Vacanze di Natale (1983): Instant Nostalgia
‘Le madeleines di Proust sono ora prodotte in serie.’ (Emiliano Morreale)[1]
Here I continue to extract some material from a forthcoming article written for the first issue of a new Italian journal of history and cinema edited by Christian Uva, entitled ‘Nostalgia per un decennio disprezzato: appunti sul primo cinepanettone’.
In an interesting book on nostalgia in the cinema, Emiliano Morreale argues that nostalgia in its ‘postmodern’ form was born in Italy in the 1980s. He locates to the years around 1980 the emergence of a ‘nostalgia mediale e di massa’ that finds its motifs and Madeleines in lowbrow culture. Morreale signals Sapore di Mare (Carlo Vanzina, 1983) as a key text of the ‘new’ nostalgia, a film which releases a ‘fenomeno centrale’ of the period, that of the ‘filone “giovanilista-nostalgico”’ in Italian cinema. As discussed in a previous post, Sapore di mare is an ensemble summer beach comedy of manners and desires set in a generic early sixties: it is a tribute to Italian commedie balneari of those years, and like many of them employs a ‘jukebox’ compiled soundtrack of period songs. ‘Sapore di mare’ is, of course, the title of a sensual beach song by Gino Paoli from 1963 (not in the film), and the period songs are key to the film’s nostalgic mode, just as they will be to a ‘winter version’ of the film, the Vanzina’s enduringly popular Vacanze di Natale from the same year (both films are co-written by director Carlo Vanzina and his brother Enrico). If the representation in Sapore di mare is patent in its nostalgic re-evocation of two decades previously, then the nostalgia in Vacanze di Natale, with its contemporary setting, can only be called ‘instant’ – but it continues to be felt by fans of the film.
Like Sapore di mare, Vacanze di Natale is an ensemble comedy, but set over Christmas and New Year in the ski resort of Cortina. It is a winter and updated (i.e., contemporary) version of Sapore di mare (which had been released earlier the same year), even as it reprises the model of 1959’s Vacanze d’inverno, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque and starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio De Sica. This recourse to a model from the 1950s or early ’60s, typical of the Vanzina’s, is an example of what Gian Piero Brunetta dubs an ‘operazione nostalgica’ in the films of the Vanzinas, Neri Parenti and Enrico Oldoini, ‘che ottiene il suo successo proprio per la coesistenza di uno spirito retrò e di una decisa proiezione verso i nuovi modi di vita indotti dal consumismo, dalla facile ricchezza e dai mass media’. Whatever the aptness of the great critic’s characterization of the films, I think we can consider the cult status of Vacanze di Natale as a kind of nostalgia for the despised decade of the 1980s, a nostalgia that is to an extent ‘built in’ to the text itself, and which I will discuss here in terms of its use of music.
Instant nostalgia
I have discussed in another previous post (which I develop here) the importance of the music to the appeal Vacanze di Natale. Though cinephile consensus asserts the film’s clumsiness, by most criteria Vacanze di Natale is an effective film. It maintains a sense of lightness and a breezy pace throughout, and in this it is helped enormously by the film’s jukebox soundtrack, which is perceived by fans to be essential to the impact of the film. The fan website devoted to the film speaks of:
[le] musiche di una colonna sonora che ha segnato un’epoca. Eh sì, perché la colonna sonora è stata fondamentale ai fini del successo di questo film. Chi non ha ballato e magari balla ancora sulle note di ‘Moonlight Shadow’ (di Mike Oldfield) o di ‘I Like Chopin’ (di Gazebo), oppure cantato la ‘Vita spericolta’ di Vasco Rossi o la disperata ‘Ancora’ di Eduardo De Crescenzo?
If the music in Sapore di Mare was drawn from the pre-Beatles 1960s in which the film was set, the music in Vacanze di Natale could hardly have been more contemporary. It features seventeen songs (both Italian and otherwise, some of which used more than once) played in their original single versions, several of which were chart hits from the year of the film’s release.
Rarely do the songs seem to have been chosen for their aptness for a scene in terms of their lyrical content: they are employed not for thematic commentary but for other reasons. The analogy I would use is one of music radio, where the playlist is assumed to accompany another activity at home or in the workplace (in the case of the film, this is a viewing activity that waivers in its intensity), and the songs are more often ‘absorbed’ than actively listened to.
Another way of putting this is to say that the songs are valued for their power of connotation rather than denotation: they are valued not for their meaning but for the experiences they recall. Narrowly speaking, in terms of the film, these experiences are the vistas, actions or characters which the songs accompany: ‘I like Chopin’, for example, is associated with Jerry Calá’s character of sciupafemmine pianist, while both ‘Moonlight Shadow’ and ‘Vita spericolata’ play over images of the ski slopes which have a spectacular rather than a narrative function. More broadly, however, the film is evoking and accessing the individual experiences brought to it by the viewer of the film, experiences that have been accompanied by the chart tunes of such recent vintage. The soundtrack is not, or not only, a soundtrack to a film, but the soundtrack to a stage of life. It is not important that the songs be particularly good or appropriate, but only that they have been widely heard. It is not even necessary for them to have been the ‘favourite’ songs of the listeners/spectators; it is enough that they are ‘catchy’, the memorable songs of a period just superseded. Hence the rhetorical question on the Vacanze di Natale fan website which asks who has not danced to the songs used in the film.The fan testimony and the space devoted to the songs on the website itself point to the manner in which the songs encapsulate the instant nostalgia for a moment barely past.
‘Eravamo così’
Borrowing a term from Fredric Jameson, Morreale (2007: 172) talks about the evocation in Sapore di Mare of a temporally imprecise and generic ‘sessantezza’, an exercise intended to posit the prototypical leisure period of the summer holiday as model for the new hedonism of the 1980s. Morreale writes:
La cosa da chiedersi, ovviamente, non è quanto quello che si vede sullo schermo sia effettivamente il 1964, ma quanto vi trapeli del 1982. […] Siamo nel pieno del trionfo dei modelli di una nuova borghesia, delle televisioni private, di una nascente piccola e media impresa, dello stato della dialettica politica DC-PCI in cui si è inserito abilmente il PSI di Craxi, che si propone come portavoce di questa nuova borghesia. La parola chiave del ‘nuovo’ e del ‘moderno’ viene percepita, a sinistra e da certa parte del mondo cattolico, anche come un’ondata crescente di volgarità, ma proprio con il richiamo agli anni sessanta la cultura di massa del periodo fornisce, più o meno coscientemente, un precedente e un modello.[6]
Morreale is here imputing to the filmmakers an operation of dubious ideological legitimation. I do not wish to offer an opinion on the accuracy of this but will limit myself to pointing out once more that this accusation is regularly found, in more or less sophisticated forms, in discourse on the films of the Vanzinas and more particularly on the filone of the cinepanettone generated by the follow-up to Sapore di Mare, Vacanze di Natale. This discourse may be composed in the name of ideology or ‘civiltà’, but it will regularly present the films as if they were simultaneously cause, symptom and apologia for a dumbing-down of Italian cinematic and political culture.
As I described in my previous post, however, it is not only the films that are deemed culpable but also the audience for them. The audience for the cinepanettone, a public that continues the longstanding Italian ritual of the Christmas pilgrimage to the cinema, isassumed to be ‘thoughtless’ and reactionary; is assumed, indeed, to be the ‘wrong’ sort of spectator, undiscerning enough to sustain a deplorable cinema. This cinema and its public, have their origins in the despised 1980s, and both are regularly damned by association. Vacanze di Natale, the inaugural cinepanettone, 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. But the film is also looked back to with great fondness by fans who may or may not, as Marco Giusti says, have ‘proprio niente del cinefilo anni ’70, dello spettatore critico’, but who seem to me to be perfectly self-aware and reflexive in their nostalgia. I quote here from my interview with Pietro Di Nocera (Rome, 19 April 2011), one of the founders of the Vacanze di Natale fan club:
Per noi ha rappresentato quello che noi abbiamo sempre pensato di essere, da ragazzini, che in qualche modo siamo stati e che in certi casi, forse, non siamo riusciti ad essere. Vacanze di Natale mette insieme quello che è la pura rappresentazione sociale di quella che è l’Italia dell’epoca. […] Perché senza appesantire la sceneggiatura, quindi la trama, è riuscito a mettere quello che era l’Italia socialista, capitalista, edonista, l’Italia più superficiale, che cercava il divertimento… l’Italia che scopriva anche un po’ l’omosessualità… Una serie di temi sociali, nei quali noi ragazzini ancora non ci identificavamo ma che, strada facendo, abbiamo riconosciuto essere oggettivi, veritieri, con il grande pregio di far ridere. Quindi, si vedevano situazioni assolutamente verosimili, ma con la tinta della commedia che rendeva tutto assolutamente piacevole.
Di Nocera’s vocabulary is reminiscent of that of the cinephile ‘Manu’ cited in the previous post, with the difference that the film is not blamed but praised for its ambivalent representation of developments in Italian society. Like it or not, a generation will have been young even in the most despised of decades and will invest its nostalgia for the period in cultural forms that prove themselves receptive and sympathetic. Let me quote Pietro Di Nocera again to finish:
Il significato [di Vacanze di Natale]è più di un messaggio… è un dire ‘eravamo così’: si rideva, si scherzava, ma c’era anche una presa di coscienza di un’Italia che stava cambiando… Io voglio immaginarlo così…
E. Morreale, L’invenzione della nostalgia: il vintage nel cinema italiano e dintorni, Donzelli, Roma 2009, p. 8.
Morreale, p. 171. Morreale argues that this ‘filone giovanilista-nostalgico’ is the only important strain of cinematic nostalgia in the period, but Sorlin disagrees, suggesting that nostalgia was a ‘dominant trend’ from the late 1970s on; he cites L’albero degli zoccoli (Ermanno Olmi, 1978), E la nave va (Federico Fellini, 1983) and Storie di ragazzi e ragazze (Pupi Avati, 1989) as examples. P. Sorlin, Italian National Cinema 1896-1996, Routledge, London 1996, p. 160.
See for example the account of the film by the contributor ‘Manu’ on the cinephile blog ‘Secondavisione’, also discussed below, at http://secondavisione.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/il-nostro-viaggio-nel-cinepanettonevacanze-di-natale-enrico-vanzina-1983/.
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