demoleft's Journal - EuroDem from Italy - Who's going to portrait this world in movies, to future generations?

The Middle East and Africa are burning, immigrants die while trying to reach the Italian coasts, democracy finds a hard way through, every day, but no movie director nor any writer in Italy seem to care.
Sign of the times.
Political disengagement is a must and soon becomes fashion. It's back to the 80s.

I just watched an Italian movie from the 50's.
At the time Anna Magnani was the counterpart of Anita Ekberg: one represented Italy on its knees after the II World War, the other the Dolce Vita, the Sweet Life many tried to lead in the same years, thanks to economy growing. Both were Italy, with Marcello Mastroianni to play the doubtful post-war man and Federico Fellini to tell what there was to tell - what an artist must tell in his time.

At the time Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassmann in their heyday played two key roles in the masterpiece by Mario Monicelli "La Grande Guerra", "The Great War", in which the 1st World War and the Alps were the stage background for many laughter, a portrait of our society and a final tragedy - both personal and national. Have a look at the faces, here http://www.italica.rai.it/eng/cinema/film/...

What's left today of that courage?
Nothing, in my opinion.

BABEL, 2006, by Alejandro G. Inarritu. The last movie that I saw uttering a shout to denounce the desolation of the Middle East, of its kids, the western responsibilities in our civil and political fall, the thread that connects us all in common and sometimes stupid fates. It was highly criticized in Italy and Europe. Too cerebral, too formal. Even too hollywoodian.
We European are good in critics. Some say critics are failed artists.

Maybe it was not a great movie, but an attempt, at least, to tell what's happening now in a world we consider too far away from us - enough, indeed, not to hear the shots, the wounds opening, the shouts, the crying.

What do we offer, instead? In Italy many directors tell private stories, personal bourgeois dramas, played and consumed within the inner walls - or on the contrary, sagas of 70's generations, interpretation of highly political tensions in Italy, fights and terrorism.

Where's the world of today, though?
Where the wars, the money-, the gas-, the pipelines-, the oil-stained carnage of innocents?
Where political abuse, where's tyranny, where are tyrants dressed in democratic suit, where is the european silence, its inability to face the world complexities? Where are poverty and hunger?

No trace. The Italian Cinema - that some celebrate in the younger generations of directors - doesn't tell this world.
And in doing "domestic" movies, they don't even have the courage of Michael Moore and stain their hands.

I don't know if it's just Italian vice. In France, during the last Presidential Elections, some papers said the art estabilishment in Paris had no account, no weight, made no opinion nor influence on the public.

Which means simply that artists - and movie directors among them - are living in another world.