#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #SICILIA #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy, #Sicilia Libertaria: Cinema - Dante (2022), by Pupi Avati (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The senselessness of Italian cinema (taken as a whole) and of the scribes who

support it lies in the wholly intellectual vocation of pleasing everyone and
bringing together critics, audiences and box office receipts, after those of the
television platforms have already largely been negotiated... if then the premiere
of the film Dante by Pupi Avati (June 16, 2022 at the Auditorium in via della
Conciliazione in Rome) is also attended by the President of the Republic, Sergio
Mattarella... it's hard not to believe that the director does not follow a
mission, that of telling the story of the Great Poet, as they say, in the fan of
jubilation. ---- The fact is that Avati, an honest craftsman of the
cinematograph, at times even a valuable storyteller of provincial stories, which
few or no one has managed to match in our local cinema of the impoverished in
terms of content and forms... Avati, we said... has tried to assign to the entire
film, Dante in particular, a certain dose of humanity, courage, dignity that he
certainly had and his immortal Comedy proves it, if there were still need, on a
"light" film frame, at times light-hearted.

Let's face it right away... our ignorance not only in Dante's subject is
abysmal... therefore we don't venture into philological truths, bookish
controversies, historical counterfeits etc., we limit ourselves to talking about
Avati's film, as we saw it in a movie theater populated by respectable people...
plunged into a cultural fervor accustomed to consolation or to the convention
that repays the master by always remaining pupils, Nietzsche, he said.

The film unfolds on the screen like an adventure novel but without the
transgressive epic of Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini or Pier Paolo
Pasolini... Rightly so, Gabriele Tanassi (fine Dante scholar), in a valuable
writing on the film by Avati underlined: «Avati's Dante is captured with
insistence in its historical and intimate context (the images of the pine forest
of Classe and the Ravenna mosaics are particularly effective, as is the
director's interpretation of the sequence of Beatrice), but he does not speak, he
communicates almost nothing of his extraordinary inner richness and very little
of his personality. Glimpses of marital unhappiness, scruples of morality and
fidelity towards the dear friend Guido and the deceased "very kind" do not fully
convey the personality of a man who, despite having often had to suffer events as
a helpless spectator, was the indisputable protagonist of his life, always
animated by what is most profound and intense can reside in the term "vitality";
in the film, however, Dante is subdued... he is not the protagonist, neither of
the film nor of his life (which, of course, has nothing to do with the vision of
Dante always a boy, an incisive choice by the director whose reasons also emerge
from a good interview). Yet there were the possibilities of further reinforcing
even just the intimate side: just think of a greater characterization of
political fervor or, even more, of the relationship with the children during the
exile, in particular with Pietro, who was in all probability at the at his
father's side in Ravenna in the last part of his life, one of the happiest».

We could end our work here, Tanassi's profilm analysis was so exhaustive...
however we want to enter the architecture of the film and try to see how the
director saw Dante through the love Boccaccio had for him.

Avati's Dante is inspired, says the director, by Dante's Trattatello in laude by
Giovanni Boccaccio and by Avati's novel L'alta Fantasia, Boccaccio's journey to
discover Dante. In 1350 the Compagnia dei Laudesi or Or San Michele or, in full,
of the Beata Vergine pura Madonna Santa Maria di San Michele in Orto, a worthy
confraternity in the government of the cities of Florence, granted posthumous
pardon to the subversive Dante Alighieri, who died about thirty years earlier.
Giovanni Boccaccio is instructed to bring ten gold florins as symbolic
compensation to Sister Beatrice, the only daughter still alive, a nun in Ravenna
in the monastery of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi... During the journey to Ravenna,
Boccaccio meets strange characters who have knew Dante or witnessed his death.
Through analexis or retrospection - those who speak well say flashbacks -, Avati
retraces Dante's life. His childhood as an orphan of a mother, his father and his
second wife, the flash of love in the presence of Beatrice Portinari.
Intellectual friendships, in particular with Guido Cavalcanti, warrior and
poet... Dante's participation in the Florentine battles, the death of Beatrice,
the marriage imposed by the family with Gemma Donati whom he will never love, but
will give her numerous children... in internal struggles between white and black
Guelphs (who competed for the political hegemony of the city),  Dante sides with
the white Guelphs (against the Pope, too) and their defeat will be forced into exile.

Let's make it short. Boccaccio arrives near Verona and in a farmhouse a commoner
tells him that she saw Dante working on a mighty work, that Commedia which will
keep him busy for the rest of his life and which Boccaccio will call Divina, it
is said. He will die leaving his immortal songs unfinished, perhaps... his son
Jacopo will then find the thirteen songs of Paradise, it seems. Boccaccio arrives
in Ravenna and meets Beatrice in a secret meeting at night... Beatrice, moved,
remembers how her father knew "The real name of all the stars".

Dante's filmic construction slides over walls, paths in the woods, pleasant
rivers, environments torn from peasant ordinariness, figures who enter and leave
the scene in a somewhat sketchy way ... one does not breathe the atavistic
poverty of the submissive nor the arrogance of the rich and the powerful...
everything flows like in an austere soap opera, even a well done one... at times
even bearable, especially when the director frames the successful faces-bodies of
Alessandro Haber, Erika Blanc, Enrico Lo verso, Leopoldo Mastelloni, Gianni
Cavina, Carlotta Gamba... and landslide however precisely on the central
interpreters, completely off register, Sergio Castellitto, Alessandro Sperduti,
mainly. Not to mention the caricatured attitude of Cesare Cremonini, Paolo
Graziosi, Mariano Rigillo, Valeria D'Obici, Romano Reggiani)... all seem
condemned to speak only for themselves in a swarm of allusions where Dante does
not appear either as a man or as a poet .

We don't understand how the Italian critics, the most cowardly in the world, or
we understand it well, could have seen in this depiction of Dante's life, the
enthusiasm of the brave poet or the genuine belated compensation for an injustice
suffered. Is there even the picture of the Pope in Avignon that comes to life?!
And then, and then... Dante's sublime poetry and the sinful, even shameless
carnality of medieval life remain in the background, dispersed in the shadows of
the chronicle. Avati also moves away from the academy, which would not have been
out of place here, to focus on popular romanticism. The painting, the
architecture, the customs and the politics of the time intertwine in a completely
extraneous way to the restlessness, the passion, the restlessness of a man who
disturbed the vices, the virtues and the indifference of the time of he.

Cesare Bastelli's photography plays entirely on pastel colors and especially in
interiors it darkens rather than enlivens the situations narrated. Ivan Zuccon's
editing is sequential to the rules and codes of Rai-cinema... the punctuations
are taken for granted, often rarefied, like the journey on Boccaccio's cart. The
music by Lucio Gregoretti and Rocco De Rosa accompany the film in the folkloric
approximation and together with the costumes by Andrea Sorrentino try to echo the
good conscience of the entire work. The song "Dance of the sisters", by the
Caserta master Francesco Oliviero, is of an overwhelming beauty and brings back
to the word love suffered, in the name of the word love recognized. In Dante,
after all, tears, anger or tenderness correspond to an ascent towards freedom.

For us who were brought up on the public street and stole Dante's books without
fully understanding their pains and joys, disagreements and refutations, the
infinite beauties and delicacies that spilled over from those pages like flights
of angels or demons or knights who accomplished the feat... and in the furious
self-taught wildness we confused heavens, hells and purgatories like poetic
sabers coming out of wells, peaks or viaticums, Nietzsche would say.. we only saw
devouring love the eyes that see or contrast those that remain blind.

What has remained with us is the indecency of our love for Dante's Inferno...
even if we have only subsumed from his poetic elegy the zest of the song, the
echo of the words, the cry of the metaphors... we have never taken farewell to
our ignorance from Dante nor dried the starry melancholy that nourished our
marginality.

The rhizome of Dante's imaginal... we transposed it into a video vision witth
Gustave Doré images intertwined with Latin American revolutionary songs... the
failure was sensational... so much so that only three of us remained in that
municipal library of the furious 70s, including a cat stray. "What does Dante
have to do with the class struggle, they said?", those with the parka and the red
scarf. "Nothing, like nitroglycerin with dynamite," I replied. In Dante I seemed
to have understood that the path of knowledge lies entirely in an apple,
especially if it is the one stolen by a hungry boy.

The razor in Un chien andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel which cuts the eye out of the
moon as a metaphor of the reader-spectator man and invites him to see, even at
the cost of profound suffering, everything he has never seen and perhaps never
ever wanted to see, isn't it perhaps the seeing-hearing that is in Dante's words
(especially in the many that we haven't understood)?... isn't it the same love
for liberated life? Isn't waiting perhaps the only landing place of self-love for
the other, and when there is no more waiting, there is no more love?... Dante's
words are adorned with beauty, with justice, with grace and in the
wandering-nudity of the interrogation baffles, moves, amuses... and brings back
to the sources of language, the eternal poetry of the man who, when he saw the
stars for the first time, knew himself and his love for the world.

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