Videocracy

Tonight I went to see Videocracy.
I was really curious. It is about Italy, but it was not thought for and Italian audience, being a swedish production.
It is kind of what I'm trying to do here, in this little bolg of mine. So I was really curious.
The first thing that comes to my mind if I think about the movie is that to me it felt like i was watching a horror movie.
The atmosphere in the room was really tense. It was facing reality, for good, as hard as it is.
Second, the picture in the movie is really good. And the editing too.
It's a documentary, and all the people that appear in it are not acting.
Still, some of the people that appear in it are so disturbing (and disturbed), real people, influencial people.
And the picture and the editing take it out of them, making them look as bad as characters from a horror movie.
Commenting on it as I was buying some water during the show, I learned for the owner of the theatre that the director himself defined it as a horror movie.
You read this blog? Go see the movie.


Here on the bottom is a youtube video made on a song by Caparezza pretty much about the same subject. Soon I'll publish the lyrics translated.

L'età dei figuranti - Caparezza: Lyrics

Normality

I have been abroad and I am therefore used to a change of paradigm, whenever living in a different place long enough means to start absorbing someone else's point of you.
By living in Italy now, for how hard one tries to stay neutral, trying to look at things from an impartial point of view. But just as when one lives abroad, also by living in one's home country, it is inevitable, eventually, to pick up the local habits.
So tonight, when I read this article, I realized how much I got used to considering certain things normal. It's scary. It's very scary. This is not normal, but if you live in it long enough you might end up feeling like it sort of is.
Sometime the change feels so close, sometimes it feels so untouchable.

Intellectuals in Italy today

Today's post from Beppe Grillo's blog.
I post it here because there is not a specific link for everyday's post's translation, but only the general English link to his blog, which by the way is this.



"What is an intellectual in Italy today? Who still has depth of thought and ethical and moral stature to stand up as a reference point in this national whore-house? How many are there that have survived and why do they stay silent?
In the 1970s the intellectuals used to write in Il Corriere. They were present in everyday news. Montanelli, Pasolini, Buzzati, Montale, Calvino, Moravia. Perhaps they would not have liked to be defined as intellectuals, but they were head and shoulders above the others in relation to culture and often for courage. In an interview, Montanelli said that the principal requisite to be a journalist were the “cosiddetti” {euphemism for testicles}, for an intellectual the same is true. Pasolini would have torn to shreds the psycho-dwarf and his chum D'Alema in a single article. Twenty years of editorials for De Bortoli would not be enough, nor would eternity for PG Battista.
Göring, designated to be Hitler’s successor, said that every time he heard the word “intellectual” he put his hand to his pistol. In the country of the P2 and the permanent mess-up between the PDL and the PDminusL we are more civil. It’s enough to have the position of director or deputy director of a newspaper, a token position in the party, some book published by a publishing house.
The intellectuals, if they still exist, have sold their souls. They have become truffles, courtesans, laughing stocks to be exhibited, scarecrows of the regime TV News or silent shadows, university academics, public charlatans with hand-outs in the left-wing weeklies, authoritative signatures in national newspapers, the gems on the Board of Directors. The intellectual is an extinct species, buried under the tons of shit from the TV and from indifference, by the rooting about of pigs, by Italian society. They have adapted. Better to live a hundred days as a sheep than a day as a free man. The best write a column, responding to readers’ letters and launch appeals for democracy to be supported, even online. Vibrant appeals that are of no bloody use.
The modern intellectual is neither on the right or the left, his cardinal point is his wallet. His distinguishing feature is the adulation of the powerful. He loves to serve and his abilities are available to whoever appreciates them. This political class is disgusting. But anyone who has not lifted a finger for 10 years when because of their role or their intelligence, they could have done so, is even more disgusting.
Italy is in a pre-revolutionary situation. There are all the symptoms. Millions of unemployed at the gates. An abnormal public debt. State spending in a vertiginous rise. Lack of political representation for tens of millions of people. Delirium at the terminal state for Tar Head who has nothing left to lose. Absence of an Opposition. Apart from Kryptonite Di Pietro. A fragile economy. A non-existent civic sense and a disintegration of the State.
La Repubblica’s ten questions on the sex life (whatever of it that’s left) of Wild Bathrobe (Note of Andrea: still Berlusconi), is the most that the Left has managed to express in three five-year periods like an Opposition to the slime that has overwhelmed us. Berlusconi has not been asked ten thousand questions that are much more important on the mafia, the P2, on the origins of his companies. He has been allowed everything. Any conflict of interests. Every filthy law. Every convict in Parliament. With the blessing of the Left-wing intellectuals and the Catholic intellectuals. All bought and happy."

The Pinocchio Effect

What is keeping me busy at the moment is the reading of The Pinocchio Effect, by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg.
The book analyses from a number of different points of view the issue of the making of the Italian identity during the years that go from the unification of the state (1861) to the rise of fascism (1920s).
The otherwise hard understand but easy to misinterpret Italian feature of a "weak" national identity, in terms of social commitment and responsibility, is here deeply analysed in it's formation and possible reasons behind it.
The metaphor used by the author is the one of Pinocchio, the famous Italian puppet, here put into the spot for it's peculiar feature of being a puppet but without strings. The paradox is, therefore, that it isn't clear whether Pinocchio receives impulses and influences from the outside world, and a puppet is supposed to, or if there is some form of inner inexplicable force that moves him, a condition hard to explain for a wooden puppet.
After the first chapter of introduction to this main metaphor, the books gets down into more and more complex matters, regarding for example the concept of liberal and postliberal subject, and the influence that this swift of paradigm had in the formation of the Italian state, among other influencing forces.
The book is keeping me busy indeed as it is not an easy reading: references to theories, positions, and authors that are taken for granted by the author, maybe a little too much, would get me stuck on every other page, forcing me to gather up every kind of further information from a number of different sources in order for me to decipher the point she is trying to make.
Frankly, I have a doubt it was ever meant to be a work of popular literature.
The background of Mrs. Steinberg, after all, justifies many of the otherwise strange-looking references I mentioned earlier (putting together, just to make an example, the parliamentary novel, masochism, and Michael Foucault).
Of course they all contribute to Mrs. Steinberg's point: it simply is not that simple to grasp at first.
So far I made it around page 150, and I finally start seeing some light at the end of the tunnel: things finally start making some sense in my head, therefore the reading is becoming less heavy.
I don't recommend it as a book to bring along in a vacation, but if you happened to be interested in the subject and willing to spend some time and brain energy on it, it definitely offers an interesting points of view and analysis of the matter.

Should you become interested in reading the original Pinocchio story, at the bottom of the italian Wikipedia page about Pinocchio you'll find both the link to the text and to its audiobook file in Italian.