Erik Gandini
Videocracy

Photography does not capture reality, it captures the idea we have of it

(Neil Leifer)

The real is never given, but is always constructed. The sense of reality is therefore something that is learned, inherited, and then modified, and so on. Today we are in a phase of modification of reality, which is accelerated by means of technologies and simultaneously enhanced

(Paul Virilio)

Full cinema last night for the viewing of the documentary "Videocracy" by the Swedish filmmaker, but clearly of Italian origin, Erik Gandini, on which it seems appropriate to initiate reflections involving the relationship between visual arts and socio-political analysis, hoping for respectful comments focused on the subject of the review rather than gratuitous and apodictic attacks on my person, unfortunately recorded by the less moderate fringes of the site's users.

Presented at the Venice festival, the documentary follows with a tendency for detachment three microstories, intertwining them with the Italian macro-history of the past thirty years: that of the young worker from Brescia Ricky, who lives with his mother in the suburbs of Sernico, and trains daily to become a television personality, trying to synthesize the styles of his reference models, J.C. Van Damme and Ricky Martin; of Lele Mora, a well-known entertainment agent who from his splendid villa in Costa Smeralda controls the fortunes of the Italian show business, through the promotion of young adults in the TV jet set and in nightclubs; of Fabrizio Corona, an entrepreneur who runs a company that follows and photographs VIPs selling the related photos to the press or to the interested parties who may not want them circulating, and for such activities has been investigated by the judiciary and placed, albeit for a short period, under arrest.

The microstories are interconnected, not incidentally but functionally to reconstruct a unified picture: Ricky's dream necessarily passes through appearances on commercial television programs, and his eventual success can only depend on intermediaries like Lele Mora; Lele Mora himself was the first important employer of Fabrizio Corona, who at the beginning of his career worked as his assistant before starting his own business as a photography agent.

In turn, these stories intersect, as anticipated, with the Italian macro-history: the dreams of the common man, naive, not too educated, nor particularly wealthy - Ricky - are embodied by the models forged by Lele Mora and, in part, by Fabrizio Corona, and by the entire system of commercial television, belonging to the Mediaset galaxy and, through it, to Silvio Berlusconi: Silvio Berlusconi, who constitutes the explicit behavioral model of Lele Mora (who compares him to Mussolini, showing the video ringtone of "Faccetta nera" on his phone, accompanied by videos with Nazi symbols) and one of the most admired figures by Fabrizio Corona (who praises the current Prime Minister for having "speculated" on some relatively compromising photos of his daughter Barbara, purchased by his company and then republished in a tabloid belonging to the Berlusconi family).

The weave of the documentary thus becomes evident: in Italy, there is a sort of "videocracy," in which commercial television has, in a sense, mutated the genetic code of the Italians, proposing models of professional economic development based solely on appearing and being seen on television, by virtue of which, if you don't appear on the screen, you are nobody: a pastiche that thus brings together Andy Warhol, Martin Heidegger, passing by the Welles of "Citizen Kane" and Scorsese of "The King of Comedy".

This model, in the documentarians' perspective, transcends at a political level: Berlusconi is both the promoter of this system, having developed commercial television in the '80s, and its main beneficiary; in obvious terms of profit, and in non-secondary terms of building a "charismatic myth" that renders the current Prime Minister a subject above all criticism, beyond good and evil, consolidating his power and perhaps increasing it day by day through skillful manipulation of reality.

Almost as if Berlusconi were the owner of the "Platonic cave" where Italians are imprisoned, seeing a particular type of film being broadcast that keeps them chained and doesn't allow them to understand the true sense of democracy, political participation, and intellectual growth and emancipation from a new totalitarian state model, not too dissimilar, then, from Orwellian models, which this film insinuates when showing us the ugliness of the Italian suburbs where popular characters "move," the orthogonal streets traced by surveyors, the illegal buildings constructed somehow, contrasted with the icy wealth of Mora's, Berlusconi's, and others' villas, an architectural insult to a nature that their presence would suggest is now contaminated.

During the screening, I asked myself a question: this documentary shows me true things - such as the embarrassing confessions of Mora or Corona - but alongside them also plausible things, which are the result of inferences, choices, selections made by the documentarians, especially in the transition and connection between microstories and macro-history.

The "truth" is what is filmed; but there are also photography, editing, narrative ellipses, all that makes this intellectual work a product, a narrative with a thesis, a thesis that is "plausible," not altogether shareable for some reasons on which I intend to dwell.

It is consoling to believe, especially among the educated center-left, that the power of the current Berlusconi government depends not only on the media potency of the Prime Minister (which is dented, at least among the youth, by the existence of other media, including the internet, where information circulates freely, albeit contradictory and not always authoritative), but above all on the fact that the Knight constitutes a model for those who vote for him and would want to be like him ("I fear the Berlusconi in me," Gaber used to say).

The fact that it is consolatory does not mean it is correct, and so it seems to me that this documentary "proves too much."

Berlusconism is cemented with the television language and the proposal-imposition of certain models, but it is necessary to ask whether these models are not simply recognized by the population as endemic to their cultural tradition, and for this very familiar and at the core reassuring: are the velinas really different from the protagonists of Pasolini's "Mamma Roma"? Is Ricky really different from the Nando Moriconi cleverly portrayed by Sordi? I think that, in the end, it is not so.

Are Berlusconian models then really different from those of certain left-wing figures? To connect with what was observed, the presence of a significant member of the homosexual minority like Luxuria on "Celebrity Island" perhaps confirms the thesis that even part of the left, or the population always close to the left, ends up sharing the same language as the right? Is Luttazzi's vulgarity or Santoro's search for blonde showgirls really different from those of other broadcasts?

If it is the epic - the message - more than the ownership regime of the televisions that strengthens Berlusconi, one must then ask why a similar political connection does not exist in other countries where the commercial television model, still influential politically due to major economic lobbies, does not seem to have influenced the political fate of the State so massively.

Thus, Italian "videocracy" appears to me - even following the author's thesis - more as the effect of a cultural crisis in our country, rather than its cause, and an agile tool through which one tries to explain and simplify a much more complex reality, to be grasped through a rigorous historical documentary analysis that explains why not a secondary part of Italy - even educated, bourgeois, acute - prefers to entrust its fate to the Knight rather than other worthy politicians, both right and left, and why not a secondary part of Italy, both left and right, does not recognize itself at all in the vulgar country the videomaker tries to describe.

Ricky's scene training in the morning, at dawn, alone, in the backyard, white tracksuit on bright green grass, with the proud mother on the veranda of the bifamily house is, in any case, heartbreaking and compassionate at the same time.

I mourn the times when a boy like that would have preferred to be a paratrooper raider rather than a raider on "X Factor".