the time it subtracts to cinema the possibility of describing reality with the richness of cinematographic analysis. Television is much more rapid in covering historical events but it does so in a much more simplified way. This, nonetheless, does not mean that cinema cannot express itself any more with the rigour that colleagues of my generation and I demonstrated.
In your films there is often the existence of a power that controls reality but remains behind the curtains. Does this demonstrate the limitation of cinema in describing the invisible power?
To represent power is difficult. Sometimes power manifests itself with crime, violence and oppression. But more often it remains behind people that do not seem to have to do with it. When there occurs any violent historical change, there is always someone standing behind observing it. Real power waits for things to happen.
Who are the directors that influenced you and the ones that you think you have influenced?
It is not a question of influence. It is something in the air, the films you see. I saw Elia Kazan’s films and he saw mine. I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s films and he saw mine. I saw Martin Scorsese’s films and he saw mine. There is something in common among us in our sensibility and our way of approaching reality.
What was the last film you saw?
Good Night, Good Luck. I really liked that film. Interestingly enough, the writer, George Clooney, told the Herald Tribune that he had seen my films.
If you had decided to make a film in London, what film would you have made?
A film that has nothing to do with the kind of cinema we have been speaking about. There is a wonderful story, set in London, by Mario Soldati. It deals with a man held prisoner by two women; a story about a discovery of London made through houses, roofs and dorms. However, I have never concretely thought to set one of my films in London, because you have to know the reality of a country, the reality of a city to recount it. How could I recount London which is such a complex and interesting universe.
There was a period in Italian cinema “when we could not make films without representing the reality around us.” The cinema of Francesco Rosi flourished in that unrepeatable phase - between the end of the second world war and the end of the seventies - marking a second-wave Italian Neo-realism aimed at an analytical investigation of national politics and society.
Now Francesco Rosi is 83 years old, and together with Michelangelo Antonioni, is among the last living directors of a wonderful generation of cinema artists that ranged from Fellini and Visconti to De Sica and Rossellini. The retrospective dedicated to the Italian director by the Italian Cultural Institute and Institute François in collaboration with Conceits Holding and hosted at Cine Lumiere in South Kensington explores a fifty-year career in which Rosi has produced 16 films, from the early The Challenge (1957), to his last film The Truce (1997), based on Primo Levi’s book, starring John Turturro.
A Scene from Francesco Rosi's film of A Death Foretold
At the centre of Rosi’s rich cinematographic career stands the period of the so-called ‘cine-inchieste,’ what he himself calls “not documentary but documented films.” Films like Salvatore Giuliano (1961), The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973) - carefully based on judicial sources and dealing with controversial figures of recent Italian history. Those characters were employed to unfold the complexity of history through the stories of individual men. Powerful and tragic Italians like the national oil company entrepreneur Enrico Mattei and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano condense in themselves all the contradictions of a society suffering from Byzantine intrigues and hidden complicities between political power and organised crime.
While dealing with these characters and their mysterious lives and deaths, Rosi never tried to impose a unique solution. Their appearance on the screen is not a biographical account but much more the metaphor of a society subject to violent and obscure changes where it is hard to grasp cause-effect laws. “I always tried to represent the reality of my country with all my doubts and all my questions, questions to which I am not able to find an answer.” In his later films, there is no ‘end’: the film and all the questions it posed continue in the reality of the spectator after leaving the cinema. In the impossibility to propose a single answer and in the will to question stands the civic character of a cinema that offers deep insights into a nation and its society.
Lucky Luciano“Only by being national a film can be universal,” says Rosi. His films have become part of an analytical and mythical national narration that, for many years, Italian cinema has beenun able to reproduce. Surprisingly, the “poet of civic courage,” as Carlo Testa realistically defined him, does not seem to have many followers.
Do you think this retrospective is a late acknowledgement of your work in Britain?
Absolutely not. I have already had different occasions to present my films to the British public. After the release of The Truce, a retrospective of my work was organised in Edinburgh. I also attended a retrospective organised in Cambridge by The Guardian that put my film Salvatore Giuliano among 100 great films of the cinema history. Years ago, I organised a retrospective of my films in London at Cinema One and Cinema Two, at that time owned by American producer David Stone. But this is my first complete retrospective, which also includes my documentary Naples Diary that I produced after The Hands Over the City.
What is your relationship with British Cinema? Who are the British directors you feel closest to?
I have a high consideration for Ken Loach. I also like the work of John Boorman, particularly Point Blank, not to speak of Richardson and many other ‘myths.’
The Mattei Affair and Lucky Luciano can be considered your last “not documentary but documented” films as you defined them. Why have you decided to leave that genre in your later work?
I did not abandon the genre. I simply continued to make films about Italian reality in a way that could fit better the new topics I was interested in. For example, to narrate the wonderful book The Context by Leonardo Sciascia was something that would have not fit the ‘documented film’ format. All my films, including the inquiry ones, are first of all films about people, about human passions, about the participation of people in history to overcome oppression and pain.
You often speak of cinema as a mirror of national reality. Why do you think that, while Italian Cinema successfully undertook that task after the War and until the seventies, today it just seems to be a broken mirror?
Because today reality is much more complex. The world has changed. Television undertakes a very invasive role in people’s lives and most of the time it subtracts to cinema the possibility of describing reality with the richness of cinematographic analysis. Television is much more rapid in covering historical events but it does so in a much more simplified way. This, nonetheless, does not mean that cinema cannot express itself any more with the rigour that colleagues of my generation and I demonstrated.
In your films there is often the existence of a power that controls reality but remains behind the curtains. Does this demonstrate the limitation of cinema in describing the invisible power?
To represent power is difficult. Sometimes power manifests itself with crime, violence and oppression. But more often it remains behind people that do not seem to have to do with it. When there occurs any violent historical change, there is always someone standing behind observing it. Real power waits for things to happen.
Who are the directors that influenced you and the ones that you think you have influenced?
It is not a question of influence. It is something in the air, the films you see. I saw Elia Kazan’s films and he saw mine. I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s films and he saw mine. I saw Martin Scorsese’s films and he saw mine. There is something in common among us in our sensibility and our way of approaching reality.
What was the last film you saw?
Good Night, Good Luck. I really liked that film. Interestingly enough, the writer, George Clooney, told the Herald Tribune that he had seen my films.
If you had decided to make a film in London, what film would you have made?
A film that has nothing to do with the kind of cinema we have been speaking about. There is a wonderful story, set in London, by Mario Soldati. It deals with a man held prisoner by two women; a story about a discovery of London made through houses, roofs and dorms. However, I have never concretely thought to set one of my films in London, because you have to know the reality of a country, the reality of a city to recount it. How could I recount London which is such a complex and interesting universe.
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