Paolo Ciaffi Ricagno
Pirata!

Costing three hundred million lire, ‘Pirata!’ or self-titled ‘Pirata - Cult Movie’ by the Turin-born Paolo Ciaffi Ricagno, director, screenwriter, and leading actor in the film, was presented in Venice in 1984, receiving modest attention, becoming first an object of cult and then soon a rightly forgotten film.

The film was certainly a unique work, presenting itself as a science fiction film inspired as much by George Orwell's ‘1984’ as by K.W. Jeter's ‘Dr. Adder,’ while also leveraging the typical aesthetics of Stanley Kubrick's ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ but it also proposed itself as a genuine musical featuring some of the punk and new wave spheres of Italy: Gaznevada, Kirlian Camera, Jo Squillo...

As mentioned, interpreted by Paolo Ricagno himself in the role of the protagonist ‘Pirata,’ along with twins Gloria and Nadia Ferrero (the film also features Luisella Ciaffi, the director's mother), the film aimed to present itself as a kind of unconventional generational manifesto where the director identifies television and, in general, the bombardment of images through TV, comics, arcades, even the clicks of a Polaroid, as the primary cause of the degradation and aggressiveness of our society. A culture portrayed as futuristic and the cause of moral and cultural decay, but on the other hand claimed as typical of its generation, as if it nonetheless forged itself through overcoming these experiences and somehow acquired this heritage and learned to master it.

But this is not the only ambiguity of a film whose plot focuses on two antagonists who are ultimately the same person or at least two sides of the same coin. In a setting halfway between cyberpunk and the cult of the belle époque, on one hand, we have the ‘supreme dreamer,’ who has established a dictatorship based on communication media and controls the population through violence and mind control thanks to the special ‘dream hat.’ A dictator who perhaps doesn't exist or only exists because he appears on television. On the other hand, we have the ‘pirate’: a solitary boy made up like a kind of Pierrot who moves through the endless night streets of Turin on skates, fleeing from law enforcement after stealing the supreme dreamer's hat.

This manhunt, leading to the final scene loaded with symbolism where the inevitable passing of the baton occurs, unfolds with a succession of scenes and encounters with surreal characters and in acidic and grotesque atmospheres and situations, which, in my opinion, are effectively rendered, although the film is not of high qualitative level and is equally rightly considered ridiculous and forgettable.

But here I might go against the grain and say that despite everything, it is worth extracting its contents. Which ultimately do not consist in a critique of the capitalist system, not to mention those televisions in Italy that at that time saw the emergence of the figure who would later become the ‘supreme dreamer’ par excellence.

The film evidently calls upon ‘social’ contents of a certain right-wing and delivers a strong critique of the Soviet bloc, deemed to have asserted itself authoritatively and according to the will of a higher entity identified within the party's bureaucratic apparatus. Not to mention also the aspect related to the close connection with a certain punk and wave scene that, founded on a substantially nihilistic imprinting, perhaps in some cases in Italy (but also in England) always looked to the right.

With grotesque contents depicted according to that futurist style already recognized as fascist in ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ where Kubrick, however, declared himself instead provocative (and provocative he certainly was) against the accusations defined as moralist and liberal, this film leaves room for many doubts that consequently go beyond the work itself and concern different forms and currents of thought believed to be revolutionary but that instead paved the way for what was then presented and forced upon us as the end of all ideals.