When Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2013, Italy’s television channel Canale 5 held an impromptu screening two days later, attracting 8.6 million viewers. Such statistics hardly convey the feverish conversation that ensued the following weeks throughout Italy from the nation’s southernmost point of Palermo to the Alps. There was a sense of national pride as Italy hadn’t shined on the international stage since their World Cup win in 2006. However, the overriding tone of Sorrentino’s film—which portrayed a nihilistic vision of a bourgeois culture peopled by lonely individuals—was not lost on a public beleaguered by political corruption and financial crisis, and in strong search of an identity. This political corruption extends to the very heart of cinema itself, as self-interested landlords and Rome’s council have recently evicted several cultural spaces in Rome with no protection from the historic city’s dysfunctional arts governance.
Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza placed Italy at the center of a malaise endemic to the developed world as cultural interests vie with profit for the hearts and minds of populations who are no longer at the forefront of progress. As Jep Gambardella, the narrator of La Grande Bellezza notes, bitterly, “We’re all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little… Don’t you agree?” This, in a nutshell, describes the emptiness at the heart of high cultural pursuit in the West as exhibition openings and art fair fanfare do little to hide the fact that art has been fully co-opted by the finance machine. Whereas arguments around figuration versus abstraction were still relevant to the left in the post-war West, now notions of creative freedom are co-opted by governments keen to put distance between their pernicious foreign policies and an equally pernicious virulent strain of radical Islamism, as seen in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
While this all seems as bleak as Jep Gambardella’s world view, the last four years have seen some radical, viable and socially inclusive alternative cultural forms take hold across Italy. Via an appeal to the power not only of cinema, but also of theater, occupiers have revived disused spaces and given them back to the people amid Italy’s disarrayed art governance. In Rome, the future of two of these initiatives—Teatro Valle Fondazione Bene Comune (Rome’s oldest theatre, evicted on August 14th 2014) and Cinema America Occupato (a cinema of ’50s design, evicted on September 3rd 2014—will have wide repercussions for the future direction of Rome, so rich in cultural history but lacking in contemporary relevance. On February 4th, former occupants of Teatro Valle expressed dismay at the theater remaining closed for the last six months since they were evicted by Rome’s Left wing Mayor, Ignazio Marino, occupying the office of the assessor of culture for one afternoon, holding an impromptu “séance” and asking “is there anybody there?”. The question aimed to highlight the lack of clear policy direction in the Rome Council’s cultural department.
The impromptu happening came as the occupiers of Cinema America—who since 18th October have run a Cinema in a disused bakery just next door to the empty movie theatre in Rome’s Trastevere zone—announced a positive meeting with Mayor Marino. In the meeting, the mayor promised to try a find solution to help re-open the cinema which is owned by “Progetto Uno S.r.l” who served an eviction notice to its occupiers in late August 2014, just two days after the Minister for Culture and Tourism, Dario Franceschini, announced an order protecting the building’s use as a cinema as well as its interior decoration. That order was to come into effect within 90 days of August 24th, enabling its owners to act preemptively to retake the building and press on with plans on hold since 2004 to demolish it to make way for 20 apartments, two floors of parking and a small area for commercial use.
Image of Cinema America Occupato via infoaut.org
During the meeting, Mayor Marino underlined the extent to which he personally feels it necessary to unblock disused cultural spaces and give them to young people to innovate in co-operation with local communities, helping to tackle problems on Rome’s periphery such as violence and social integration. He even extended an invitation to the former occupiers and Cinema America Occupato to manage such an initiative and promised to help negotiate the purchase of the space after the occupiers’ most recent 2.4 million euro offer (the value of the property when acquired in 2004) was refused by its owners.
But such a strong promise will be watched carefully, especially coming after Rome’s assessor for culture, Giovanna Marinelli, issued a statement with Giovanni Caudo in January suggesting they would be open to considering proposals for Cinema America. Such conflicting messages between the Mayor and his own assessors have become a familiar trademark of Rome’s regime, which appears to use confusion as a tactic to retain a very loose control over a stagnant cultural scene. Last year, Rome went eight weeks without a cultural assessor at all, and the contemporary art museum MACRO operated for more than a year with no director. Federica Pirani, the new director of the once-vibrant museum, has yet to make an official public appearance or announcement in her new role despite starting in December 2014. Far from challenging Sorrentino’s portrayal of decadence, Rome’s council appears to be making the notion of a “cultural void” a specialty. They even appear to play divide-and-rule among the brilliant ex-occupiers of its most central cinema and oldest theater, both of which ran programs for years with no council or government intervention.
As the ex-occupiers of Teatro Valle threaten to re-occupy the 18th century theater, the Piccolo Cinema America continues to run a program of films, talks and other events, keeping alive the dream of a return to the disused cinema a stone’s throw from its door. It is as yet unclear whether its young occupants—most of whom met in college—will soon be ready to move back to Cinema America or whether they’ll benefit from Marino’s plans for a network of re- and newly opened cultural spaces across Rome. Recently, the former occupiers of Cinema America have co-operated with Rome’s council on an initiative named Festival Trastevere Rione del Cinema, which will involve free screenings in Piazza San Cosimato, close to the closed cinema. The program will run from 2 June to 30 July and will help fill a gap in Rome’s summer programming as the council has withdrawn all funding, running a competition for cultural entities who can bid to run self-funded projects in parks and piazzas. Such a strategy is clearly not a long-term solution and it would perhaps be wise to be cautious of an administration that has so spectacularly failed to run and maintain even those spaces in its own possession. In October 2014, Sorrentino issued a statement declaring that while he will always remain a citizen of Rome, he will give back both his honorary Roman citizenship and his Oscar if Cinema America is not re-opened. Such a sentiment expresses a situation in which governments are becoming increasingly dysfunctional as they’re subordinate to capital, rather than their citizens. In Rome, a city rich in social centers and occupied cultural spaces, the citizenry is fighting back with a passionate intensity that other cities and countries could learn from.
Mike Watson is a theorist and curator based in Rome. He holds a Phd from Goldsmiths College and has curated events at the 55th and 56th Biennale di Venezia as well as at Nomas Foundation. In late 2015 he will publish “Towards a Conceptual Militancy” with Zero Books.
*Still from “La Grande Bellezza” courtesy fotomuseo.it