The 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival kicked off yesterday evening with some significant changes. The selfies were not seen on the red carpet (we'll get over it) and the participants were given a card with an invitation to be corrected (it was really necessary!) under penalty of severe legal sanctions while there are no press conferences to present the film in competition (power of online reviews!).
There will be a lot of talk, we hope, of post-cinema, i.e. how much the new productions will be more or less destined for theaters rather than for streaming distribution as the various Netflix, Sky, Amazon etc. with great public success. Finally, it should be noted that appointments of this kind are increasingly oriented towards global marketing rather than product quality: we are heading towards the end of the season and US productions seem more attracted to participate in the autumn competitions – Venice – as well as with the eye to the Oscars, very far from Cannes.
In the meantime, a crime, a criminal act, has been committed in Rome, with a vast media echo. In truth, the fact took place for over a month but only in the past few days did news of it become known with the publication (or rather with the inclusion on the net) of a video taken by surveillance cameras of an attack by a well-known clan Roman criminal, i casamonica, to the detriment of a disabled woman and the waiter of a bar where they claimed to want to be served first and better than other customers. An act of pure barbarism, a display of criminal force.
What links the two facts? What is the connection between Cannes and Rome? The common thread is the theme of violence which, in this case, takes place in Rome, but could take place anywhere, in Italy or in any other part of the world (see London in these days). The Italian film in competition at the Croisette speaks of harsh, strong violence, at the limits of endurance: Dogmanby Matteo Garrone. A story is brought back to mind that caused a lot of uproar at the end of the 80s, when Pietro De Negri, known as the "canaro della Magliana" literally tore the body of his torturer into pieces. From the sequences in the trailers that we have seen of Garrone's film, we can imagine that we will be spared nothing (it will be in theaters on May 17th) not only on the particular climate of that story, but also on the more general topic of the representation of violence on the big screen .
The news footage, on the other hand, easily brought to mind years of television and film productions all concentrated on this theme: countless episodes of Gomorrah, of Crime novel, of Suburra, as well as in the cinema just recently the film about the Mexican criminal had a moderate success Pablo Escobar. The vision of that world has been re-proposed from all possible angles and questions have often been asked about how much, in what way, they may have influenced behavior patterns, languages, then taken up as an example by young people, great fans of the genre.
The question is simple and resembles the chicken and the egg dilemma. Do television and cinema reflect reality, take their cue from it, faithfully reproduce the temporal scans, the depth of the characters, or do they anticipate it, synthesize it and re-propose it metabolized? The cauldron in which this dimension mixes and answers are sought is made up of a formidable mix of power: television, cinema and the Internet.
It is difficult to find convincing and comprehensive answers. It often happens, even when discussing a film, that it can be argued that the purpose of visual storytelling can also consist in revealing the (apparently infinite) limits to which human nature is capable of exercising violence towards itself, with the hope of being able to then develop the necessary antidotes. In the same way, the problem arises when the question of the "right/duty" of news reporting is being debated in wanting to show bloody images, in information broadcasts or when they enter social networks.
According to a survey Audiweb for Il Sole 24 Ore "indicate 128 minutes spent on the net by surfers between 4-7 years old and 214 for 8-14 years old while 97% of Italian children aged between 4 and 14 followed television programming in 2016 and he dedicated 208 minutes to it every day, every day of the year”.
In ancient China, when children first went to school, they received them as a textbook The Book of Three Characters and the first combination of ideograms they had to learn meant: man's nature is originally good.
Despite this vision, more or less acceptable, it must instead be noted that, in the history of humanity, the land of violent and aggressive behavior has always been plowed and sown well and poisoned plants still grow in those furrows and continue to make victims. However, cinema and television appear innocent: however much the subject has been studied and studied in depth, human beings always seem to be the best screenwriters of serial television productions or highly successful films.
