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 (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…
