A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film

Epilogue: Art Film Redux: Cinepoetics in the New Millennium

Epilogue: Art Film Redux Cinepoetics in the New Millennium By the turn of the millennium, a once-mighty Italian film industry had long been mired in crisis. In 2001 box-office numbers dropped by fifty percent from the previous year, and in 2005 the Berlusconi government slashed funding of the nation’s principal arts program by forty percent.1 The fate of Cinecittà reflected the decline. Faced with crippling budget cuts, the migration of directors to cheaper production sites in Eastern Europe, and waning public interest in the spectacles that made it famous, the forty-acre heart of the Italian film industry had struggled to remain solvent for decades (it was privatized in the 1990s after facing bankruptcy).2 To resuscitate its finances, the studio planned to unveil the $800 million theme park Cinecittà World in 2012, with attractions to include rides based on the films of its much-mourned patron saint, Federico Fellini. Indeed, to many the death of the maestro Fellini in 1993 symbolized the demise of the nation’s cinema as a whole.3 One can understand the pessimism, since the golden age of the neorealist and auteur art film had become a distant memory by this time.4 While statistics point to a decreased public interest in Italian film and its loss of international prestige,5 there has also been talk of a minor renaissance in the nation’s cinema.6 After a long draught at Cannes, Italian films took two of the top awards in 2008, the grand prix going to Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008), an unflinching exposé of Neapolitan organized crime, and the grand jury prize to Paolo Sorrentino’s Il divo (2008), a hallucinatory portrait of seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti, tried for Mafia collusion and ordering the death of a rival journalist among other crimes. A range of other sources in Italy and abroad confirms the good news from Cannes.7 A cause for this limited resurgence stems from a return to the mix of aesthetic exploration and sociopolitical inquiry that marked the art-film tradition, combining its auteurist “cinema of poetry” with a creative interpretation of neorealism’s legacy. In contrast to Lino Miccichè’s notorious label of recent filmmakers as the “heirs of nothing,”8 some directors are rather the 144 A Cinema of Poetry heirs of the neorealist exhortation to “remake Italy” and the auteurist mandate of translating ethical engagement into a personal artistic vision. Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah captured critical attention for its use of such trademark neorealist techniques as nonprofessional actors, on-location shooting, local dialect, and a focus on the poor and marginal. But when reminded of the connection, Garrone insisted that neorealism proper involved a specific cinematic response to the socioeconomic plight of postwar Italy. His remark reveals the idiosyncratic nature of his relationship with the legendary movement in a film that cannot be reduced to a simple recapitulation of neorealist formulas. His scenes of violence are more graphic than any ever dreamed of by the neorealists—even the Nazi torture of partisans in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City pales in comparison to the bloodletting in Gomorrah . Moreover, Garrone alternates gritty reportage from the Neapolitan urban wastelands with more surreal sequences, including an eerie shot of two crazed teenage boys wearing only underwear and randomly firing their machine guns on a beach. Paolo Sorrentino’s Il divo also balances its inquiry into the facts with dreamlike passages, such as when the insomniac Andreotti walks through the predawn streets of Rome with his bodyguards in tow on his way to morning mass. The livid-colored Andreotti seems embalmed in his stiff gait, and the empty streets bear the same dim lighting as the interior of the church, part of the film’s strategy of trumping the natural with the artificial. A later shot of Andreotti’s coalition reveals a commedia dell’arte–like troupe of cronies often filmed from low angles to accentuate their menacing presence, especially the enormous parliamentarian Sbardella, alias Lo squalo (The Shark). Il divo derives its light from a chiaroscuro forebear, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films, which anticipate Sorrentino’s handling of dramatic interior contrasts to suggest intrigue, secrecy, even foul play. Sorrentino also borrows from Coppola his grisly sense of montage: Il divo begins with a multiple murder scene that recalls the spliced murders and Christening at the conclusion of The Godfather, where Michael Corleone’s henchmen eliminate his enemies while their boss renounces Satan and all...