S.and there is an image that can now be taken as a symbol of the 79th Venice Film Festival is that of the digital man running along the bar that separates the festival-goers from the most desired destination: the dematerialized ticket office.
Cate Blanchett in TÁR: time is everything. Credit: Focus Features
“Time is everything,” says Lydia Tár-Cate Blanchett in the trailer for Tár by Todd Field, one of the most anticipated films of the Festival. “Time is the essential part of the interpretation. Nobody can start without me. I start the clock “.
Much time has been wasted on the digital platform to which every major festival, from the pandemic onwards, has now contracted out its ticket office. Nothing works and there are many sobs of regret “For those beautiful queues outside the halls or in front of the box office in the presence of kind conductors with whom a real interaction was possible”. This is of course an exaggeration, but we have heard worse (“It’s a conspiracy”). Even if there are extremes for paranoia: the little digital man almost always reports to the start box, “48 minutes, 19 minutes, the system is paused” … But also: “error 20” and the question: “are you a visitor of this site or the administrator? “. Ah, if I were …
A genetic mutation?
Except that the reader of the difficulties experienced by the reporter to do his job, since the world has been around, rightly does not care, asserted that the festival-goer complains by default (for security checks, for the weather, for queues, for the food, for the prices, for the choice of films, for the sense of humor of the Venetians, and in fact there is a little bit of a cultural gap there), and having ascertained that we are not on a war front, we close it immediately with the story of the vicissitudes we are going through to guarantee us a place in the room. If it is news, it deserves at best to finish in a “short”. However, however, this umpteenth genetic mutation offers a food for thought. If it is true that a festival, especially when it is called Mostra del cinema and blows out 90 candles, is not just a series of screenings, but above all a place of meeting, exchange and discovery, where people who speak different languages, have different experiences behind them and look at the world each in their own way and think that it is worth trying to see it through the eyes of others, then there is something wrong, beyond Vivaticket’s crazed algorithm. There is something wrong with the solitude towards which even this praxis which now seems irreversible leads.
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Just today it was held a panel on the future of cinema, a meeting in which few numbers were given in truth, but there was an atmosphere of general optimism. The pandemic had made us fear that the festivals would disappear and instead here we are, in flesh and blood, at least we not dematerialized. Many of us, however, arrived with at least a third of visions already underway, before the festival even begins, others resigned to watching another third streaming on your computer in your hotel rooms. Then the meetings (veterans tell stories about spontaneously born interviews in bars, when bars were not kiosks, but had a charm, in front of a martini and not a sushi) are often meetings of 10-15 minutes shared with colleagues who have interests different and that sometimes produce that typical alienating effect of “oh my God, I’m in a film by Nanni Moretti” (a film that, since everything changes, Moretti no longer does, but there are the followers). We know, it’s not a question of laziness, it’s all necessary: festivals multiply sections, screenings overlap and celebrities decide that the role of the press, perhaps with respect to social networks, perhaps with respect to the world seen and interpreted by now only according to the laws of marketing, is increasingly marginal.
And cinema also changes, but fortunately it does so according to laws that are its own. Not that marketing has nothing to do with it, otherwise we would have no reason to worry about the disaffection for the theater when Marvel films are not shown. But there are films here that we look forward to seeing because we think they will be balm for our little daily efforts and will help make sense of our presence at the Lido. Fortunately, the list is not short. And it goes from young Frederick Wiseman who, to make good use of the lockdown in France, made his first fiction film at the age of 92 and after a career as a documentary master, A coupleto Paul Schrader who with To Master Gardenerjust a year after giving us The card collectorhe continues in his personal path of redemption. We want to meet without fear cannibal lovers of Bones and All by Luca Guadagnino, experiment to what extent an artist’s dream can become a modern nightmare along with the conductor that Todd Field designed for Cate Blanchett (and no other) in TAR and maybe try to experiment the Irish disamistade of the protagonists of The Banshees of Inisherin by Martin McDonagh, and ask us with Walter Hill and his Dead for a Dollar, if there is still room for the western in this world. To answer almost certainly: of course yes! So may a cowboy, please, hang the little digital man from the tallest tree …
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