Italy Cinematography in the 1990’s and Beyond Part I

In the nineties the phenomenon of the beginnings intensified in Italian cinema, appreciable both quantitatively and qualitatively, so much so as to characterize the period at the turn of the new millennium as one of the most fertile and stimulating, but also one of the most contradictory for this cinema.. In fact, if on the one hand it was possible to speak, as the most attentive critics have done, of generational change, of ‘rebirth’, of ‘new cinema’, of recognizable trends, even of ‘schools’ and areas of fervid operation (especially in the South, thus configuring a creative-productive shift away from Rome and the conventions of the cinematographic environment), on the other, in terms of the circulation of the most recent Italian films and the identification of an audience for new authors, in short, in terms of the visibility of the renewal, the aporias were noteworthy. In fact, if the films of the young authors were also appreciated abroad, and not only in international festivals but also on the quality cinema markets, their economic resilience in theaters was instead weak. This happened, however, in an Italian context in which it was difficult to enact an adequate system of rules and laws for cinema and in which the market proved to be flat on television tastes and habits, as well as in the grip of a duopoly like that of RAI / Mediaset, which has conditioned, with its production-distributive appendages in the cinematographic field, procedures and models. of trends, styles and themes, on the other hand it ran aground in the face of the unavailability of the business and the market to absorb it and therefore enhance it, thus remaining largely invisible. Nonetheless, against the background of a scenario of transition and of notable change also in the Italian socio-anthropological landscape, a new creative tension has emerged, authorial worlds capable of innovation in terms of language have emerged, a renewal of both names and acting styles, new formats and production methods have been experimented with in the name of research and independence. Furthermore, the space to test the skills of young authors, for ex. in short films and video (including digital). The latter has known,

According to TIMEDICTIONARY.COM, a trend that has been taking shape since the early nineties could be traced back to the category of ‘reinterpretation’ of the Italian landscape, precisely recovering the meaning that Neorealism, on a theoretical level as well as in works, attributed in the second post-war period to the emergence of concrete and dramatic signs from the deep layers of Italian identity under the impetus of historical transformation and in the epiphany of environments, spaces, faces, behaviors. Even if the new attention to realism has partially differentiated itself, accentuating rawness and disenchantment, from the phenomenological or epic or sentimental-melodramatic tones of the first neorealist season, the clarity and poetic tension of some authors have dug deep, with notable configurations of style, in the deep reasons, often in the dark implications of Italian identity. With a few films, a filmmaker like Mario Martone has outlined a poetics centered on a tragic reading of the confrontation between the individual and the community (the latter always identified in the complex jumble of the Neapolitan anthropological landscape, between past and present) in films such as Death of a mathematician Neapolitan (1992), Troubling love (1995), Theater of war (1998). In a similar creative context, linked to an altered, icastic, at times cruel and hallucinated image of the Neapolitan universe, Antonio Capuano moved in the cross-section, oscillating between documentarism and Brechtian theatricality, of Vito and the others (1991) and in the reinterpretation Baroque of the Greek tragedy, set in a stylized hinterland degraded and devoured by Camorra violence, by Luna Rossa (2001). Directors such as Pappi Corsicato also belong to the so-called Neapolitan school with his extravagant and eclectic crossings of genres and styles, from pop to musicals to mythological films to photo novels (Libera, 1993; I holes neri, 1995; Chimera, 2001); Stefano Incerti, who with The Verifier (1995) has drawn a painful human portrait in a nocturnal and torn urban context; Nina Di Majo, who revealed herself with Autumn (1999) and who with L’verno (2002) continued with coherence on an intimate figure articulated with elegance and harshness; and finally Antonietta De Lillo, who in Non èright (2001) was able to restore, with tenderness and ease and with an unconventional use of the digital technique, the spontaneity and little secrets of two eleven-year-olds, children of separated parents, in a confused Neapolitan summer. Among those who managed to invent an image full of hallucinatory force and a figurative violence bordering on the metaphysical nightmare, we should remember the duo of Palermo directors Daniele Ciprì-Franco Maresco, who (after a long, parallel video production also broadcast on Rai under the acronym Cinico TV) with only two films, Lo uncio di Brooklyn (1995) and Totò che visse twice (1998), have deconstructed visual conventions by configuring a self-sufficient universe between apocalyptic vision, anthropological remains of the atavistic Sicilian landscape and hallucinatory pictoriality with references to the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel and Samuel Fuller. To the very fertile creative reality of cinema ‘made in Sicily’ (land of cinema par excellence, as much as Naples, for the history of Italian cinema) also belong to the melancholy ironic production of Francesco Calogero (Nobody, 1992; Five days of storm, 1997), the one with cultured literary references by Roberto Andò (The prince’s manuscript, 2000) and the one with tones together sociological and aesthetic products by Aurelio Grimaldi (Le buttane, 1994).