The cinepanettone and the ‘wrong’ sort of spectator
In this and the next post I extract some material from a pair of forthcoming articles, one by myself and one co-written with Catherine O’Rawe. My own article is written for an issue of a new Italian journal of history and cinema edited by Christian Uva, and is entitled ‘Nostalgia per un decennio disprezzato: appunti sul primo cinepanettone’. With Catherine I wrote ‘Contemporary Italian Filmgoers and their Critics’, to come out as part of the collection Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, ed. by Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (Bristol: Intellect, forthcoming 2012).
In the next post I will talk about the fan nostalgia for the first cinepanettone, Vacanze di Natale (Carlo Vanzina, 1983). The theme I want to develop here is my hunch that the critical accounts of the cinepanettone may be bound to the date of production of Vacanze di Natale. In other words, the film is seen by critics as an exemplary product of the decade in which, for many, a new qualunquismo that would become a full-blown berlusconismo was born. This was the period when, for critics like Brunetta, the Italian ‘homo cinematograficus’ spectated his last, to be replaced by a fickle and inconstant comedy fan like the one for the cinepanettone itself. Is it the case that the cinepanettoni are so regularly and ritualistically denigrated because they are considered to appeal to the ‘wrong’ sort of spectator, a non-cinephile sensation seeker?
As is well known, the 1970s saw the demise of the seconda and terza visione circuits and even the closing of prima visione cinemas under pressure from the rise of private national television channels. The only exception to falling audiences, in the late 1970s and ’80s, for Italian cinema as a whole were comic films structured around popular comedians like Massimo Troisi or trans-media figures like Adriano Celentano.[1]
I do not intend to rehearse the story, so often told, of the crisis of the Italian cinema industry in the 1980s, so much as point out how that crisis is regularly co-opted to express a more general discomfort with the ideological tenor of the decade. The Italian 1980s are a despised decade marked in discourse by a sense of simultaneous belatedness and anteriority. The decade is conventionally described as the years of the ‘retreat’ from political participation into the private; as such it is regularly seen in relation to the too-eventful 1970s. But the 1980s are just as regularly seen as a kind of suspended time, a period of culturally vacuous hedonism to be truncated and punished by the political crisis precipitated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the corruption scandals of Tangentopoli.
Gian Piero Brunetta talks in the title of his account of the failing performance and (as he sees it) ambitions of Italian cinema in the late 1970s and through the 1980s as the ‘lunga agonia del’ “homo cinematograficus”’, in other words of that type of spectator ‘che trova nella sale tutti gli alimenti per il proprio sviluppo immaginativo e sentimentale’: This ‘richiamo’ might be a figure like Celentano himself, or it might take the form of the Christmas holidays, when a ritual of cinema-going remains in place: ‘Il pubblico generico dai primi anni ’80 va scomparendo, la sua frequentazione del cinema si limita alle grandi occasioni o al rito natalizio […].’ Or, as Brunetta puts it:
non si può più nascondere il dato che il pubblico italiano, salvo poche eccezioni, evita sempre più di anno in anno il cinema nazionale come se fosse affetto da sindromi di immunodeficienza acquisita. Salvo premiare i film natalizi dei fratelli Vanzina o di Enrico Oldoini.
Brunetta’s hyperbolically figurative language, referring to a disease that emerged as a fearful threat precisely in the 1980s, is telling. It indicates how the consideration of the fate of the cinema is inseparable, in the minds of the commentators, from the perceived conditions – ideological, economic, even, apparently, medical and perhaps moral – in contemporary society and times.
Naturally, I have no wish to dispute the figures or analysis provided by authorities like Brunetta and Corsi; my objection here is to the apocalyptic tone and to what risks becoming a crudely reflectionist account of the Italian cinema, an account that can generate broad-brush judgements such as the following:
In effetti il cinema dei Vanzina, di Neri Parenti, di Enrico Oldoini, può diventare l’emblema più significativo di un decennio caratterizzato, almeno nelle immagini vincenti, da un bisogno di ridere, da una rinuncia a pensare, da una celebrazione dell’apparire, dal cinismo e dal rampantismo, dall’abbassamento sensibile del quoziente di intelligenza comica, dalla convinzione della perfetta permeabilità tra cinema e televisione […].
Note the slippage here between the critic’s low view of the quality of the films and his low view of the quality of their audience, possessed of a thoughtless ‘bisogno di ridere’, guilty of a ‘rinuncia a pensare’…
In referring to the cinema of the Vanzinas, Neri Parenti and Enrico Oldoini, Brunetta is taking about the three directors most associated with the cinepanettone, and his characterization of the audience for the filone as thoughtless has become ubiquitous. The writer ‘Manu’, a contributor to the cinephile blog ‘Secondavisione’, gives an account of Vacanze di Natale in which we witness again the slippage between dubious quality in the film and in its spectator, and both are linked to ideological conditions in the 1980s:
Siamo all’alba del berlusconismo, che ci avrebbe travolti, mutati e distrutti per i trent’anni seguenti. E qui si vede già il progetto in nuce. Non solo nel greve e banale product placement, che mostra una certa luciferina astuzia nel presentarsi in un film il cui target saranno proprio i forzitalioti di domani: playboy da strapazzo, burini che anelano ad essere ricchi, borghesi vacui e stronzi. Ci siamo trasformati tutti in personaggi di questo film, o lo vorremmo essere. Imprigionati in una brutta sceneggiatura e in una povertà visiva da far rimpiangere Bombolo
As readers of this blog know, in my own study of the cinepanettone and its audiences I have sought responses to an online questionnaire designed to elicit information about the consumption, utilization, circulation and discursive construction of the films. Respondents were asked if they believed there was a typical spectator for the cinepanettone and, if so, to provide a description of that person. Judging by the tone of the responses, take-up has been skewed to those with a low opinion of the cinepanettone. The expression ‘l’italiano medio’ recurs frequently, sometimes linked to social class or status, and the supposed berlusconismo of the spectator is made explicit, as is his low cultural level:
- Un italiano medio e poco intelligente e ironico.
- L’italiano medio, ovvero cultura medio/bassa.
- Tipico berlusconiano.
- I truzzi, gli arricchiti e i berlusconiani.
- L’italiano ignorante, l’italiano stupido e l’italiano di destra (più del 50%).
- Una persona senza cultura, che non legge e non si informa, non va al cinema abitualmente e non conosce la storia del cinema, probabilmente di centro-destra, con pregiudizi e priva di gusto e con la soglia dell’attenzione e la capacità di concentrazione bassissime.
- Maschilista e volgare.
- Un uomo porco a cui piace vedere culi e tette al vento […] e che si diverte con volgarità e espressioni dialettali e che si masturba ripensando alla battona di turno che ha recitato nel film.
It seems unlikely, given the success of the cinepanettone with a variegated audience that includes families and persons of all ages and sex, that its spectator can be so confidently characterized or gendered. It seems rather that the remarkable strength of the language in some of the responses above points to a perceived cultural and political divide in Italy. The questionnaire respondents are revealing how the cinepanettone itself is employed as metaphor for political disappointment and how its audiences are made scapegoats for this. Perhaps such material is to be expected in the unguarded responses to an anonymous online questionnaire, but the sentiments expressed are really not so far from those of the authoritative commentators. The wrong sort of spectator who survives the death of Brunetta’s homo cinematographicus incarnates the wrong sort of social subject and generates both the wrong sort of government and the wrong sort of cinema.
In comparison to these ‘divi’ comedies, Vacanze di Natale performed modestly.See the statistics provided in V. Zagarrio (a cura di), Storia del cinema italiano, Marsilio: Venezia 2005, vol. 8, 1977-1985, pp. 658-9.
‘Dal punto di vista politico-istituzionale, è un periodo che è apparso agli storici come un “limbo”, una fase di stasi che prelude alla crisi degli anni novanta’. E. Morreale, L’invenzione della nostalgia: il vintage nel cinema italiano e dintorni, Donzelli, Roma 2009, p. 8, p.151.
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