30° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
TFFDOC/DOCUMENTI

Signo' Belluscone... dica!

Signo' Belluscone... dica!

Country: Italy
Year:
Duration:


excerpts from a conversation with franco maresco by giuliano la franca

Berlusconi has been present in our work, mine and Ciprì’s, since the beginning, when we started to finalise Cinico Tv, which would land at RaiTre in 1990, around the end of the Eighties. 
We had decided to banish and accurately avoid every reference to real existing persons, to any reality that might point to an immediately recognisable contemporary scene. Cinico Tv was a parallel universe, which we polished as we went along until we got to Lo zio di Brooklyn, to Totò che visse due volte...
The only exception to this rule we were abiding to was Silvio Berlusconi, an obviously existing character; the inventor of Fininvest, which was transforming Italians anthropologically during that period. Our characters often target him, they evoke him, as with the extraordinary ode in Leopardiesque-mode by cyclist Francesco Tirione, which predates B’s real-life descent into the ring by 4 years. We pander, with great pleasure, to our characters’ wish for unmentionable vengeance, and B becomes a comic-strip character, a Disney character almost, an Uncle Scrooge adapted to a “Palermo-esque” condition: we used to have a sarcastic and spiteful attitude that still viewed B with a certain sympathy however. […] 
The characters in Cinico Tv, from Tirione to Paviglianiti, to the Abbate brothers to Pietro Giordano, are an exaggeration of commedia all’italiana characters. They take the place of the various Sordis, Tognazzis, Manfredis, Gassmans and they replace that bourgeois genotype representing the average Italian with a world in which nobody is reprieved any more, in which there are no bourgeois, working-classes, underclasses, struggles, or class sympathy. There is only one truth in our world: Man is a piece of shit. So, if Giordano is a sort of exaggerated Alberto Sordi, we see the bastard that an Italian is in general within B, an Italian at his worst. In the Fifties and Sixties commedia all’italiana there was a spark of humanity, of redemption, with B we feel we have reached point-non-plus. […] 
Belluscone, una storia siciliana is the title of this interminable film I’ve already been working at for ages. […] B is Sicily, his relations with Sicily are something uproarious, he owes everything to Sicily and ever since his origins, he has been dealing with Sicilians: Dell’Utri, a certain Giuseppe Azzaretto, founder of the Rasini Bank which allowed B to build his enormous fortune, and then Mangano, Bontade, cosa nostra men. B is more Sicilian than the Sicilians. And reflecting just on this I asked myself it made any sense to make the umpteenth documentary on a story already told many times. I realised it was not the right direction, so I preferred to talk about the love, the symbiosis that many Sicilians have felt for B and with him. I brought a parallel story with another protagonist, a B doppelganger, a small outdoor-fête impresario and neo-melodic singers agent, in the foreground. I talk of B through little, even sordid stories, bordering on the grotesque and the paradox, and his Sicilianness appears even more evident and potent. […]
This film is a Frankenstein made up of a small amount of shots by ourselves, but especially of archive material from Sicilian TVs, on more or less conniving neo-melodic singers performing in local broadcasts and on the radio. [...] I think this non-object object may give the idea of a world also on a symbolic level, B’s world, Sicily’s, Italy’s, which is fragmented, made of many souls, of many dimensions, of many realities. For me, the film is the second part of Enzo, domani a Palermo, the documentary I and Ciprì dedicated at the end of the 1990s to an impresario who managed film extras: a first farewell to something that was disappearing. With Belluscone I’m trying to shut the tale we started then, in a more sombre manner. In this sense it is a definite adieu to a world, to a Palermo that does not exist any more, and that I am not sure whether to have any regrets about, although this present and the future looming ahead may risk instigating some.

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