GIANFRANCO ROSI
Fuocoammare

Although, personally, I do not have particular sympathy or veneration for the aforementioned author, it is right to acknowledge Rosi for what is Rosi's.

It had been over fifty years since an Italian director won two of the most prestigious film festivals with two of his works within a short period. Antonioni, after the highest recognition in Berlin with La Notte (1961), and in Venice with Il Deserto Rosso (1964), also won at Cannes with Blow-Up (1967), in a decade when Italian cinema shone and led the major European filmic avant-gardes together with the Nouvelle Vague. Different times, and certainly a different caliber compared to today and the comparison even with Rosi himself does not even arise. But nonetheless, it is always positive that Italian cinema is recognized.

Rosi must also be credited with the merit of a gaze that is both distant and highly personal on a humanity at the margins of history. And perhaps this is what fascinates the most about his cinema. Even though, on closer inspection, Sacro Gra was awarded by a benevolent Bertolucci against all odds, and Fuocoammare was awarded by Meryl Streep mainly in virtue of the political climate of these not-so-funny years.

But to consider Fuocoammare as a political work would be the gravest of mistakes.

What strikes me the most positively, both here and in the aforementioned Sacro Gra, in films that are far from being masterpieces, is precisely the originality of a gaze that reaches a certain and peculiar purity in framing real-life events far from the spotlight of centrality. Events of life so ordinary and seemingly insignificant, that they are as far as possible from celebrating the cinematic aesthetic and not of Hollywood cinema. Instead, Rosi photographs the ugliness and the small or large tragedies of marginality with his own and commendable mastery.

Then, of course, there's the issue of landings, immigration, and death.

The film highlighted particularly the most controversial and disturbing scenes concerning the death of several unfortunate Africans following sea journeys.

Now, several other directors and documentarians have often questioned the meaning and opportunity of showing death through images and/or sounds (authors of much greater artistic stature compared to Rosi, one name above all: Herzog). and whether or not it is possible to cross the line of what can be shown.

Rosi, in fact, for several, albeit brief scenes, shows more and more faces of the tragic: desperate resuscitations, faintings, not too human conditions, bagged corpses, and finally, corpses piled on the lower decks of the boats. The images are undoubtedly raw but also quite dry, and in this, devoid of sensationalism. And, I might say, also of moral blackmail, if not for the fact that there is always a form of macabre voyeuristic blackmail in such operations.

It is difficult to evaluate films like Fuocoammare, which can fascinate for the aforementioned reasons, or disgust. Personally, I can only conclude by saying I feel both sensations.