“Parole che mi rappresentano poco…”
Two weeks ago I got an email marked ‘urgent’ from the producer Filmauro telling me that they had been trying to contact me in my office and that Luigi De Laurentiis needed to talk to me. This surprised me: I had tried to organize a mini-festival of Filmauro films as part of the 2011 Cambridge Film Festival, showing them with a ‘Carry On’ film or two and perhaps with Love Actually - there was even talk of getting Richard Curtis to participate - and I had an ongoing correspondence with De Laurentiis about this until he went quiet. I had the impression he didn’t really know what a film festival was - he kept saying things like ‘noi stiamo molto attenti all’intellectual property’, as if I was trying to steal his films for my own dubious purposes, rather than, well, generously organizing an event that would offer free advertising for his company! Anyway, here he was contacting me again - could he have changed his mind?
Some chance - it appeared he was embarrassed by a couple of the transcriptions of his words in his interview with me, and he rang me on my mobile to suss out whether I’d change the material available here and here. De Laurentiis had made some disdainful comments in our interview about fans and about actors (in Natale a New York), and had used some colourful language to describe the comic appeal of forms of prejudice to a popular audience. Apparently Christian De Sica had contacted him with the text from the blog, drawing his attention to the brutta figura De Laurentiis made therein and suggesting that a respected actor like Massimo Ghini might be offended by Luigi’s dismissive comments.
Let me just register my intense sense of flattery at being read by my idol Christian De Sica. Now let us move on.
As I explained in previous posts, I have tried to retain something of the feeling of a verbal exchange in the interview transcripts and have resisted cleaning up the language - whether lexically or grammatically - as far as possible. My intention is to communicate the sense of a lively debate on a controversial topic, and I think of this as a homage to the cinepanettone itself, so often criticized for its vernacular, and which so often has its language, in the DVD subtitles ‘per non udenti’ invaluable to the foreign scholar, rendered grammatically and lexically less demotic. I also wanted to represent more accurately the experience of talking to my various interviewees: I admit, my impression of De Laurentiis was of an affluent and arrogant playboy type. He works very hard, I don’t doubt (I witnessed this during our interview, actually, as he took many calls), but he regarded me as an alien and lower form of life. Why should I sandpaper my impressions?
Well, I did agree to change his words. I suggested he mail me his preferred versions of the offending sections and have used them to adapt the text (see the sections in bold here). My thinking was as follows. De Laurentiis was helpful to me in our interview - as far as I can tell, he was honest in his answers - and I remain grateful to him, as to the rest of my interviewees. I also didn’t want to spoil future scholars’ chances of getting access to these people. I therefore felt it right to allow him to modify his comments, even as I have retained, against his wishes, a softened version of the disdainful reference to the fans because I think it represents accurately the company’s attitude.
De Laurentiis asserted in his email (8 May) that, in the original transcription, ‘ci sono dei linguaggi che non mi rappresentano molto. Probabile colpa di qualche misunderstanding dei concepts.’ This seems to suggest that I misunderstood him, but allow me to insist that this was not the case. The transcripts were carefully worked to retain the tone of the interviewees’ discourse, and to accord with an impression gained from attentive listening on the occasion of the interview itself. Anyway, readers can judge for themselves.
Let us now praise famous men
In these weeks, along with exam correction at Leeds and preparation for papers and classes at the Postfeminism conference and at the University in Bologna, as well as for the CineRoma graduate seminar organized with Notre Dame University, I’m working on finishing the book of this project, sending a chapter at a time to the patient translators Luca Peretti and Riccardo Antonangeli. I’ve just finished rewriting the introductory chapter, an expanded version of an article already published and available here. At the end of the chapter I try to make explicit my intellectual approach and the theoretical underpinnings of the project, making specific reference to two intellectual greats, Mikhail Bakhtin (encountered several times already in this blog) and Pierre Bourdieu. Here’s what I have written:
Interview transcripts: final draft
Christian speaks
Here is the final draft of the edited transcripts of the cinepanettone interviews which were excerpted in the previous seven posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). This puts all those transcripts together, or the most interesting bits, and is the draft - all 18,500 words of it - I hope to include in the project monograph. I have tried to do something formally satisfying as well as informative with the material Luca Peretti and myself got in our conversations with fans, actors, directors, screenwriters, editors, composers, critics, scholars and sceptics - all of whom I have tried to grant an equal authority in a discursive collage. I have attempted to retain something of the feeling of a verbal exchange, even to the extent of annoying at least two of our interviewees who objected to their informal representation in the online transcripts (I was obliged to modify their contributions). The chapter in the book will have an introduction, and perhaps I’ll rearrange some of the sections below, but if readers agree the following is lively and engrossing I don’t intend to edit it any further. (But see here for information about a change I did make…)
Interview transcripts (7): Tifosi (Canu, Di Nocera, Proietti, Tamburini)
In this seventh and last edited transcript from the interviews conducted by Luca Peretti and myself on the cinepanettone I excerpt the words of four fans of the filone.
Lorenzo Proietti
Lorenzo Proietti is an avid filmgoer and also a cinepanettone regular – a combination demonstrated by all these interviewees and one that challenges the stereotype of the typical cinepanettone consumer who goes to the cinema just once a year. I spoke to Lorenzo in December 2010 in his office in the building in Rome where he works as a concierge. He showed me the tin box kept there which contained the ticket stubs for every movie he’d seen at the cinema since the turn of the century: a substantial batch.
Pietro Di Nocera
I have discussed here my interview with Pietro Di Nocera (in a posh Roman hotel bar in April 2011), one of the organizers of the Vacanze di Natale (1983) fan club and website. He is passionate about the original but scornful of the other films – especially those of Neri Parenti – though he admits to seeing them and to laughing.
Enrico Tamburini and Massimiliano Canu of cinepanettoni.it
I spoke by Skype videocall in February 2011 to the two organizers of a cinepanettone fan website based in Udine (I discuss the interview here). Massimiliano Canu and Enrico Tamburini were highly engaged with the filone and the kind of comedy they felt it represented. They were much less interested in the directors than the actors, and, interestingly, seemed to be embarrassed by the vulgarity held to be characteristic of the films and their exploitative representation of women.
Interview transcripts (6): parlano gli scettici (Antonangeli, Garofalo, Missaglia, Schirò, Uva)
In this sixth edited transcript from the interviews conducted by Luca Peretti and myself on the cinepanettone I excerpt the words of four members of a focus group of male university graduates aged between twenty-four and twenty-six: Riccardo Antonangeli, Damiano Garofalo, Nicola Missaglia and Enrico Schirò. As I explained to them, there were representatives for us of a certa intellighentsia who I hoped would help us to discern the substance of, and get some of the reasons for, a widespread dismissive feeling towards the cinepanettone on the part of those who consider themselves educated and culturally well-informed. The next post will be about the fans of the cinepanettone, but these are among the sceptics: I want to take seriously the perceptions of the public, sympathetic or unsympathetic, to help to understand and analyse the appeal or not of the film di Natale.
Gli scettici: Garofalo, Antonangeli, Schirò, Missaglia
Joining the four members of the focus group is the academic Christian Uva, who teaches film at Roma Tre University and who has appeared several times in this blog (see here and here). Christian is the author of the best study I’ve found of the films of Neri Parenti, in which he is brilliant on the persona of Christian De Sica (see the end of this post for details). Our conversation focussed on the ideology of the cinepanettone and on some of its formal characteristics.
Appassionati per caso: Srivastava, Uva, O’Leary
Interview transcripts (5): parlano gli attori (Boldi, De Sica, Ghini, Tabita)
Boldi and De Sica: even great love stories must end
Continuing from four previous posts (here, here, here, and here), more edited transcripts of the interviews myself and Luca Peretti have done about the cinepanettone, this time with the actors Massimo Boldi, Christian De Sica, Massimo Ghini and Barbara Tabita.
Natale in Sud Africa:Ghini, gurning, and Belen, verso
These were the most difficult interviews to do, and have generated the least interesting results - perhaps. Actors are very practiced at interviews and will often repeat material they know has entertained in the past. This was certainly the case with De Sica, who repeated stuff almost verbatim I had read elsewhere (the context itself was unfortunate: his mother had died the previous night after a long illness, but De Sica graciously preferred to go ahead with his appointments). Ghini’s was less an interview than a monologue that Luca and myself interrupted at irregular intervals. But at least those two interviews were face to face, which meant one could probe and respond politely. I’ve discussed the problems of my skypephone interview (audio only) with Boldi here, and I only recently managed to get an interview with a woman involved in the cinepanettoni, having failed to convince both Nancy Brilli and Sabrina Ferilli that I was anything but a sinister stalker geek. A colleague happened to know the Sicilian actor Barbara Tabita, who stared in Natale in Sud Africa, and the latter was kind enough to reply by email (from her iPhone) to my questions. Inevitably, I think, her responses were a little anecdotal and I would have liked to have been able to ask supplementary questions about a theme she was most interesting on, that of the body of female actor in a masculinist cinema culture.
The interview with Boldi took place in just before Christmas 2010, with De Sica and Ghini in January 2011, and Barbara Tabita sent me her answers by email in February 2012. My questions are signaled with an ‘A’. The interviews have been transcribed by Luca and Damiano Garofalo - sincere thanks to both of them.
Natale in Sud Africa: De Sica and Tabita on the menu
Massimo Boldi. Discuss.
How can we explain Massimo Boldi? It’s not a question intended ironically - I enjoy Boldi and have tried to unpack some of his appeal here. It’s a question that could be asked of any actor, but it’s particularly interesting in the case of Boldi because he is so often pilloried, while retaining his popularity. Boldi seems to have begun his career with quite an aggressive style of humour, seen to be typical of Italian TV (stampo Berlusca)in the 1980s (though I can’t find any clips online), and he has always liked to insert surreal elements in his performances. But something about him - body shape, mobile infantile face, clumsiness (he is an Italian ‘Mr Bin’ in 1998’s Paparazzi), mimicry - seems to have also (always?) appealed to kids.
In the interviews I have been excerpting in the last few posts, some of those who worked with Boldi - as actor and as actor/producer - have discussed aspects of his persona and his appeal. I asked Carlo and Enrico Vanzina about working with him on the first film he made after the split with Filmauro,Olé (2006), directed by Carlo Vanzina, scripted by both brothers, and produced by Medusa.
ENRICO VANZINA: Boldi è uscito dai film di Natale e… probabilmente, in quel momento si pensava che fosse quasi più forte lui di De Sica da solo… sembrava che nell’incasso del film di Natale Boldi desse più forza… perché era più comico, perché aveva il Nord, perché era per i più bambini…
[Olé] era un film molto Disney da un certo punto di vista… c’erano i sogni… In più c’è una grande svolta: Boldi fa un ruolo sentimentale!
CARLO VANZINA: Allora abbiamo pensato che siccome si rivolgeva… soprattutto Boldi, staccandosi da De Sica aveva un pubblico più di ragazzini… abbiamo pensato di trovare una cosa un pochino più immersa nel mondo anche dei ragazzi… Poi, adesso, il film era molto leggero… nel senso che… poi Boldi voleva fare un film non volgare, voleva fare un film un po’ alla Disney…
To note in these remarks are four elements: Boldi’s perceived popularity, something that made Medusa invest in a film constructed around him; his popularity particularly in the North of Italy, seen to be difficult to achieve for other comic actors (e.g. Carlo Verdone, too identified with Roma ladrona); his popularity particularly with kids; and finally, the use of the term ‘Disney’. Paolo Costella, who directed Boldi in A Natale mi sposo (2010; he also co-wrote, as he did Boldi’s La fidanzata di papá of 2008) also talks of this ‘Disney’ aspect:
PAOLO COSTELLA: il mondo di Massimo Boldi, che è uno strano confine tra una volgarità e una comicità molto facile e invece una ingenuità, lui dice spesso disneyana e tanti non capiscono perché […] però invece qualche cosa nell’anima un po’ candida che ha lui come personaggio, qualche cosa c’è.
Boldi is, then, a paradoxical beast. His flabbiness equips him to play the grotesque body, as discussed here, but he is also something like an animated character that talks in funny voices and suffers comic misadventures. The Vanzinas alluded in our interview to using this softer second aspect in their Boldi tv series for Canale 5, Un ciclone in famiglia (2005-8). I’ve only watched the first episode, but it’s effectively made light comedy in the consolatory mode intended for, I’d guess, an older (post-55) and a younger (pre-11) audience. It marries gorgeous international postcard vistas with odd couple comedy and nuclear family units as conventional and petit bourgeois as the most conservative palinsesto programmer could want, even if there’s a dose too of soap opera style issuefying (teenage pregnancy and financial difficulty). The pace of the editing is mainly glacial, with special dwelling on two-shots in which Boldi and his Roman opposite number (and second fiddle), played by Maurizio Mattioli (below), do their schtick. (Mattioli and Boldi go way back, for example to a great episode in Fratelli d’Italia, 1989.)
On the evidence of the episode I watched, the ‘vulgarity’ reviled in the cinepanettone is present in the show, but carefully rationed, and associated not with Boldi but with Mattioli’s physically much larger character, who once almost pronounces ‘li mortac…’ and permafarts his way (hilariously) through a night they share in a letto matrimoniale in a Swiss pension.
As I say, it all works very well. Have a listen to the theme song (text here if required) and notice Boldi’s interjections.
The figure of the harassed pater familias has become the default setting for Boldi since Merry Christmas (2001), but in this song has been cleverly distilled to its essential elements of needy/greedy offspring and father/wallet. Remarkable though is the mode of Boldi’s interjections: the ‘io pago’ in a caricature Neapolitan accent is a version of a famous line of Totò’s in the 1950 (?) film 47 morto che parla (dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia), seen and heard here:
Notice that Boldi’s rendition of the line is in a more exaggerated Neapolitan than Totò’s (a Milanese’s idea of the Neapolitan accent perhaps). Boldi is the one who speaks in a funny voice, the cuddly comedy dad par excellence. I don’t think that the allusion is meant specifically to the Totò film (Totò plays a miser, with a nod to Molière); it’s rather that a phrase out there in the culture, known by everyone and employed jocularly in constantly renewed contexts, like Alberto Sordi’s ‘lavoratori’ followed by a raspberry noise from I vitelloni, has been appropriated for the purposes of (a) signalling the tone of the show; (b) providing information about the rueful role the father is forced to play, as well as indicating his central place in the narrative; (c) asserting the status of Boldi as (like Totò) an indulged national figure.
Interview transcripts (4): registi e sceneggiatori (Paolo Costella, Enrico Oldoini, Neri Parenti, Carlo Vanzina, Enrico Vanzina)
‘Neanche Shrek fa riferimento alla realtà americana.’ (Neri Parenti)
Costella, Oldoini, Parenti
Continuing from the three previous posts (here, here, and here), more edited transcripts of the interviews myself and Luca Peretti have done about the cinepanettone, in this case of the screenwriters and/or directors, Paolo Costella (who directed the 2010 Boldi film A Natale mi sposo), Enrico Oldoini (who has also done a Boldi film and several Filmauro films in the 1990s), of stalwart cinepanettone writer and helmer Neri Parenti (too many films to mention), and Carlo and Enrico Vanzina, the writing/directing team who did the first cinepanettone (though they would refuse the term) and several since (they scripted 2011’s Vacanze di Natale a Cortina with Neri Parenti).
Carlo and Enrico Vanzina
The interviews with Paolo Costella and Neri Parenti took place in December 2010 (when Natale in Sud Africa was still on release). I spoke to the Vanzinas in February 2011 (Enrico twice) and a cautious Enrico Oldoini in April.
My questions are signaled with an ‘A’, and Luca’s with an ‘L’. The interviews have been transcribed by Luca and Damiano Garofalo - sincere thanks to both of them.
Interview transcripts (3): addetti ai lavori (Luigi De Laurentiis, Luca Montanari, Bruno Zambrini)
Parlano un produttore, un montatore, un compositore
Continuing from the two previous posts (here, and here), more edited transcripts of the interviews myself and Luca Peretti have done about the cinepanettone, in this case of the editor and composer, Luca Montanari and Bruno Zambrini (above), who have worked with director Neri Parenti for many years, and with Luigi De Laurentiis (he’s one of the hunks below) of Filmauro, son of Aurelio, who has taken increasing control of the production of the film di Natale in recent years. The interview with De Laurentiis took place in a palatial room in the Filmauro HQ next to the Quirinale. We talked to Bruno Zambrini in the room where he does his composing on the piano at his home in Rome, and to Luca Montanari (a keen fly fisherman, as he told us) in a film studio, also in Rome, where he was editing a TV fiction. The interviews took place in January (Montanari and Zambrini) and April (De Larentiis) 2011. Most of the material here is from De Laurentiis because he could tell us about the organization of the year’s work on the annual film.
Interview transcripts (2): parlano alcuni sceneggiatori (Borsatti, Brizzi, Marciano, Martani)
Parlano alcuni sceneggiatori, del cinepanettone e no
Continuing from the previous post, here are some more edited transcripts of the interviews myself and Luca Peretti have done about the cinepanettone, in this case of two screenwriters historically involved with the filone, Fausto Brizzi and Marco Martani.
Brizzi and Martani established with Neri Parenti the formula that is considered the cinepanettone doc, and which led to the films’ created success in the last decade.
We also spoke to Cristina Borsatti, a script doctor, writer and teacher, about an article she had written in Film TV which deals with product placement in Natale in Sud Africa (she had actually worked on product placement in Natale in Crociera -for the press office associated with the cruise ship company that had allowed the use of ship), and the shortcomings of the film’s script.
Finally, I include here excerpts from my conversation with Francesca Marciano (above), a very experienced screenwriter who has worked with Carlo Verdone and Wilma Labate among others (Francesca heard about the project and asked to meet).
In transcribing the interviews (all of which took place in Rome in December 2010 and January 2011), we decided to maintain the natural pauses and hesitations characteristic of ordinary speech, but this has been done below inconsistently, which may give the impression the men were less hesitant than the women. This will be cleaned up in the final edit, which will have to be much shorter. Questions are signalled with an ‘A’ for Alan and ‘L’ for Luca. Readers are warmly invited to suggest what elements of the conversations they find most interesting.
Interview transcripts (1): parlano i critici (Della Casa, Giusti, Silvestri)
I’m working though the transcripts of the interviews myself and Luca Peretti have done about the cinepanettone, accounts of which can be found in the following posts:
- A week of Interviews
- On interviewing method
- Massimo Boldi on his comedy
- Neri Parenti on beginning work on the cinepanettone every January
- Focus group
- Two films, two scholars, two directors, one cabbie and a critic
- Marco Martani on multiple address
My plan is to construct a virtual roundtable discussion on the cinepanettone taking in a variety of perspectives. The eventual thing should be about 10,000 words (to be published in the project monograph) but I’m posting here the work in progress, as I edit the transcripts and organize them thematically. In transcribing the interviews we decided to maintain the natural pauses, hesitations, rewordings and so on of ordinary speech (and the punctuation mark most often employed is the ellipsis). These will probably have to be replaced and cleaned up in the final version, but I retain most of them here, for the record.
In this first batch, I have juxtaposed the words of three left-wing critics, all somewhat sympathetic to the cinepanettone: Stefano (detto Steve) Della Casa, expert on popular cinema and presenter of RAI Tre daily radio show on cinema ‘Hollywood Party’ (interviewed December 2010); Marco Giusti, arbiter of Italian cult cinema and film critic at il manifesto (interviewed December 2010); Silvana Silvestri, also film critic for il manifesto and versatile writer on film (interviewed January 2011). My questions are signalled with an ‘A’ for Alan. I begin by trying to elicit the history of the Christmas outing to the cinema…
Italian National Cinema… the Cinepanettone?
‘Above all else, comedy is an invitation to belong.’ (Andy Medhurst)
Massimo Boldi performs the ‘grotesque body’ in A Natale mi sposo
I’m writing a chapter on the cinepanettone for Peter Bondanella’s The Italian Cinema Book (BFI), a volume which, accordingly to Peter’s blurb,
will provide an accessible and innovative consideration of major critical issues in the history of the Italian cinema […]. This multi-authored work aims at moving beyond familiar approaches to the Italian cinema and will deal with a number of historical, cultural, and theoretical issues, including the evolution of Italian film culture over a century, the rise of Italian film stars, the structure of the film industry, the importance of the art film as well as the genre film, and the representation of Italian culture and history by the filmic image. […] Contributors will include not only some of the most distinguished senior scholars, critics, and film historians from a variety of national critical traditions but also some of the brightest and most innovative young scholars working in this field.
I’ll leave Peter’s description stand unremarked, but want to excerpt here some of the material I’m putting in my chapter. My argument, based on material in Catherine O’Rawe and my ‘Against Realism’ article, and on other stuff on the audiences for the cinepanettone discussed already in this blog, is that the cinepanettone has a good claim to be considered as ‘Italian National Cinema’ – as good a claim at least as the auteurist and realist canon of films that have been well received abroad and adduced as part of a kind of diplomatic project for the celebration of Italian culture. But what about what Italians actually watch in great numbers, and with regularity for many years? Isn’t that national cinema too? Here are some extracts from a draft of the chapter (the images are illustrations to the descriptive part of the article which I have not included because too familiar to the any readers of this blog).
Gestural energy: Christian De Sica in Natale a Beverly Hills
My purpose here is to claim for the cinepanettone the status of ‘Italian national cinema’. To argue as much is to challenge the conventional idea that Italian national cinema is comprised only of realist and auteurist works that have been appreciated outside Italy itself. It is also to refuse the idea that Italian national cinema should be conceived of as a kind of diplomatic project intended to represent the ‘best’ of the country’s cinematic culture at an international level. Given the contested quality and status of the filone it may seem a paradoxical gesture, but it is an essential one, to place the cinepanettone not at the margins but at the centre of discourse about Italian cinema.
National cultures have traditionally served as a way of demarcating academic areas of interest and, at least in the Anglophone academy, film studies have taken a foothold in departments of modern languages. Italianist cinema scholars therefore have a stake in retaining the national as a category of description, especially as the status of cinema studies was initially precarious within what were traditionally schools of literature, linguistics and history. It was institutionally imperative to assert a canon of individual film texts of undoubted aesthetic or ethical appeal, a canon (by analogy with the received litany of literary greats) that had ‘made Italy’ – indeed, that had ‘made Italians’.
In a context such as this, the study of genre cinema was unthinkable, and what emerged was a teaching and research syllabus that ignored most of the ‘popular’ in the sense of commercially successful within Italy itself. Italian cinema came to mean neorealism and the great auteurs, and the legacy of this approach is still with us today.
This legacy manifests itself in scholarship that defines its role in edifying and paternalistic terms, and that deals exclusively with the Italian cinema (however defined) the scholars believe should be known and admired rather than the range of films that have actually been produced and watched in Italy. This is often accompanied by a reflectionist model which sees a putative ‘best’ cinema as the ‘mirror’ of the Italian nation. In the Anglophone academy, this approach takes the form of a diplomatic project to celebrate those texts that resound to the glory of Italy, and the work of many writers on Italian film, perhaps especially in North America, is conceived precisely in terms of proselytizing for an Italian national culture.
Such a nationalistic cinema history has come in for criticism from within Italian cinema studies itself, from political and other perspectives. While areas of the discipline remain conservative, some have made the move from an essentializing model, in which the national cinema is seen as a direct reflection or expression of the national culture, to a constructivist model, in which the cinema is analysed as one of the means through which the ‘imagined community’ of the nation is posited and pictured. Some refuse the national cinema paradigm altogether, whether because it elides cultural discontinuities and the experience of, say, Italy’s minorities and incoming migrants, or because cinema is itself a transnational phenomenon, drawing themes, technologies, personnel and funding from across borders, and with designs on an international market.
I deploy the concept of national cinema here for strategic reasons, in order to put the experience and taste of a despised popular audience at the centre of our concerns. Some have argued that comedy ought to be considered as Italy’s quintessential national mode, based both on its commercial popularity and on its ability to ‘touch on themes very close and particular to the culture’ (Casetti and Salvemini 2007: 25). But I believe we should give equal attention to the context of the consumption of the cinepanettoni as to the content of the films (i.e., their themes close to the culture). In other words, the cinepanettone can be argued to be Italy’s national cinema because of its consumption within Italy itself and its adoption as part of annual holiday ritual, something demonstrated by the longevity and scale of its success within Italy itself.
A shocking interruption to the comedy in Natale in crociera
The divisive character of the films’ success is, ironically, another reason we can speak of them as Italian national cinema: the fact that they are as deplored as they are enjoyed suggests the cinepanettoni are engaged in a contested subtending of national identities. This is done, I argue, through ‘pleasurable politcs’, and I return to material discussed in a previous blog post to make my point. The pleasurable politics of the cinepanettone are similar to those identified by Andy Medhurst (2007: 69) in his (sympathetic) analysis of the reactionary content of some English stand-up comedy: ‘a politics of defence not attack, of refusal not uprising, of embracing your own, of consolidation against condescension’. That is to say, in its carnivalesque celebration of socially inappropriate behaviour and values, the cinepanettone also offers, precisely, a sense of community, even of home. Laughing, writes Medhurst, you feel at home:
It’s all about belonging, and the comic text or practitioner can call on a variety of devices in proffering the invitation. Belonging is why most television comedies have laugh tracks, why narrative film comedies will fade or cut or leave visual pauses when they think a great line has just been delivered and thereby reassure the audience that this is the right time to laugh, why stand-up comedians are filmed in theatres or studios with audiences present and why there are frequent cuts away from the comic to the convulsed consumers, why there are few more rapturous communal experiences than being in an audience rocking and hooting at the same gag, and why there are fewer finer pleasures in life than a group of old friends remembering and cementing their bonds through helpless, heedless laughter. (p. 20)
The ritual consumption of the cinepanettone perhaps offers precisely this: a feeling of home, as the spectator enjoys the antics of his or her fellow Italians abroad.
I am arguing that the cinepanettone constitutes Italian national cinema because of its consumption within Italy itself and its adoption as part of annual holiday ritual, something demonstrated by the longevity and scale of its intra-national success. That success may be fading, but the cinepanettone remains a perfect illustration of the process, constructive and contested, of imagining the national community. For many the cinepanettoni are a shared celebration, an assertion of community; for others, of course, the very idea these films could speak of or for ‘us’ is appalling. But the cinepanettone has been, and may be still, the Italian national comic genre par excellence.
_______________
References
Casetti, F. and Salvemini, S. (2007) È tutto un altro film: più coraggio e più idee per il cinema italiano (Milan: Egea)
Medhurst, A. (2007) A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities (London: Routledge)
A fishy something again
In the previous post I wrote about models for some of the comic situations or visual jokes in the cinepanettone. I mentioned that A Fish Called Wanda seemed to be a particular point of reference. To confirm this, I illustrate a couple of scenes from the film.
I wrote in the previous post about flattened animals. In the films discussed there, these animals (mice, cats, guinea pigs) are first flattened and then inflated. The latter doesn’t happen in A Fish Called Wanda where a plot strand concerns Michael Palin’s character Ken’s attempts to kill a witness who has implicated his jewel thief boss. She is a bad tempered old woman (Patricia Hayes) with three small yapping dogs (one of which has been run over by a car, above). The joke is that Ken is a mild mannered animal lover but he accidentally kills all three of the horrible little creatures before the old woman finally dies of a heart attack, much to Ken’s delight, as seen here.
This scene anticipates some of the taboo busting violence to animals and the aged in Neri Parenti’s cinepanettoni of the new century, as in this scene from Natale in crociera (2007), in which a naked Christian De Sica, ejected from his lover’s apartment, knocks an old lady unconscious in order to use her poodle to mask his modesty.
Why would A Fish Called Wanda have been such a key source? Well, although production values in the film (particularly the lighting) seem dated now, the camera work and editing, and so the staging of the humour, are extremely precise. The casting of the ensemble is almost perfect and the performances are great, each part played with conviction and a kind of joy. And last but not least, it makes a strong part of its appeal its transgressive aspect and potential to offend: it’s misogynist hogwash (John Cleese’s Archie is married to a shrew, played with relish by Maria Aitken, and his weakness for cute young American flesh vindicated in advance); the film finds hilarity in disability (Michael Palin’s animal-loving conman with a stutter, as seen above); the use of profanity throughout; the representation of a woman’s frank sexual (and masturbatory) desire; and, as we have seen, a refusal to respect the traditionally protected categories of animals and the aged.
As my reference to misogyny above indicates, I do not pretend there is no ideological aspect to all this, but I do think that it challenges those who want to describe the cinepanettone as essentially ‘right wing’. I have invoked a sophisticated version of this position in an earlier post on the grotesque body in the cinepanettone. I quoted there the Italian academic (and good friend of mine) Christian Uva as writing that the ‘cattiveria’ in the cinepanettone is ‘serialmente e programmaticamente indirizzata verso precisi obiettivi che, come visto, sono sempre gli stessi, e cioè le cosiddette categorie deboli, quali le donne, gli anziani, gli omosessuali’ ( from ‘La politica del panettone’, in Michele Picchi and Christian Uva, Destra e sinistra nel cinema italiano: film e immaginario politico dagli anni ’60 al nuovo millennio (Rome: Edizioni Interculturali, 2006), pp. 165-72 (pp. 169-70)). I want to suggest that the transgressive/taboo busting aspect of the cinepanettone operates at a ‘lower’ or at least another level than that of politics per se. Uva notes this too when he goes on to say that ‘Culture’ as such is presented in the films as a ‘noioso patrimonio di “sfigati” esclusi dalla grande orgia della vita’ (p. 170). It’s an old argument (it’s been going on for decades in relation to the real liberatory potential of carnival and the carnivalesque as paeaned in Bahktin): is the breaking of taboos and the transgressive unmasking of politeness a challenge to oppression, or is it rather the brazen confirmation of principles and prejudices conventionally disavowed? My position would be that this question cannot be answered in the abstract. It’s an obvious enough point to make that it will always be historically and context specific, but I want to remind ourselves also that the person watching and listening, laughing or not, has a competence not to be underestimated, and most can tell the difference between audio-visual narratives and reality.
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ps. a couple of points. Firstly, as I have already mentioned, one of the things that seems to annoy about the cinepanettone is the fact that its jokes are often unrelated to plot (this is a theme in Franceso Piccolo’s essay on Natale a Miami). Thus, De Sica’s leveling of the vecchia is a purely spectacular moment, with no purchase in the story, whereas our enjoyment of the death of the old lady in Wanda (and Ken’s reaction to it) is justified by its place in the plot and by the iterative motif+variation in the film. Secondly, an interesting further aspect of the ‘transgression’ in Wanda is the emphasis put on the deliberate ‘constructedness’ of Jamie Lee Curtis’ Wanda, who is seen to choose costume and and performance style according to the seductive purpose at hand; at one point she is even shown bleaching the hair on her top lip. (This is in opposition to the carefully disavowed construction of ‘natural’ beauty of the desirable woman in even as transgressive film as There’s Something about Mary - an intertext omnipresent also in the cinepanettone - where Cameron Diaz is, if I remember, never shown as anything but gorgeous and fully formed.)
pps. It occurs to me to complicate a little my point in the post-scriptum about jokes in the cinepanettone being unrelated to plot. Yes, our enjoyment of the delayed death of the old lady in Wanda is justified by its place in the plot and Ken’s repeated bungling attempts to rub her out, but Wanda is a single film (there was a sequel made, but that’s another story). Yes, many of the jokes in the cinepanettoni might be purely spectacular moments with no purchase in the story, but it is a serial form, and the effect between films is cumulative, in a different but analogous way to the Ken/old lady events in Wanda.
More comedy models and motifs in the cinepanettone
Following on from the previous post in which I pointed out possible sources for the banterous ‘buddy’ relationships in Natale in Sud Africa (2010), and an earlier entry in which I pointed out the echoes in a Neri Parenti film of a satirical motif from the commedia all’italiana, I want to post here a few clips and photos to illustrate further comedy models for the cinepanettoni.
Director Neri Parenti’s fondness for silent comedy (he has made a pair of films with Paolo Villaggio and Renato Pozzetto entitled Le comiche (1990, 1991) - the title also once given to programmes of silent comedy on Italian TV), slapstick and violent cartoons is well known. These first few clips illustrate something of this taste.
Ignore for now - if you can - the race and gender issues in the following clip from Parenti’s Natale a Rio (2008) and concentrate instead on the cartoon inflation of the dead cat. Christian De Sica told me that he and Ghini (the two actors in the clip) were annoyed at how unpersuasive the fake cat was (and the digital rendition is clumsy too) but it seems to me that this absence of realism allows the viewer to collaborate in the joke.
Beasts, Buddies and Love Interests, or, Down Africa Way
The cinepanettone often includes elements of the comic buddy movie. It was built for many years, of course, around the rapport between Massimo Boldi and Christian De Sica. Their personae and physical types were too different, though, for them to be conventional buddies, who are often marked by similarity. And in fact in the cinepanettone doc of the first years of this century, Boldi and De Sica often share only a few scenes in each movie, and they will occupy different story strands in the doubled or tripled plot. When Boldi defected after Natale a Miami (2005) the makers had to find new partners for De Sica. Already in Miami he had been paired up with Massimo Ghini - but their pairing was standard fare for sexual farce, with comic misunderstandings and coital embarrassments prominent. However, by the time we get to Natale a Rio (2008) we find the same pair traveling together and getting into location-specific scrapes. There is an attempt by the makers, I think, to build a buddy duo on something like the model of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in their ‘Road to…’ films, although there are many possible models and the comparison is obviously inexact without an equivalent to Bing’s singing and Bob’s childlike bumbling.
Bing and Bob on a raft on the road to Morocco
The ‘Road to…’ model is more prominent, though, in Natale in Sud Africa (2010) in which, however, de Sica and Ghini occupy different story strands, being paired with Max Tortora and Giorgio Panariello respectively. One scene in Road to Morocco (1942) - which perhaps suggested itself for its (ostensible) African location as well as its buddy duo - may have inspired two specific scenes in Natale in Sud Africa. (Of course, there will be very many potential prototypes in the history of the cinema, but I think it’s enough to identify the type of situation without having to assert a specific influence. It’s interesting, by the way, that Road to Morocco was not a model in Natale sul Nilo (2002).) Here’s the scene (it directly follows the one reproduced above) from Road to Morocco. Note how it begins with banter between the traveling buddies, and how the animal is the vehicle of the ‘reconciliation’. Note the crude special effect of the superimposition of the camel’s head onto the image: the none too persuasive aspect of this (though it may have been more plausible to 1940s eyes) adds to the sense of playfulness: the viewer is in on, and asked to countenance, the silly joke. (Note too the reference to the aunt…)
As I say, the scene seems to anticipate two consecutive and paired scenes in Natale sul Nilo, when both pairs of men encounter snakes - one rubber and one apparently digitally generated. Here are the banterous brothers played by De Sica and Tortora answering a call of nature, and making explicit as usual certain elements that underpin the homosocial… (Note again the reference to an aunt…)
This scene is directly followed by another from the parallel plot strand in the film, when a reconciliation of the rival safari buddies played by Ghini and Panariello is enabled by another snake, and one as unpersuasive as the camel (or ‘kangaroo’!) in Road to Morocco. (In this case the unseen penises of the De Sica/Tortora strand have been explicitated, as they say, and displaced to another snake-in-the-hand.)
This scene and the one from Road to Morocco could obviously and usefully be compared in terms of their formal construction: the scene in Natale in Sud Africa employs some shot/reverse shot, but both directors (Neri Parenti and David Butler) use frontal staging and place their actors before some foliage. Both provide some break-down of the scene into greater degrees of close-up to aid the build-up of the joke and to focus on the reactions of the actors, followed by a final long shot to deliver the punch line. The differences too are interesting: the camel is (ultimately) a very real one in Road to Morocco, and its sneeze plainly, ahem, improvised and fortuitous (for the makers if not for Bob); on the other hand, it is the location that is unfeigned in Natale in Sud Africa, and as such it has a travelogue/tourist aspect missing from the studio-bound settings in the Road to Morocco (if the Moroccan beach is real, it is somewhere on the California coast, and closer to Casablanca (also 1942) than Casablanca (pop. 3m)).
Finally, it’s interesting that (unlike Bob and Bing in the ‘Road to…’ movies) characters in the cinepanettone have rarely fought over the same woman, even if some partner exchange was on the cards in the first Vacanze di Natale of 1983. Boldi and De Sica were simply too unlike to share a love object. De Sica and Ghini have some misunderstandings in Natale a Miami, but they are not after the same woman. De Sica and Tortora in Natale in Sud Africa are after the same money rather than the same flesh.
The love interest in Road to Morocco, Dorothy Lamour. The clue is in the name.
But the same body is desired in Natale in Sud Africa by Ghini and Panariello’s characters, just as Bob and Bing hope for the same female love object in Road to Morocco. None of the four, we are right to assume, will be successful in their quest… After all, it’s the relationship between the men we care about and enjoy. the woman is the occasion for their banter and the excuse for their intimacy.
Belén Rodríguez, love interest in Natale in Sud Africa.
