from Matteo Bordone's blog:
Someone had hinted at something, amidst uncontrollable fits of laughter, regarding this intervention by Roberto Faenza on the topic "Avatar vs the Rest of Cinema". Then today Casanova Wong Kar-Wai from 400 Calci sent me the link. So I read a bit of what the European art director Roberto Faenza thought to say about Avatar, the latest vulgar tool of the showman James Cameron. Because that's how he puts it. He.
It turns out that, after the controversies regarding funding for cinema, after months of melodramatic scenes from all the members of this small quasi-governmental industry, after the threatened enormous losses to our culture and our lives that, according to them, we could suffer, they are doing everything to convince us that next time it's really time to cut any form of funding. It's a shame for the machinists, but if the professionals of Italian cinema think this way, maybe it's just a different sport, perhaps even amusing, but of little interest to us and we don't want to fund it.
Because to look at the American film industry with such a basket of clichés that are so old and anachronistic — we're not talking about a Romance philologist, but someone who does at least theoretically the same work as Billy Wilder — you must have built a spatiotemporal bubble, one of those that if you do alone is fine, but if I also have to listen to you and give you money, then we’re in the realm of collective plagiarism.
Cinema was born amidst the sideshows, and has always been spectacular, effects-driven entertainment. In fact, it was originally that more than documentary and truth: when the Lumière brothers projected scenes of everyday life, the very nature of motion reproduction was impressive, frightening, spine-tingling, and no one in the audience experienced it as "truth." Cinema has always been the most cherished form of entertainment/expression/communicat ion among those available. It continues to be so, and for this reason, it has economically significant dimensions. Never in the history of cinema has a poor genre prevailed in opposition to a rich genre. Spectacular cinema has always been the most successful when it has existed. And that's okay.
Great cinema has always known great productions. As anyone who has seen credits knows, the production of artificial characters employs many more people than the shooting of actors in flesh and blood. The production times for animated films are much longer than those of traditional films. No one, before Faenza's brilliant idea, has ever questioned Disney's work as inhumane. Even Bacon was — thankfully! — spared criticism when he decided not to use the realism of cameras, instead relying on his own selfish brush. In particular, Avatar is one of the most colossal productions of all time, and to think it has little to do with people is a sign of concerning shortsightedness. People who sell straws retail and don't notice the trucks of timber whizzing by behind them.
I would conclude by saying that those who work in cinema, like those who are passionate about it, generally know that complex work tends to be admired with the right humility. Because it's a mess to put together a blockbuster: it’s not child’s play for hamburger eaters. Be it a post-War Cinecittà peplum, a Bollywood musical, or Avatar, or a Chinese wuxiapian, a blockbuster is the manifestation of the industrial and organizational power of cinema, the quintessential collective work, the king of civil logistical jobs. And cinema enthusiasts love cinema. They don’t care about this or that: they love cinema. They want lots of it, beautiful, and without any whining. This is not the case for Faenza, who — let’s not act misunderstood — has a position that no critic currently supports. It’s something he says and what people at the bar say, repeated by snobs, the bored, that sort of thing. Real filmmakers, historians, industry professionals wouldn’t even dream of it. As for military metaphors, the follow-up-deb
