IFFR documentary makes an excellent attempt to give commercial ital-disco music from the eighties a better name

Italians don’t dance with a purpose, says a sociologist in the delightful music documentary Italo Disco – The Sparkling Sound of the 80s, on display at the IFFR. They don’t dance to revolutionize, as they danced in Mexico, or to change the world, as danced in 1960s London. Italians dance because it is beautiful to dance. They put on their best clothes and forget all their worries. The aesthetics of the dance, the exuberant, detailed attention to appearances, that is the Italian touch.

And what better to dance to than a disco beat? No wonder the Italian music industry plunged into disco not long after the genre emerged in the United States in the mid-1970s. The Italians gave it their own twist, as they had done before with American films. What the spaghetti western was in the movie world, that was italodisco into the music.

The spaghetti disco sound remained popular for years, with mega hits such as Vamos a la playa from Righeira and I Like Chopin from Gazebo. It was the sound of summer, camping discos and holiday romances. At the same time, italodisco was known as ultra-commercial, simple and clichéd, in short, the opposite of cool.

Italo Disco – The Sparkling Sound of the 80s makes an excellent effort to give the genre a better name. Italodisco was more than a few beats and a synthesizer tune, director Alessandro Melazzini shows with the help of diehard fans, music experts and of course the musicians themselves. Just take that synthesizer, a new instrument with unprecedented possibilities, used by the Italians for a futuristic, space sound. The decoration of the acts was just as ultramodern, as were the often groundbreaking video clips.

Melazzini brings together all the protagonists of the eighties, from the La Bionda brothers (the geniuses behind many monster hits) to Sabrina Salerno (‘Boys boys boys, I’m looking for a good time/ Boys boys boys, get ready for my love‘). A star role is reserved for the Italian sociologist who perfectly knows how to interpret the music movement and all its side effects.

When he explains that the genre was not just fake, as a copy of American disco, but often also double fake and even triple fake, it starts to get dizzy. The stars of italodisco were regular playbackers, while the real singers remained anonymous. Meanwhile, German producers began to interfere with the music. Germans pretending to be Italians pretending to be Americans.

You wonder whether that striking sociologist is really a sociologist, or a well-chosen stand-in. It does not matter: Italo Disco is a film that sells the eighties with its hysterical colours, cheerful hypocrisy and futuristic dreams.