window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en-GB'}; (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })(); (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); This is my research blog for the project 'Holiday Pictures: Ritual, Genre, and Italian National Cinema' on the series of films released in Italy every December and colloquially referred to as 'cinepanettoni' (‘film-Christmas-cakes’). The blog was intended as a public notebook for the short book in Italian I have written and published on the 'filone' (sub-genre), and is now being updated irregularly. Here's the book: Fenomenologia del cinepanettone (Rubbettino, 2013), trans. Riccardo Antonangeli and Luca Peretti.
Luca Peretti (Yale University) has been working with me as my research assistant on the project.
Email Alan directly See also my blog on teaching Italian cinema at the University of Mumbai.
The project is supported by the AHRC (UK) and the University of Leeds.
Alan O'Leary
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Book Review: Fenomenologia del cinepanettone by Alan O'Leary by Ilaria De Pascalis
Recensione scettica del mio libro di una collega italiana. Ilaria De Pascalis rimane convinta che il cinepanettone sia la ‘massima espressione nazionale’ di ‘una cultura fallocentrica’ in Italia.
Masculinity and Banal Whiteness in the Cinepanettone
I have a chapter, ‘Mascolinità e bianchezza nel cinepanettone’, in a forthcoming book on race in Italy edited by Gaia Giuliani entitled Il colore della nazione (LeMonnier). The piece will be published in a translation by Chiara Fiorentini and it develops material in the chapter on the carnivalesque in Fenomenologia del cinepanettone (2013) and material on race on this blog (for example from this post). The chapter I wrote in Autumn 2014 has been trimmed for publication and for that reason (and for the benefit of non-Italian speakers, though there are some quotes in Italian), I post the essay in its original length here, with apologies for some problems with formatting and the malfunctioning links to the notes.
Christian De Sica in Natale a Beverly Hills
I write this chapter in the United Kingdom while the BBC World News is full of the reaction to the decision not to indict white policeman Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a young unarmed black man, in Ferguson, a suburb of the United States city of St. Louis. For some commentators, the reporting of events in Ferguson, focussing on protests against the shooting and against the decision not to indict Wilson, miss the point: the real story is one of ongoing resistance by white Americans to the perceived erosion of their racial privilege. For Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies and history at Emory University, the shooting of Michael Brown and the legal machinations employed to protect his killer from prosecution are an expression of ‘white rage’ at the always-belated attempt to achieve full equality and citizenship of the United States for its non-white population: “Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless” (Anderson, 2014).
Meanwhile, in Britain itself, recent small-scale electoral success by the virulently anti-immigration (and anti–EU) United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has placed immigration policy at the top of the agendas of even the major political parties. Xenophobia, always pervasive in a country suffering post-imperial melancholy, has now moved to the centre of political discourse, directed explicitly against present and potential migrants, but also, and not always implicitly, against anyone not construed as “white” or “native”, no matter how many years or generations resident on the island.
Even if we are dealing with events and conditions quite distinct from those in Italy, this context is important to acknowledge for the present writer, because it frames and challenges the account I give here of a popular cinematic form that might well be seen as a version of xenophobic discourse, even as the symbolic expression (disavowed as humour) of “white Italian rage”. I am concerned in this chapter with the foregrounding and thematization of race in the Italian film di Natale or “cinepanettoni”, a series of farcical comedies released annually in Italy in time for Christmas until the last was produced in 2011.[1] These are films that have been described as the representational correlative of Berlusconismo, sharing the former Prime Minister’s ideology and his racism. To give two examples: the left-wing journalist and European Parliamentarian Curzio Maltese (2011) has written that the cinepanettone “sta al ventennio berlusconiano così come i ‘telefoni bianchi’ stanno al ventennio fascista”, while a respondent to a questionnaire on the cinepanettone expresses the feeling that “rappresentando il decadimento culturale e le ‘ideologie’ della destra italiana rappresentata da Berlusconi, il cinepanettone è un genere razzista”.[2]
I do not share this opinion of the cinepanettoni, films that have consistently been among the top grossing films released in Italy since the turn of the century. It would be a bland piece of academic writing that set out merely to confirm the haughty common sense about a popular cultural form that has been enjoyed over three decades by very many Italians of whatever ethnicity (or gender or sexual orientation or age).[3]
Table from Cucco 2013
Are the films racist? Certainly they feature characters who express racist (as well as sexist, homophobic, ageist and ableist) ideas, or who perform verbal or physical violence against non-white people, and they do this (as I will describe below) in a way which recalls racist discourse from Italy’s own colonial past.
This employment of racism is one reason why a critic characterizes the films as “un imbarazzante fenomeno italiano [che] indigna ogni volta al suo apparire buona parte della società […]” (Simonelli, 2008, p. 185). If the films contain racism, however, they also contain something else. I will argue that the _cinepanettone _is found to be “embarrassing” also because they explode “banal whiteness”, a term I coin (by analogy with Michael Billig’s “banal nationalism”)[4] to refer to the way whiteness is typically rendered as the normative and unmarked ethnicity. I argue that banal whiteness is refused in the cinepanettone: whiteness is de-naturalized and rendered visible, made strange, and with it normative masculinities and sexualities. As a form of carnivalesque comedy, the cinepanettone is a privileged site for the arbitrariness of identity to be exposed.
A comic form associated with the holiday period of suspension of quotidian norms and priorities, a parenthesis marking the death of the old year and the birth of the new, and with rituals of cinema-going typically involving groups of friends or family (Piccolo 2007), the cinepanettone lends itself to analysis in the terms of the carnivalesque provided by Mikhail Bakhtin (1979).
Bakhtin dubs “carnivalesque” an anarchic aesthetic that employs and celebrates the body-based and chaotic elements of popular culture (by which Bakhtin means the “culture of the people”) and that refuses all authority. The carnivalesque is expressed especially in the grotesque and for Bakhtin the carnival body is a grotesque body: an abundant and corpulent thing of “ ramificazioni ed escrescenze” (p. 32), a body “in-becoming”, permeable to and continuous with the living and dying world. The carnivalesque expresses a material and “degrading” vision of the world. All that is spiritual, respectable and “high” is brought low.
The employment in the cinepanettone of coarse language and its ridiculing of cultural pretensions or conventional moral priorities (or the revelation of their hypocrisy) are perfectly consistent with Bakhtin’s account of carnivalesque laughter. For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is an “ambivalent” mode, by which he means that it acknowledges and celebrates the cyclical nature of human existence and so has a double face of negative (denigration/death) and positive (regeneration/birth and life). This ambivalence extends to its political character, which is neither essentially progressive nor essentially reactionary but takes on a progressive or reactionary character according to context, reception and use (Stallybrass and White, 1986, p. 16). I want to suggest here that the cinepanettone is an ambivalent form that expresses both progressive and reactionary impulses. This article is not a tepid defence of the treatment of minorities in the cinepanettone, but an argument about the “undecidability” and concomitant potential (even “Utopian” potential) of a popular form.
In the rich and influential article that I draw on for my argument, Derek Duncan discusses “the racial and colonial logic that subtend the national imaginary of Italian cinema” (Duncan, 2008, p. 211), an imaginary I am also analysing here. Duncan, however, specifies that the point of such an analysis is not to designate Italian cinema as racist “in any reductive sense”. Rather it is “to begin the work of unpicking just one of the many ideological knots through which the historical narratives of national identity formation unravel” (ib.). Such is also my purpose in this chapter. But if it is not my purpose to endorse the common sense idea that the cinepanettone is a racist form enjoyed by white racist Italians, then it is important also to admit my “positionality”. I write as a white Irish male from the security of a permanent post in a well-funded British university.[5] I enjoy the social ratification that comes from being in a standard, reproductive, heterosexual (and ostensibly mono-ethnic) relationship. My purpose in acknowledging this is not to reify my ethnicity, nor is it to claim some authority to somehow speak “for” whiteness, nor again to derive authority from a confessional self-“outing” as multiply privileged.[6] It is, though, to admit that I am indeed multiply facilitated in my enjoyment of the violent behaviour of the white Italian males in the cinepanettone: my visible “race”, my public sexuality, my academic post and my physical distance from Italy — all allow me to adopt an abstracting analytical vocabulary in dealing with the films.
Permit me though to insist that my discourse is not one of disguised white rage intended to hymn a form that celebrates white privilege; and allow me to insist that my analysis is not intended to defend or excuse the racist elements in the texts discussed. I argue instead that the pleasure a spectator takes in the performance of abjection in the cinepanettone is not necessarily racist, misogynistic, homophobic, ableist or ageist, though the humour may well turn on one or more of such prejudices. Instead, the helpless, mortified laughter at the carnivalesque embarrassments in the cinepanettone can be understood as a somatic expression, like retching, which recognizes the abject and accompanies the process of abjection — or rather, the process of what I will call “displaced abjection”.
Anti-racism and distinction
A typical reader of this volume may never admit to having watched any of the cinepanettoni here discussed; why should such a reader care about my extended and hair-splitting analysis of the inflections of racist discourse in a film series which, in any case, exhausted itself some years ago?
Such a reader should care, I believe, because the attitude to popular forms like the cinepanettone, or, more precisely, to the audiences for such forms, has implications for the activity of anti-racism. As anti-racists, we need to careful, if we deplore films like this and the people who enjoy them, that we are not simply demonstrating our own greater political and cultural capital.
With the term “cultural capital” I am, of course, invoking the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his book Distinction (2001). Bourdieu demonstrated that cultural taste is not a simple matter of individual or inherent discernment but is entwined with social position and power. Taste is revealed in this perspective not to be expressive of eternal judgements of quality, value and morality, but to be a question of distinguishing oneself from other classes and groups, and to be one of the means of asserting and reproducing social and economic status.
The discourse of anti-racism can itself take the form of cultural capital and enable the performance of distinction towards those deemed less enlightened then oneself. This is an operation that is politically suspect, to say the least, but also strategically unwise if the battle against racism is to be won and the intersection of heterosexual masculinity and whiteness is to be dislodged from its position of hegemonic centrality in Italy and elsewhere. As Ben Pitcher has argued, anti-racist academics like ourselves are sometimes guilty of adopting “the rather patronizing and moralizing stance that if everybody thought about race like [we do] then racism would disappear” (Pitcher, 2014, p. 22).
My point is that anti-racist distinction can be enacted against the forms enjoyed by “others”, and in Italy that has meant the cinepanettone above all. Arguably, the cinepanettone is the victim of what Pitcher calls “a cultural demand for the popular expression of anti-racism” in Italy (p. 131), and its audiences are victims of “the hidden scapegoating codes of class or cultural specificity” (p. 132). As Pitcher comments, the “demotic discourse of racism” is “produced by a distinction between the educated and uneducated: ‘she’s ignorant’” (ib.). The audience for the cinepanettone is regularly described as an “ignorant” audience: “Guarda reality shows, va in discoteca, veste volgare e non ha un alto grado di istruzione, e se lo possiede non ha alcun interesse per l’arte e la cultura in genere”.[7]
The remark just quoted was made by an anonymous respondent to an online questionnaire, but the attitude it exemplifies is shared by many right-thinking people in Italy. A salient example can be found in an essay on the cinepanettone by the writer and public intellectual Francesco Piccolo, who gives a perceptive but tendentious account of seeing the 2005 cinepanettone along with a packed audience in one of the largest auditoriums in Italy on the day after Christmas (Piccolo, 2007). Piccolo makes clear that the cinepanettone is a kind of film made for other people: maybe less educated, but certainly less cultured than ourselves. Those he encounters in the audience for Natale a Miami in the Cinema Adriano in Piazza Cavour, Rome, are from ‘un altro mondo’ (p. 93). Audience and film exist, for the writer, in a kind of symbiotic vulgarity: the women wear fur coats; some are even obese (p. 99).
The article is one of a series written by Piccolo in which his pop ethnography becomes a performance of distinction designed to appeal to the cultural and political capital of his reader. With the benefit of hindsight, Piccolo himself seems to have realised this. He writes as follows in a more recent book about another such article:[8]
C’era una forma di disprezzo così evidente, una forma di razzismo così evidente in quel che avevo fatto, che neutralizzava l’efficacia del reportage. Metteva me e i lettori in una posizione di superiorità morale nei confronti di esseri umani diversi da noi, e che quindi ritenevamo potessero (dovessero) subire quella violenza. (Piccolo, 2013, p. 208)
Received opinions about a popular form should not prevent us from inquiring into the complexities of its representations and the potential they allow for complex readings. Otherwise we too run the risk of practicing “violenza” and “razzismo”.
The homosocial motor
I focus in this chapter especially on the successful variation of the cinepanettone formula established in the 2000s for the producer Filmauro by director Neri Parenti with his young co-scriptwriters Fausto Brizzi and Marco Martani. I will begin by gesturing at something of what the films derived from the film comedy tradition of male couples as a means to situate better the character of their racial politics.
Most of the cinepanettoni of the new century are set in locations outside Italy and usually feature a parallel plot centred, until 2005’s Natale a Miami, around the comic duo of Massimo Boldi and Christian De Sica, opposing regional and physical types (Boldi is the carnivalesque grotesque body par excellence while the De Sica persona has its origins in the commedia dell’arte). Boldi and De Sica occupy parallel story strands and will tend to share only a few scenes in each movie: perhaps the most entertaining and certainly, for many viewers, the most anticipated moments in the films. The characters will typically first meet in a confined space like a changing room or shower—their enforced proximity implying but mocking the possibility of slippage from homosocial to homosexual—sometimes followed by a location-specific mini-adventure: an encounter with clichéd and implausible Bedouin in Natale sul Nilo (2002), for example; or with a serial killer straight from central casting in Natale a Miami.
Boldi and De Sica in these films play husbands and fathers, but the films refuse to validate definitively the heterosexual bond or the nuclear family—a nice paradox, and one that points to the films’ carnivalesque inversion of received priorities, given that the cinepanettoni are designed to be watched in a cinema context dominated by families. The cramped location where the Boldi and De Sica characters tend to meet reveals the homosocial motor that powers the comedy: rarely do these films aim at the (re)constitution of the heterosexual couple that is the goal of more conventional comic films, and the most formally satisfying of the cinepanettoni end with the male partners reunited in another disastrous tryst. Again, Natale sul Nilo and Natale a Miami offer good examples: in the former, Boldi and De Sica inadvertently take the place of crash test dummies in a car charging towards a wall (the film ends on a freeze frame; Fig. 4), while in the latter they are trapped, as the titles roll, in a cab driven by the serial killer encountered earlier.
Boldi and De Sica have something of the “pre-Oedipal” aspect familiar from classical Hollywood pairings like Laurel and Hardy (see King, 2002, pp. 77-92). The cartoon-like endings of the best cinepanettoni are reminiscent of the final scene of a film like Swiss Miss (John G. Blystone, 1938), in which Laurel and Hardy, on their way out of town and film, are attacked by a gorilla they have earlier injured .[9] The narrative tenacity of the hapless homosocial couple is an acknowledgement of audience pleasure in their disorderly personae, and it also points to the serial character of the films. The narrative “achievement” of the heterosexual couple implies closure; the persistence of the homosocial, on the other hand, implies that the adventures are incomplete and will be reprised.
The licence granted to Boldi and De Sica to transgress and misbehave in the cinepanettone can be related to the freedom granted to the ‘trickster’ figure in traditional cultures, ‘an unruly male figure who breaks the rules, is governed by uncontrollable biological urges for food and sex and who often lacks a sense of unity and control of his own body parts’ (King, 2002, p. 64). The question to ask in the context of this book is on whose behalf is their transgression performed, and what are the costs of the transgression for other groups and identities.
Giacomo Manzoli (2013) has persuasively discussed Italian popular cinema of an earlier period, including the erotic comedies of the 1970s, in terms of its negotiation of changing circumstances. The cinepanettone might also usefully be thought in these terms. Thus the films might be concerned with migration to Italy in recent decades, but mainly in a cryptic manner. We may see such a concern expressed but disavowed by the shifting abroad of the main events of the film (which will tend to begin and end in Italy), so that the Italian characters are rendered as “minority” inundated by “foreigners”.[10] At the same time, the foreign location functions in archetypal terms like the enchanted forest in a Shakespeare comedy, a carnivalesque space where quotidian behaviour and established hierarchies and values are suspended. Again though we can see such an enchanted space (which is also a “time” in the film, and so what Bakhtin dubs a chronotope) as a cryptic and recuperative re-elaboration in a tourist mode of the historical experience of migration from Italy. Once economic migrants, the Italians are now wealthy visitors who choose to visit Miami (2005), New York (2008), or Beverly Hills (2009). On the other hand, the representation of North-East Africa in Natale sul Nilo risks recalling the experience of migration and occupation of the Italian imperial project, even if once more the film seems to be dealing with anxieties about contemporary migration to Italy.[11]
Tanto va la gatta
The processing of such anxieties may be at work in Natale a Rio (2008). When Massimo Boldi defected after Natale a Miami to make a rival series of Christmas films, the producers Filmauro had to find new partners for the immensely popular De Sica. Already in Natale a Miami the latter had been paired up with Massimo Ghini for standard sexual farce, and in Natale a Rio the same pair get into location-specific scrapes that recall those endured by Boldi and De Sica.
Natale a Rio is a film where the notorious sexism and xenophobia of the cinepanettone is expressly foregrounded for the purposes of humour. The misbehaviour of the irresponsible protagonists Berni (De Sica) and Patani (Ghini), mirrored, in this case, by the antics of their two sons who also find themselves in Rio, is a primary source of amusement.[12] The film several times subjects Berni and Patani to humiliation and violence, for example when they are robbed and forced by stereotypical street children into a portable toilet which is then rolled down a slope. They emerge completely covered in excrement, a carnivalesque moment of utter abjection.
The moment precipitates the key scene when Berni and Patani accidentally crush to death a pet cat in the home of a woman who helps them—allowing them to clean up and providing fresh clothes—after their disastrous experience with the street children. Having flattened the creature,[13] they then try to reanimate the beast with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and other farcical means.
The inflation and flight of an animal is a familiar motif in cartoons, recycled time and again in analogue and, more recently, in digital animation. Tribute to the success of the motif in Natale a Rio, to the motif’s effective generation of laughter in other words, is the fact that it was swiftly reprised—in A Natale mi sposo (Paolo Costella), the Massimo Boldi cinepanettone from 2010. Christian De Sica has said that he and Massimo Ghini were exasperated at how unpersuasive the fake cat was in the scene in Natale a Rio (the digital rendition is also crude);[14] but the absence of verisimilitude allows, even co-opts, the collaboration of the viewer in the joke. A frank clumsiness is a dimension of the address, a figurative wink that implicates the spectator, and works to disavow the incongruous mix of adult and childish registers in the scene, not to mention its employment of misogyny and racism.
Estimé, the black female character who helps the white men and whose cat is killed by them (played by the Brazilian singer Orietta Castillo, the character is identified by name only in the credits), is, in Bakhtinian terms, grotesque. Her body is abundant, “excessive”, and foregrounded by her costumes, which are tight-fitting with brash colours and ostentatious jewellery. As such, she conforms to several of the qualities of the unruly woman who disrupts norms of femininity and male/female hierarchies, as identified by Kathleen Rowe (1995). The character of Estimé has been introduced earlier in the film when Berni and Patani arrive at Rio de Janeiro airport.[15] She is attracted to Berni, the De Sica character, and, then and later, she dominates the men. Her performance is highly mobile: she “aggressively” occupies the space around her, skipping sideways as well as forwards. She jokes and laughs, and even if the camera rarely occupies her perspective (she is always seen, even when her “intrusive” gaze is shown) she lays claim to her own desire, frankly admiring the men’s bodies and at one point invading the space of the bathroom where she coos in appreciation of Patani’s penis.
Bakhtin was concerned solely with class even when his account of the grotesque is posited on representations of the female, but Kathleen Rowe, in her account of the unruly woman, has been careful to gender the carnivalesque grotesque. She writes “the tropes of unruliness are often coded with misogyny. However, they are also a source of potential power […]. Ultimately, the unruly women can be seen as prototype of woman as subject—transgressive above all when she lays claim to her own desire” (Rowe, 1995, p. 31). Diane Roberts (1994) too discusses gender in her consideration of grotesque stereotypes in American culture, but she adds the question of race, and certainly we need to think about race in order to make sense of the work done by the grotesque in the cinepanettone.
The tropes of unruliness are coded in Natale a Rio both with misogyny and racism: Estimé’s unruliness is “a source of potential power” and (as such) a threat to the white men whose monopoly on desire is put into question. Estimé is a desiring subject, and this transgressiveness is menacing to the white male identity asserted as normative in the film; but it is employed to reinforce that identity and to enable further investment of narrative energy in the men’s homosocial affair.
The affluent Estimé seems to live alone with her “micia”, the precious female cat that is killed by the men. The dialogue employs the word “micia” as a double entendre, and Patani initially takes it to refer to Estimé’s pudenda, which he is horrified to think Berni has been forced to caress in order to secure his change of clothes. Ghini even makes gestures with his hands referring to the imagined great size and mobility of the vulva. The word play continues even when the confusion has been clarified, the cat crushed, and the men attempt to revive the cat using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (“Soffio, soffio nella micia!”). The killing of the cat is a racist and misogynistic punishment of Estimé’s unruly desire and difference: the double entendre points to the “micia” as a metonym for the woman herself, and as a figure of Estimé, it distils her to her sexuality, indeed to the genitals.
The representation of Estimé has precise forebears in Italian and European visual cultural. It recalls the use of images of the so-called “Hottentot Venus”, the South African Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, used by the fascist regime “as a warning about the purported deformities that miscegenation could produce”, “as a cautionary example of monstrous hybridity, supposedly resulting from a mixed racial heritage” (O’Healy, 2009, p. 180). The iconography of the “Hottentot Venus” is part of a visual heritage that asserts Estimé as monstrous. Ghini’s hand gesture to describe the vulva may even originate in discourse about Baartman’s supposedly large labia minora, again an indication of “bestial” and excessive sexuality. I am not suggesting that a specific allusion to the “Hottentot Venus” is intended by the filmmakers or would be read by the film’s audiences;[16] but the components of the iconography of Sarah Baartman will have slipped into common sense, a paradigm through which a combination of skin colour, body shape and gender is interpreted and understood to bear meaning.
An image of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman
The employment of a “latent” and racist iconography seems to confirm Derek Duncan’s suggestion that “the colonial gaze of fascist cinema may have exceeded the regime in longevity” (Duncan, 2008, p. 198). The temptation is to derive the meaning of Estimé from the legacy of this “colonial gaze” in xenophobic political discourse about the migration to Italy of Africans and Eastern Europeans in recent decades. It is revealing, in this context, to compare the character of Estimé with the corpulent black maidservant brazenly dubbed “Mamie” (Edith Peters) who attends the rich misanthrope and misogynist Elia (Adriano Celentano) in the comedy Il bisbetico domato (Castellano e Pipolo, 1980), the most successful film of the 1980-’81 season in Italy. Mamie, a stereotype derived from classical Hollywood cinema, is a sexless figure whose function is to facilitate the “proper” heterosexual coupling of Elia and Lisa (Ornella Muti) in the film.
If Mamie’s function in Il bisbetico domato is to expedite the successful heterosexual communion of white master and mistress (and as such she is the opposite of a sexual threat), the function of Estimé in Natale a Rio is instead is to cement the homosocial attachment of the Italian men abroad. As suggested above, the cinepanettone tends to aim not for the narrative closure of heterosexual marriage or variation thereof, but for homosocial reprise, where the men are thrown back together and the farce can continue beyond the titles. Estimé’s “monstrous” desire brings the two men together in shared revulsion and the chastisement of her sex is a turning point that redirects the men towards the location of the farce (a luxury rented house) in the remainder of their story strand (notably, the cat scene is located exactly half way through the film).
Catherine O’Rawe (2014, p. 64) has written of mainstream Italian comedy that “the identity of the italiano medio must be constantly bolstered by these others”, non-white characters that is, “whose narrative position, however, can never be central”. The place of Estimé in Natale a Rio bears this out, though a thorough account would require further description of the representational economy of race and gender in the film, which I gesture at here.
Restricting ourselves to female characters, the film also features the very blonde Swiss-Italian Michelle Hunziker in a protagonist role. Small parts are allotted to two young and conventionally attractive mixed race “maestre di samba” (the term is relished by the male characters as a euphemism for escort) played by Brazilians Raquel Fiuna and Fernanda Andrade,[17] and also to Berni and Patani’s ex-wives, played by white Brazilians Betania Betcher and Rosana Oliveira, in Rio to have cut-price breast augmentation surgery. In effect, we have a continuum of female ethnicity and type from young, slim and blonde to older, corpulent and black, with Estimé as the anti-Hunziker. As Diane Roberts (1994, p. 5) points out in her discussion of Bakhtin and race, the classical white body and grotesque black body are interdependent.[18] O’Rawe (2014, p. 53) has described the middle-aged woman as “the most abject category of Italian comedy”, but there are degrees of abjection here too, to do with race as well as age and gender.
Displaced Abjection
In Bakhtin’s idealizing portrayal, carnival was a period in which the “people” contested the institutions and structure of authority and power, but of course that category of “people” conceals all manner of internal difference: of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, even class. Critics of Bakhtin have pointed out that the contestation in historical carnival has often been directed not against the powerful but against the weak—or at least against a weaker section of the “people”. As Stallybrass and White (1986, p. 19) point out, “carnival often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups—women, ethnic and religious minorities, those who ‘don’t belong’—in a process of displaced abjection […]” (Italics in original).
This calls to mind Christian Uva’s perceptive analysis of the Neri Parenti cinepanettoni from the new century. Uva describes the De Sica persona’s verbal and physical violence towards other characters in the films:
il fattore ideologico interviene quando ci si accorge che tale cattiveria non contempla un raggio d’azioni a 360 gradi, ma risulta fin troppo serialmente e programmaticamente indirizzata verso precisi obiettivi che […] sono sempre gli stessi, e cioè le cosiddette categorie deboli, quali le donne, gli anziani, gli omosessuali [...].(Uva, 2006, pp. 169-70)
The suggestion I want to make is that the carnivalesque “cattiveria” of the cinepanettone—directed against “le donne, gli anziani, gli omosessuali” and others—is, to adopt Stallybrass and White’s term, a process of “displaced abjection” in which the weaker are abused by those who are themselves weak.
With the phrase “those who are themselves weak” I mean white Italian heterosexual males. The process of displaced abjection in the cinepanettone reveals as unstable each of these terms (white, Italian, heterosexual, male), and demonstrates that the category they constitute is inherently insecure. Indeed, I suspect that one reason the cinepanettone is widely felt to be a cultural embarrassment is the unusual extent to which it foregrounds the fragility of normative masculinities. This fragility is, arguably, the central theme of the filone, and the abuse of the weaker by the weak in a process of displaced abjection is a version of just this theme.
O’Rawe (2014, p. 67) has demonstrated that “masculinity, whiteness, and heterosexuality are articulated through each other in Italian cinema”, and the unstable components of the normative identity in the cinepanettone are imbricated with each other, in terms of how they are elaborated in the films, to such a degree that they can be difficult to prise apart from an analytical perspective. The cinepanettone itself is one of the means through which the “imagined community” of the nation of Italy is posited and pictured, and in a sense the Italianness of its characters, with their heavily marked regional attributes, can be established only through their confrontation with the non-Italians they meet at home and abroad.[19] As we have seen, these non-Italians are often also non-white and it is another “embarrassing” feature of the cinepanettone that it will draw attention to the race of the minor character or extra—often encountered in spaces of transition, the airport, the hotel foyer, outside a nightclub, and so on—and such a character, male, female or otherwise, may (as in the case of Estimè in Natale a Rio) represent a sexual threat.
These marginal characters clarify by what they are not the lineaments of the normative identity in the cinepanettone, but their necessary reappearance in film after film points to the fragility of the identity thereby established. This is a process of abjection, which Kristeva (1982) argues is essential to the definition of the subject—in this case our normative subject of white heterosexual Italian male. The subject requires a border to be able to know itself as “I”, but that which is rejected (construed as monstrous, polluted, abject) can never fully be expelled. The borders of the subject are always unstable, ambiguous, in constant need of reinforcement and so the abject is essential to identity, constantly revived even as it is repulsed.
The abjected is, in fact, encountered at every turn in the cinepanettone, revealed to be a constitutive part of the identity from which it has been expelled. Examples include the black third wife and family of Christian De Sica’s character revealed at the climax of Merry Christmas (we are surprised to find him to be a trigamist, having known him already to be a bigamist); or the black infant born to white Italian parents in La fidanzata di papà;[20] even the very tall, apparently African man met at the airport in Vacanze di Natale ’95 who turns out to speak with a thick Neapolitan accent.[21]
Boldi’s characters are particularly prone to the sexual attentions of heavily muscled black men. The homosexual threat and sodomitical possibility are ever-present and conflated (though in the event sodomy tends to be mimicked or performed with objects—in one memorable case by a dog’s cold nose). Again, it is not always possible to separate the traits of “monstrosity”, and the abjected body may display more than one: in this case, the menacing body is marked as outsize, homosexual, black. However, this abjection is a question of degree. The process staged in the films is, I repeat, one of displaced abjection, where a normative but weak identity embodied by Boldi (grotesque and, by Bakhtinian definition, porous and vulnerable to penetration), is at once threatened and granted ontological security by a non-normative and therefore “weaker” type. What we have considered above in Natale a Rio is just this process of displaced abjection, where the “weak”, the normative but fragile white male Italian identity, abuses the “weaker”, the black woman, whose historical and contemporary oppression is disavowed by the wealth and confidence exuded by Estimé in the film.
Who is the butt of the joke in Natale a Rio: is it the female grotesque, Estimé, or is it the two male Italian “tricksters” played by De Sica and Ghini?[22] Is their behaviour relished or deplored—or is the pleasure the vehicle of the censure? Does the recourse to a racist iconography dating back to the Nineteenth Century, and subsequently exploited by facism, express a contemporary anxiety about miscegenation and the threat to (a supposed) national ethic identity, or does it mock such an anxiety? Is Natale a Rio condoning a racist fear of migration to Italy, or is it ridiculing that fear?
I would not hazard any sort of categorical answer to these questions. Consistent with the carnivalesque register of the cinepanettone, as I have been arguing, is its ambivalent political-ideological character, which translates here to a sort of undecidability. These are not didactic films and, though of course they can be subjected to ideological critique, they are not instructing the viewer what to think.
Certainly, it might be objected that the “fragility” of white heterosexual Italian masculinity, as portrayed in the films, is a ruse, just another means of asserting the centrality of the normative identity and of assuring its hegemony. Catherine O’Rawe has argued something like this in relation to the many contemporary Italian comedies that deal with the male “italiano medio” in crisis, and so foreground an analogous “threatened” masculinity, in which “non-white masculinity appears”, and of course not only masculinity, “in order to shore up white Italian masculinity and to restore it to its central place in Italian society” (O’Rawe, 2014, p. 45).
The point, however, is that this re-centring cannot be the whole story; the genie of fragility cannot simply be put back in the bottle. As O’Rawe writes: “Through its negotiation and mediation of contemporary anxieties around masculinity, comedy calls into question and makes visible seemingly natural and invisible categories such as whiteness, middle-class belonging, and sexual difference itself” (p. 49). The cinepanettone represents a radicalized version of this calling into question and making visible, and displaced abjection is essential to the process.
Banal whiteness
Richard, Dyer in a justly famous passage about the hegemony of whiteness, writes that:
As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people. […] The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world. (Dyer, 1997, pp. 1-2)
The de-naturalization of white as the unmarked and invisible race is, as Dyer says, a political imperative for the egalitarian. However, the diagnosis by Dyer and others of the “invisibility” of whiteness as one, if not the source of its power has been subject to criticism. Alaistair Bonnett points out that, in fact, whiteness was (and is) explicitly examined, and therefore “seen”, in colonial and racist discourses which have “produced a voluminous literature on the superiority of white civilization” (Bonnett, 2000, p. 119).[23]
Bonnett’s point is well made, but to discuss the “theorization” of whiteness only in terms of racist discourse (be it contemporary or historical) is analogous to those accounts of nationalism that associate it only with “those who struggle to create new states or with extreme right-wing politics” (Billig, 1995, p. 5). That is, such an account of whiteness may fail to explain the reproduction of whiteness, and its concomitant power and centrality, in everyday life and society.
Michael Billig has dubbed “banal nationalism” the workings of the quotidian reproduction of nationhood. He argues that nationalism is not unique to foundational, exceptional or crisis moments in the life of a nation (in times of war, for example), but is constantly present, subtending in familiar form (symbols on coins and stamps, little rituals, national stereotypes, the use of the first person plural pronoun by politicians etc.) the feeling of belonging to a given nation. “The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion,” says Billing, “it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building” (p. 8).
The putative “invisibility” of whiteness might usefully be conceived in similar terms to Billig’s limp flag, as “banal whiteness”. Whiteness and the ideology of its centrality and “natural” power are not generally reproduced by explicitly or deliberately racist discourse, even if crisis moments like the Ferguson grand jury’s refusal to indict the white killer of the black Michael Brown might unveil the racist theory of racializing quotidian praxis. The reproduction of whiteness will tend instead to be a mundane matter of, among other things, artistic representations, nonverbal behaviour, and cultural consumption rarely conceived of in explicitly racial, that is white, terms—forms of interior design, for example.[24] To some extent this is all very obvious (our identities are always asserted and reproduced through tastes and routines), though the analogy of banal whiteness and banal nationalism might be pushed further. One could consider how the conviction of the naturalness of white power is assumed to be characteristic only of extremist individuals and groups unlike “us” (non-racist white people), just as nationalistic feeling is typically seen to be characteristic of marginal “others” (other classes, peripheral regions or inchoate nation-states). But for my purposes here, I simply want to argue that the _cinepanettone _refuses banal whiteness, or at least offers to its viewers the material to inform such a refusal.
My intuition is that the iterative aspect of the cinepanettone—the homosocial affair that survives the credits into the next film—lends it a double character. It offers security-in-sameness, of which banal whiteness is a part, and a sense of being above or beyond history. As Angela Dalle Vacche (1992, p. 12) has written, comedy in the Italian cinema deals “with the long duration of deep structures of behaviour”. However, the location of the comedy in a carnivalesque time and space (the parenthetical chronotope) means that it is equipped to acknowledge and negotiate changing circumstances on behalf of its audience. In other words, the concern with deep structures of behaviour over the longue durée does not imply that such behaviour is immutable, and so the cinepanettone makes whiteness strange. As Karnick and Jenkins argue, comedy allows “a culture to negotiate […] both commonly shared values and the possibility of change in response to competing desires and needs” (quoted in O’Rawe, 2014, p. 48).
Let me repeat my argument in plain terms. The claim to pre-eminence of white-heterosexual-Italian-masculinity is posited on the firmness and stability of that category. The revelation of the instability of the category has, therefore, the potential to be the undoing of its claim to pre-eminence. Comedy tends to foreground such instability but the cinepanettone does so to a greater extent. And so it offers greater potential to explode the banality of whiteness, of heterosexuality, of Italian nationality, of masculinity, and of the compound identity created from these terms. As a carnivalesque form, the cinepanettone denaturalizes and holds up to critical view (renders “visible”) the normative identity.
Carnival is an example of what anthropologists call a ‘liminal’ period when a society or culture articulates or tests in ritualized form its understanding of itself. Such periods, we are told, are characterized by a ‘subjunctive’ mood heavy with potential, an anything-may-happen temporality in opposition to the ‘indicative’ time of workaday existence. Of course carnival ends, but the subversive potential may survive the carnival parenthesis. This is what Victor Turner calls the “ultraliminal”: “the perilous realm of possibility of ‘anything may go’ which threatens any social order and seems the more threatening, the more that order seems rigorous and secure” (Turner, 1979, p. 478; Turner’s italics). As a quintessentially carnivalesque form the cinepanettone offers the possibility of the “ultraliminal”, the possibility of threat to the established order, but it does not dictate that a viewer act on that possibility. It is not (I repeat) a didactic form and does not decide your position for you even as it employs and exploits prejudices and stereotypes that you might well subscribe to, disavow, reject or deplore, but which, like it or not, are part of your culture.
As Bakhtin says, carnivalesque laughter in the face of the given order gives that laughter a Utopian aspect: “[The] carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things” (p. 34). Of course, the register in which this occurs in the cinepanettone is a (necessarily) crude one and functions “like” racism, like sexism, like homophobia and so on: the form employs and exploits these discourses, it fails to deplore them, but it is not the same thing as them. The films take their place in a culture of prejudice, but offer the material to find a way beyond that culture. As Mary Russo writes of carnival laughter: “It is the conflictual laughter of social subjects in a classist, racist, ageist, sexist society,” but “carnival and carnival laughter remain on the horizon with a new social subjectivity” (Russo, 1988, p. 226).
Thanks to Chuck Leavitt, Gaia Giuliani, Denis Flannery, Giacomo Manzoli, and Áine O’Healy to for helpful conversations and comments during the drafting of this piece.
A meta-cinematic moment from the end of Natale a Rio
Notes
[1] “Cinepanettone” is journalistic rather than a technical term, probably coined around the turn of the century, and different writers place different films in the category. See O’Leary, 2013a, pp. 15-19, and Cucco, 2013, pp. 476-7, for discussions of definition and lists of the cinepanettoni.
[2] This remark is by an anonymous respondent (no. 107) to a questionnaire on the _cinepanettone _I made available online in 2012 (see O’Leary 2013a, p.107). I have argued that the association routinely presumed between Berlusconi and the cinepanettone reveals the latter to have become a metaphor for political frustration and shows its audiences to have been made scapegoats for political disappointment (O’Leary 2013a, pp. 92-93).
[3] Although many assumptions are made about the people who enjoy the films (see O’Leary 2013a 138-42 and passim), we actually know very little about the audience for the cinepanettoni.
[4] Billig’s formulation refers to the rituals and representations that sustain an everyday sense of belonging to a nation (Billig, 1995). I explain the idea at greater length the section of this chapter entitled “Banal whiteness”.
[5] “White Irish”, a collocation that would once have been considered a contradiction in terms, is the box I am encouraged to tick in the UK census form or in the “Equal Opportunities” documents regularly circulated by British universities.
[6] For critical comments on “confessional” statements like this one, and the risk of reifying and de-historicizing whiteness, see the chapter “White Identities and Anti-Racism”, in Bonnett, 2000, pp. 119-41.
[7] This is another response (no. 242) to the questionnaire about the cinepanettone made available online as part of the “Holiday Pictures” project. See O’Leary, 2013, p. 90.
[8] The article, ‘Sciando’, dealing with a congress of Alleanza Nazionale, was originally published in Diario and is available here.
[9] There is certainly something to be said about how the gorilla in Swiss Miss is the ultimate other to the whiteness of the ‘Swiss” mountain location in the film. As with cinepanettoni, the ultimate other is at the far end of a continuum that features the two male protagonists slightly nearer the middle.
[10] Though making no mention of the cinepanettone, Duncan (2008, p. 195) talks of how recent Italian films respond to the “rekindling of memories of Italy’s own history of emigration and colonialism” (p. 195).
[11] This is suggested in the film’s representation of Egyptians as almost exclusively _male _(and referred to as sexually predatory), with the exception of the minor character of masseuse who, like the Bedouin in the same film, emerges from the image-bank of orientalism.
[12] A parallel plot strand concerns a standard odd couple romance between a hapless inetto played by Fabio De Luigi and spirited blonde played by Michelle Hunziker.
[13] The cat is crushed by a thick phone book inadvertently dislodged from a table. There may be an oppositional symbolism at work here between the “rational” and ordered presentation of “facts” in the phonebook, and unruly, “disordered” female sexual desire, as represented (I argue below) by the cat.
[14] Interview with the author, Rome, February 2011.
[15] She is identified as Haitian to enable two later jokes involving voodoo – again, an assertion of her irrationality and threat to order.
[16] Sòrgoni (2003: 412) argues that Baartman’s story does not seem to have become “widespread at a popular level” in Italy since its employment by the regime.
[17] The characters are announced at the close of the film to have found employment in Italy itself as the latest veline on the satirical news programme Striscia la notizia. This is a nice example of how the cinepanettone plays with the prejudices of right-thinking people (Simonelli’s “buona parte della società…”), referring in this case to what Danielle Hipkins (2011), in a brilliant piece, has described as a moral panic in Italy about the figure of the velina.
[18] The Hunziker character discovers her boyfriend (Paolo Conticini) having sex, farcically portrayed, with a black female character (I was unable to identify the name of the actor concerned).
[19] With the phrase “imagined community” I am alluding to the constructivist understanding of the nation famously articulated by Benedict Anderson, 1991.
[20] Chuck Leavitt has pointed out to me that an allusion may be found here to the Neapolitan song “Tammurriata nera,” famously played by the band in the restaurant scene in Ladri di biciclette.
[21] The joke contains an implicit allusion to the “Northern” (and Lega Nord) idea of the Italian South as “Africa”. The joke is ambivalent, in that it may be read as mocking the prejudice or confirming it.
[22] See King, 2002, p. 64.
[23] Likewise, many scholars have described the historical placing of different groups in the category of white, so that, for example, Italians and Irish “became white” relatively late.
Bibliography
Anderson Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1991
Anderson Carol, ‘Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops: It’s white rage against progress’, The Washington Post, 29 agosto, 2014, available at <http://tinyurl.com/pyb3tu7>
Bachtin Mikhail, L’opera di Rabelais e la cultura popolare, Einaudi, Torino, 1979
Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism: Sage Publications, London, 1995
Alastair Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and international Perspectives, Pearson, Harlow, 2000
Bourdieu Pierre, La distinzione: critica sociale del gusto, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2001
Cucco Marco, ‘Il cinepanettone nell’economia del cinema italiano’, Economia della cultura, 23, 4, 2013, pp. 475-88
Dalle Vacche Angela, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992
Duncan Derek, ‘Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema and Its Histories of Representation’, Italian studies, 63, 2, 2008, pp. 195-211
Dyer Richard, White: Essays on Race and Culture, Routledge, London, 1996
Giuliani Gaia, ‘“Non ci sono italiani negri”: il colore legittimo nell’Italia contemporanea’, Studi culturali, 10, 2, 2013, pp. 254-67
Hipkins Danielle, ‘“Whore-ocracy”: Show Girls, the Beauty Trade-off, and Mainstream Oppositional Discourse in Contemporary Italy’, Italian Studies, 66, 3, pp. 413-30
Geoff King, Film Comedy, Wallflower, London, 2002
Kristeva Julia, Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982
Maltese Curzio, ‘Il cinepanettone non piace più’, La Repubblica, 27 dicembre, 2011
Manzoli giacomo, Da ercole a fantozzi: cinema popolare e società italiana dal boom economico alla neotelevisione (1958-1976), Carocci, Roma, 2012
Áine O’Healy, ‘“[Non] è una somala”: Deconstructing African Femininity in Italian Film’, The Italianist, 29, 2, 2009, pp. 175-98
O’Leary Alan, Fenomenologia del cinepanettone, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2013a
_________, ‘The Borders of the Homosocial in the Italian Christmas Comedy’, La Tribune Internationale des Langues Vivantes, 56, 2013b, pp. 25-30
_________, ‘Of Shite and Time’, The Italianist, 35, 2, 2015, [pp. TBC]
_________, ‘Holiday pictures’, research blog at <http://holidaypictures.tumblr.com/>
O’Rawe Catherine, Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
Piccolo Francesco, ‘Una tonnellata di equivoci’, in id. L’Italia spensierata, Laterza, Roma, 2007, pp. 91–130
_________, Il desiderio di essere come tutti, Einaudi, Torino, 2013
Roberts Diane, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region, Routledge, London, 1994
Rowe Kathleen, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, University of Texas press, Austin, 1995
Russo Mary, Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory, in T. de Lauretis (a cura di), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988, pp. 213-29
Giorgio Simonelli, Cinema a Natale: da Renoir ai Vanzina, Interlinea, Novara, 2008
Stallybrass Peter, White Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1986
Barbara Sòrgoni, ‘“Defending the race”: the Italian reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8, 3, 2003, pp. 411–24
Turner Victor, ‘Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 6, 4, 1979, pp. 465-99
Uva Christian, ‘La politica del panettone’, in Picchi Michele, Uva Christian, Destra e sinistra nel cinema italiano: film e immaginario politico dagli anni ’60 al nuovo millennio, Edizioni Interculturali, Roma, pp. 165-72
The project made a guest appearance on Troppo Giusti, arbiter of cult Marco Giusti's Friday night cinema programme on RAI Due, hosted by Andrea Delogu. The programme concerned the cinepanettone and the new film, Ma tu di che segno sei?, by guests Massimo Boldi, Neri Parenti and the Vanzina brothers, Carlo and Enrico (produced separately from Filmauro). Pierra Detassis, critic and editor of Ciak, had interesting things to say.
Marco Giusti
Alan was interviewed from Denmark via Skype (from 17:30), and was obliged to clarify his nationality.
O'Leary and Delogu
It's an interesting December in Italy for comedies, especially those identified (however notionally) as 'cinepanettoni'. Old blog friend Roy Menarini facebooked to say:
La scissione dei cinepanettoni. Parenti e Vanzina insieme a Boldi prodotti dal marchio d'essai K Films (!!), contro De Laurentiis contro il meta-cinepanettone "Ogni maledetto Natale" (e contro Aldo-Giovanni-Giacomo). Il Natale 2014 è epocale...
Luca Peretti, dottorando presso l’Università di Yale, è stato il research assistant di Alan O’Leary, docente di italianistica dell’Università di Leeds, per il suo progetto sui cinepanettoni (da cui è uscito il libro 'Fenomenologia del cinepanettone', Rubbettino, 2013). Quello che segue è un dibattito sui film di natale e sul loro ruolo all’interno del cinema e della società italiana, che amplia e problematizza la discussione iniziata in un forum online gentilmente ospitato su ReadingItaly: https://readingitaly.wordpress.com/2013/12
I have just spent two weeks of October 2014 in Sassari as a visiting professor and guest of Prof Lucia Cardone. The first of my lectures was on the cinepanettone. We showed Natale sul Nilo (Neri Parenti, 2002) and I then spoke for about an hour on 'studying the cinepanettone', putting the emphasis on Bourdieu and Bakhtin as key commentators for understanding the form.
Thanks to Emma Gobbato for the design of the poster seen here.
Dom Holdaway's review of FENOMENOLOGIA DEL CINEPANETTONE
A thoughtful review of Fenomenologia del cinepanettone by Dom Holdaway (University of Bologna) has just come out in the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2: 3 (2014), pp. 447-9.
Dom is kind about the book. He agrees the cinepanettoni were important to study; he likes the mix of empirical and theoretical; and he is particularly sympathetic to the 'Bakhtin' chapter of the book (chapter 4) in which I give an account of the films in carnivalesque terms.
He is understanding also about the tone of the book, which he rightly describes as personal, self-aware and sometimes defensive. He does suggest, however, that this means I sometimes ask my reader 'to make sacrifices which are ultimately precarious in order to defend the films'. Read Dom's reservations for yourself in the full review here and below. See this post for my own discussion of the content of the book and of the rationale for my approach in it.
Dom's generous judgement that the book marks 'very important first steps into the critical study of the cinepanettoni’ has already been confirmed (if I may say so myself) by the work of Marco Cucco, a specialist in the economics of cinema, who refers to my work in an article entitled 'Il cinepanettone nell'economica del cinema italiano' published in Economia della cultura, 23: 4 (2013), pp. 475-88. (He recently presented the work at the NECS conference in Milan.)
The cinepanettone discussed by Natalie Fullwood, Danielle Hipkins, Luca Peretti, with Catherine O'Rawe and myself in conversation. Online batch of articles edited by Stefano Bragato on the Reading University Italian studies postgraduate forum.
With Enrico Vanzina and Jerry Calà at the opening of the Ozu Film Festival
The Ozu Film Festival which takes place in various towns around Sassuolo in Emilia had the 1983 Vacanze di Natale as its opening film last Friday, 15 November, preceded by a discussion with screenwriter Enrico Vanzina (with me, above), star Jerry Calà and myself. The event was organised by festival directors/programmers Chiara Fiorentini and Enrico Vannucci, who write:
Quando si parla di questo film i sentimenti e i discorsi che si generano sono duplici. C’è chi ne parla nei termini dispregiativi [...] e lo descrive quindi come uno degli esempi di quei film brutti, adatti a un pubblico burino, tendenzialmente di destra e maschilista. E c’è chi ne parla in termini elogiativi, attraverso una prospettiva di rivalutazione del basso e del gusto popolare. Tuttavia oltre a queste due prospettive ne esiste pure un’altra, accademica, che cerca di trovare altri aspetti e altri modi per analizzare sia Vacanze di Natale che, soprattutto, i cinepanettoni. Ovvero quella prospettiva inaugurata da Alan O’Leary nel suo testo Fenomenologia del Cinepanettone in cui, partendo dal carnevalesco bachtiniano e dalla descrizione dei corpi maschili e del loro essere grotteschi, fino ad arrivare a descrivere il processo di abiezione dislocata, si riescono ad aprire diversi spunti di discussione alternativi attorno al filone.
Here’s an article in Il fatto quotidiano about the event and the programmers' reasons for choosing the film. Vanzina was thoughtful and intelligent, if a little self-regarding, in his discussion of the film di Natale. Calà was a bad tempered and ageing diva off the stage and superficial but simpatico on it. I discussed the status of the cinepanettone in Italian cinema studies and the fact that the movies are more interested in the grotesque male body than the beautiful female body.
The 16/7/13 edition of the Cinematocasa weekly cinema podcast - linked to above - is a conversation with me, Massimo Arciresi, Massimo Di Martino and Marco Rovaris on the cinepanettone and on Femomenologia del cinepanettone. I spoke by Skype from my friend's wicker-weave covered terrace in monsoon Delhi. I haven't dared listen back to the discussion having woken at 3am in a sweat realising some of my grammatical and lexical errors. But the real problem was not the errors; it's rather the way I feel obliged, in italian, to compromise the complexity or subtlety of my points in advance in order to manage something like a coherent discourse. As a result, my contribution was crude. Also unfortunate was the absence of a female contributor to the discussion. The tone, inevitably, was a bit blokish, not helped by my own bullish and frankly irrelevant insistence on the quality of the films. Mah!
Special thanks to Marco Rovaris of cinema.tesionline.it for making the discussion possible.
By kind invitation of Christian Uva and Vito Zagarrio, and with the tireless help of Luca Peretti, I was able to present Fenomenologia del cinepanettone twice in Rome last week, at the IBS.it bookshop in Via Nazionale on Wednesday 5 June, and two evenings later at the Teatro Palladium in Garbatella as part of the Roma 3 film festival. The presentation in Via Nazionale was chaired by Christian Uva with critic and arbiter of cult Marco Giusti, and director (of Immaturi and La banda dei babbi Natale) Paolo Genovese. Project friends like Catherine O'Rawe, Dom Holdaway, Aine O'Healy, Alice Santovetti and Dana Renga made it along to listen and asked some very pertinent questions. Some of these were also involved in the evening at the Teatro Palladium, but the guests of honour were cinepanettone director Neri Parenti and screenwriter Marco Martani, who have featured many times in this blog (see the captions to the photos for a full list of participants). Here's a report of the evening by Miriam Larocca.
Freelance Italian journalist Sergio Caroli read my book and wrote asking for an interview, which we did by email. The version above was published yesterday (24 April) in La Sicilia, but was trimmed from the original text, which I add here.
"Con questo libro vorrei riuscire finalmente a indagare un fenomeno cinematografico che è arrivato a una tale popolarità e a una tale longevità nonostante sia detestato, come il suo pubblico, praticamente da tutti. Da non italiano è stato proprio questo dilagante disprezzo a incuriosirmi e farmi venire la voglia di studiare il cinepanettone". Così scrive Alan O’Leary, professore all’Università di Leeds, presentando il suo saggio “Fenomenologia del cinepanettone” (Rubbettino, pp152, euro14).Studioso di cinema italiano e storia culturale italiana (è autore del volume “Tragedia all’italiana” sulla rappresentazione del terrorismo nel cinema), O’Leary, irlandese, non circoscrive l’analisi alla rassegna dei vari film o alla loro storia e alla loro fortuna (o sfortuna) di critica e di pubblico, ma realizza una indagine sociologica sull’argomento, utilizzando strumenti di ricerca e di ermeneutica messi a punto dagli studiosi di religione, in tal guisa giungendo identificarsi con il pubblico dei cinepanettoni, mantenendo però ben saldi i principi dell’oggettività. O’Leary si pone il fine di sviluppare una specie di tassonomia dei cinepanettoni e di motivare l’enorme successo, malgrado il disprezzo dei critici. Ad arricchire il saggio c’è una serie di interviste con attori, produttori, critici e fan.
1) Professor O’Leary, l’uso del termine “fenomenologia” richiama alla mente il celebre saggio di Umberto Eco, “Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno”. C’è qualche analogia?
Eco fornisce un modello imprescindibile per tutti noi che ci occupiamo della cultura di massa, ma ci tenevo nel libro a distinguere il mio tono dall'approccio ironico di Eco. È chiaro che Eco tratta Mike Bongiorno e il suo pubblico come «altro». Perfino l'uso che fa della polisillaba 'fenomenologia' suona più come una presa in giro. Io invece ho seguito l'esempio di studiosi della religione come Ninian Smart per cui 'fenomenologia' rappresenta un «tentativo di raggiungere un’oggettività empatica o una soggettività neutrale» verso il fenomeno preso in esame. Per me, dunque, fenomenologia sta a indicare un approccio che prende sul serio l'esperienza e i gusti dei pubblici per i cinepanettoni nonché offrire un'analisi neutrale degli stessi film.
2) Che genere di storia raccontano i cinepanettoni e di quali strategie narrative si servono?
Difficile rispondere in poche righe siccome si tratta di una forma complessa evoluta nel corso di trent’anni. I cinepanettoni doc sarebbero i film diretti da Neri Parenti a partire da Merry Christmas (2001), commedie generazionali che si svolgono in località straniere da sogno. Caratteristica comune è la trama costruita su storie parallele incentrate su Boldi e De Sica e i momenti più spassosi sono quelli in cui i due finalmente si incontrano, spesso in uno spazio ristretto, come in una doccia. I vari Vacanze di Natale, invece, seguendo il modello del film dei Vanzina del 1983, sono ensemble comedies tipicamente contenenti una colonna sonora dei tormentoni estivi dell'anno, elemento fondamentale per l’impatto dei film. Altri film accentuano la satira dei costumi maschili e dell’omosocialità (tema importante e ricorrente) e spesso prendono la forma di film a episodi. Un ulteriore gruppo, poi, si caratterizza per il tono parodico e per le citazioni di altri film. E così via. Insomma, una varietà piuttosto impressionante che sfida il mito secondo cui i cinepanettoni siano «sempre uguali».
3) Il suo libro intende rispondere alle critiche di carattere estetico e ideologico rivolte al cinepanettore. Lei dichiara di essere stato guidato da due autorevoli studiosi del ruolo della cultura popolare; uno è Pierre Bourdeieu che ha indagato sulla funzione sociale del gusto. Può spiegare la relazione?
Bourdieu mi serve per contestualizzare il diffuso disprezzo per i cinepanettoni. Il sociologo francese ha dimostrato che l’apprezzamento di un prodotto culturale non è una questione di un giudizio innato e individuale; è invece qualcosa che si acquisisce, legato alla classe sociale e al «capitale culturale». Il cinepanettone è considerato di basso livello culturale e questo disprezzo è il segno di una posizione sociale privilegiata, se non necessariamente in termini economici almeno in quelli culturali. Spesso si traduce questo disprezzo in termini politici: il cinepanettone sarebbe 'di destra' così come i suoi spettatori.
4) L’altro è Mikhail Bakhtin, che ha studiato la carica trasgressiva della comicità carnevalesca, la cui presenza lei individua nei cinepanettoni…
Il carnevale storico era un periodo di morte simbolica e rinascita durante il quale l’intera comunità veniva coinvolta in un rovesciamento delle gerarchie sociali e in una sospensione dei normali codici di comportamento. Il cinepanettone si presta a un’analisi in termini carnevaleschi, associato com'è alla sospensione in tempo di festa delle norme e dei bisogni quotidiani, e al ciclo di rinnovamento sancito dalla morte dell’anno appena trascorso e dalla venuta del nuovo. Il ricorso a un linguaggio volgare, il mettere in ridicolo pretese culturali e il ribaltamento delle normali convezioni morali che mette in atto, corrispondono perfettamente alla comicità carnevalesca teorizzata da Bakhtin.
5) Il cinepanettone viene spesso accusato di sfruttare l’immagine nuda del corpo femminile, ma lei osserva esso pone molto più spesso in evidenza le nudità grottesche del corpo maschile. Può esemplicare e spiegarne le ragioni?
Non voglio per niente negare il sessismo della forma, comunque mi colpisce il modo in cui il corpo nudo di Boldi, spesso fatto vedere nei film, è reso invisibile dalla critica, quasi come se si tratta di una rimozione. Boldi incarna alla perfezione il corpo grottesco descritto da Bakhtin, aperto al mondo esterno, con l’enfasi sugli orifizi e sulle protuberanze. Flaccido, sudato, a volte incontinente, Boldi rappresenta l’opposto, e l’equivalente parodico, del fisico tonico, abbronzato e perfetto della starlet di turno.
6) Lei descrive in un capitolo i risultati di un suo questionario sulla percezione e sul consumo del cinepanettone? Quali sono gli esiti che l’hanno maggiormente impressionata?
Non potevo non notare un tono estremamente negativo nelle risposte (ovviamente di non-ammiratori dei film) alla richiesta di scrivere una descrizione dello 'spettatore tipico' dei cinepanettoni, per molti un berlusconiano poco intelligente e di scarsa cultura. Il tono censorio sfocia nell’insulto in più di un’occasione. Ecco probabilmente la risposta più estrema: "un uomo porco a cui piace vedere culi e tette al vento e che si masturba ripensando alla battona di turno nel film." Mi sembra che la forza del linguaggio sia sintomo di una frattura politica e culturale. Il cinepanettone è divenuto metafora di frustrazione politica e il suo pubblico è diventato capro espiatorio.
PS. and today (1 May) a longer (but still edited) version appeared in the Giornale di Brescia
The link above is to a long review of the project monograph: I'm impressed that reviewer Michele Masneri has read the book carefully, even if he seems to misread the opening chapter and has the strange idea I'm English.
The writer's opinions in this second piece, here, seem to be based, not on a reading of the book, but on a quick scan of the review in Il Giornale. At least Paola D'Antuono gets my nationality, if not my age, right: 'Addio cinepanettone, non ci mancherai ma se vuoi puoi emigrare in Irlanda.'
Review of the project monograph in Il Giornale (my second mention in that estimable organ, as it happens). Pedro Armocida is very kind, and has certainly read the book - but not sure I’m ecstatic about some of the quotes out of context, viz. comments on my gender, below:
”[…] diversamente dall’illustre predecessore (Umberto Eco e la Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno) non si pone mai in termini ironici e sarcastici rispetto al tema trattato. Forse perché, e non è certo un dettaglio, l’autore del volume, Alan O’Leary, 45 anni, non è italiano ma è uno studioso irlandese dell’università inglese di Leeds. Non si spiegherebbe altrimenti l’ammissione di aver «imparato a ridere guardando i cinepanettoni», di trarre piacere «come maschio eterosessuale dal cattivo comportamento dei maschi eterosessuali in questi film» e di avere «un’empatia fenomenologica per il suo pubblico».”
The link is to a blog post by Jamie Steele, a doctoral student at the University of Exeter, in which he responds to my lecture at Exeter in November last year. I was alerted to the post when one of my students quoted it in an essay.
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