(en) Italy, .Sicilia Libertaria: Cinema - Pino Bertelli (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Current Italian cinema, the ugliest in the world, is a rehash of encyclopaedic

jokes... same voices, same faces, same bibliographic events and everywhere the
same mercantile philosophy... the myths of art, politics, fashion... are bundled
together on the other, without ever being questioned or gutted in their own
contents and truths... fairy tales become certainties, fairy tale certainties
packaged for the attestation of the dominant historiography which converts them
into products for immediate sale and sends them to the funeral of desire .
Since every love wants eternity, Nietzsche said, and we love the madmen, the
thieves, the homeless and the whores of Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi)
desecrated in an immortal atheist pietas... and we have never thought of
accessing the rank of blessed by will of a pope, a merchant or a secret service
cop... we are taken by skepticism at the sight of Michele Placido's film, The
Shadow of Caravaggio, as much as by the abysmal boredom that his awkward shots
bring to the eye. You have to be crazy, demented or saints to believe that such
an iconographic junk can really return the immense art of a subversive with no
regrets like Caravaggio ... it is clear that the director has not studied well
nor Goethe's lessons on color , neither the cinematographic form of Ejzenštejn,
nor even less the impetuous vision of the bodies of Pasolini or the Promethean
epic of Dreyer... in short, he built a sort of filmic scaffolding, not even
pleasant, with the municipal vocation for the Roman caricature (as one perceives
in the dialogues transposed to the contemporary).

It is not enough. Caravaggio's shadow is sprinkled with discourses on art, on
philosophy, on morals that recall the flattery builders of the Salesian friars...
life is created in art and tempered in faith or vice versa. In reality it should
be said that art is a profusion of excesses, excesses, unruliness of the artist
and under every sky it delegitimizes power (even the one that subsidizes it) or
is nothing. We do not want to make a list of artists who in every form of
expression have disobeyed the pope, the banker or the patron who authorized their
manufacture... Goya painted the Spanish court of Charles IV... but this did not
prevent him from depicting (even with subtle irony) the nobles for what they
were... parasites of appearance and flatterers of the cane. Goya never disguised
convenience at the level of a style, he produced a style that went beyond
conventions, and it is no coincidence that he then made The Disasters of War and
aligned his indignation with the people in revolt against the massacres of
Giuseppe Bonaparte (Napoleon's brother, shot on the throne of Spain). The sleep
of reason generates monsters (1797, circa) or May 3, 1808 (1814), are there to
testify that authentic art does not tolerate impositions or codifications and in
the insolence of creativity, unearths the cemetery of definitions.

 From The Shadow of Caravaggio. Naples, 1609. Caravaggio is sentenced to be
beheaded for killing his friend Ranuccio Tomassoni. He finds refuge with Costanza
Colonna and the nephew of the Pope, Scipione Borghese. The painter's life was
wild... he drank a lot, had sex with prostitutes, boys and often found himself at
the center of brawls and revelry... the Holy Roman Church controlled him through
a sort of inquisitor, the Shadow of Caravaggio, in fact... almost a young,
petrified Maigret who investigates his deeds, let alone! Does the film settle on
a police investigation?! Blood runs throughout much of the narrative. Cardinals,
counts and marquises are attracted by the Dionysian bravado of Caravaggio...
frequenter of proxeneti (exploiters of prostitutes), outcasts, beggars, the last
of the society that he will take as models for his works... saints, male and
female saints, madonnas... a bum will be Peter, the first pontiff elected by
Jesus Christ (?!), crucified upside down out of humility and unworthiness towards
Christ. Caravaggio's blasphemous and immoral canvases disturb the hierarchies of
the Church... the painter flees to Naples, then reaches Malta and thanks to
Constance he is knighted. Caravaggio returns to Naples where he is attacked. In
Palo Laziale the inquisitor meets Caravaggio and promises to save his life in
exchange for the cessation of painting... Caravaggio refuses the offer, the
inquisitor strikes the painter and delivers him to Ranuccio's brother who
barbarously kills him.

Caravaggio's shadow extends over certifications of non-existence already seen in
Goffredo Alessandrini's Caravaggio-the cursed painter (1941), with Amedeo Nazzari
and Clara Calamai, which the beautiful fascist bourgeoisie sang its praises while
the black twenty years was starting to collapse...   Nazzari rolled his eyes and
held swords in the manner of a third-rate butcher and Calamai gave away bare
shoulders, but she absolutely lacked that whore-like frivolity that illuminates
every sacred painting of the Madonna. Caravaggio's choleric painting is a
philosophy of misery reversed in poetry that evokes its beauty and nobility in
the face of the despisers of justice and builders of gallows. Perhaps because he
knew that "with the irreparable beauty of poetry the reader is not discouraged,
even if he has studied a little", Dante, I think he said... but he is made aware
that all power is based on the assent of those on whom it rests!

Wholesale... in 1967 Silverio Blasi, robust TV-director, fires the script
Caravaggio with Gian Maria Volonté... despite the interpretative strength of
Volonté, the product is poor, false and incomplete even from the historical point
of view... the myth surpasses the truth , which for Caravaggio was much more
important than beauty. The miniseries Caravaggio (2018) by Angelo Longoni debates
between the demonic and the pictorial idolatry of Caravaggio... Alessio Boni
rather than remembering the painter, refers to a Vatican house painter in
disguise. The docufilm Caravaggio-The soul and the blood, a Sky production,
directed by Jesus Garces Lambert, is a plethora of reinterpretations of the
artist's works that add nothing or take away from a refresher course on Italian
art. It is enough to see Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986), a small jewel of
interpretative-figurative beauty, to fully understand the art of the dagger and
the eternal heretical painting of Caravaggio. Here there is no ambiguity of
genius, there is the genius who expands his art until it explodes against the
vaunted royal culture, cloaked in social and political disasters.

The actorship of The shadow of Caravaggio leaves no room for misunderstandings.
Riccardo Scamarcio portrays Caravaggio in the manner of a bewildered waiter who
moves as best he can between farce and oratorio dilettantism... he really does
not have the plebeian vulgarity nor the erotic passion that made Caravaggio a
commentator on the contempt and uprooting of the aristocratic dunghill of his own
weather. Louis Garrel, a valuable interpreter elsewhere, does not seem to be at
ease playing the Shadow of the painter... he always remains on the sidelines of
the scene and seems to think like a police inspector full of convictions and
certainties unworthy even for the last executioner in London, that at least he
knew how to hang even the least of the poor with a certain grace. Isabelle
Huppert is a Constance who is shipwrecked in the impersonal... caught up in
little habits and attitudes that do not echo the sensations of infamy or love
that invested the muse-protectress of that artist suspended between the agonizing
and the fury of the right and the true that they came out of his art. Of all the
chain of actors (including Placido-cardinal) it is better to postpone... each one
seems resigned to life imprisonment or the guillotine... no one takes upon
himself the image of what they wanted to destroy... everyone places himself in
the indefinite and everyone remains on the edge of fictitious paradises where no
one is saved or lost. Only Moni Ovadia does Filippo Neri as he was embodied... a
few gestures, deep gazes, face turned away from the epitaph as if from
enchantment... we see that Ovadia does not wear halos or pre-established
grammars... he looks at us, speaks to us and makes us listen. Above all, he makes
us understand that it is the overcoming of imposed reason that creates the human
in man.

The legend narrates the meeting between Filippo Neri and Caravaggio... but it is
quite improbable because the saint died in 1595, the very year in which
Caravaggio arrived in Rome... nevertheless The parable of the two wolves really
contains the restless and turbulent soul of the artist and man: "In you I see two
wolves fighting against each other and having to tear each other to pieces", San
Filippo Neri would have said to Caravaggio. The painter asks "which of the two
will be able to win". The saint allegedly gave him this answer: "The one you feed
the most".

Caravaggio's shadow is wrapped in a darkened photograph (Michele D'Attanasio)...
as if to cover the emotions, to make violence and celebrations spectacular. The
editing (Consuelo Carlucci) is slow, without internal connections and with the
music (Federica Vincenti, Umberto Jervolino), sets (Tonino Zera) and costumes
(Carlo Poggioli) rather mellifluous, they make the film slide into a facade
spirituality... everything seems avoid condemnation to the happiness or
unhappiness of this or that character and the Church is not my accused of outrage
to the freedom to live outside of sanctity or servitude.

Authentic art would be intolerable without the genius, the madman or the accursed
poet who denies it... at a certain degree of transgression, any frankness becomes
indecent and must be punished. But it is in the irreparable wound of pain that
love awakens and sings the dissolution of the powerful.

Pino Bertell

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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