Paolo Sorrentino: a Trans- Cultural and Post-National Auteur

JICMS 7 (3) pp. 331–338 Intellect Limited 2019

EDITORIAL

Annachiara Mariani The University of Tennessee

Paolo Sorrentino: A trans- cultural and post-national auteur

This special issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (JICMS) 1. See references for on Paolo Sorrentino is the first collection of articles in English devoted to this an up-to-date list of publications on prominent, award-winning director and paves the way for new ideological Sorrentino. and theoretical approaches to his cinematography. Sorrentino’s indisputable status as a renowned auteur has been established and advanced by numerous film studies scholars.1 As Claudio Bisoni states,

Even before La grande bellezza (2013) triumphed with the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014, Sorrentino’s oeurve had long been considered works of ‘industrial’ auteur cinema: they could compete successfully in international festivals thanks to a negotiation of an individual visual style and characters that are firmly rooted within Italian society. (Bisoni 2016: 251)

Alex Marlow-Mann agrees, and asserts confidently that, ‘given his degree of control (over settings, characters, gestures, editing strategies, music) together with the considerable thematic parallels between his films, and the coherent

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2. Giulio Andreotti stylistic aesthetics since his debut film, Sorrentino’s films are prime candidates (1919–2013) was the sixth longest-serving for auteurist analysis’ (2010: 162). Finally, in ‘What is Italian cinema?’ Alan prime minister since O’Leary remarks, ‘[a]s its most internationally visible products, Sorrentino’s the Italian Unification films assert the “authentic” Italian cinema to be that which directly recalls the and widely considered the most powerful and auteur cinema of the so-called golden age’ (2018: 19). prominent politician Sorrentino’s global breadth, his unique visionary style and distinctive of the so-called First aesthetics, his outspoken hubris and weighty poetics, his metaphysical Republic. lyricism and stunning compositions (with Luca Bigazzi behind the lens) tout court make him a contemporary director worthy of scrutiny. The purpose of this issue is to rediscover and deconstruct Sorrentino’s current exegesis, highlighting auteurial traits to present a more extensive picture of his cinematic opus. Paolo Sorrentino’s cinematic career dates to the late 1990s, when as a screenwriter he wrote and directed his first short films Un paradise (A Paradise) (1994), L’amore non ha confine (Love Has No Boundaries) (1998) and La notte lunga (The Long Night) (2001) (which inaugurated his life-long collaboration with Indigo Film). His first feature film L’uomo in piú (One Man Up) (2001) received praise and prizes at the 58th Venice Film Festival and initi- ated his long-term collaboration with Neapolitan actor Tony Servillo. It was with his second feature film, Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) (2004), that he truly stepped into the limelight, winning five David di Donatello and three Nastri d’argento awards. In 2006, he directed the dysto- pian L’amico di famiglia (The Family Friend) and, in 2008, his much-acclaimed biopic on Giulio Andreotti,2 Il divo. This was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival, thereby placing Sorrentino at the centre of a nationwide cinematic and political debate. Il divo also impressed festival juror Sean Penn, leading to their collaboration in This Must Be the Place (2011), Sorrentino’s first English-language film. In 2014, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013) won the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and a BAFTA and five EFA Awards. In 2016, La Giovinezza (Youth) gained an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song and two Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song. The film also won three European Film Awards. In addition, in 2016, Sorrentino wrote and directed The Young Pope (2016), his first English-language Italian drama television series for HBO, Canal+ and Sky Atlantic, whose stellar cast included Jude Law, Diane Keaton and James Cromwell. To add to this list of achievements, Sorrentino has also published a novel, Hanno tutti ragione (Everybody’s Right) in 2010, and two collections of short stories: Tony Pagoda e i suoi amici (Tony Pagoda and His Friends) (2012) and Gli aspetti irrilevanti (The Irrelevant Aspects) (2016). His latest biopic, Loro (Them or The Gold) (2018), offers a fictional, four- year snapshot of Italian tycoon and political leader Silvio Berlusconi’s life; it was released in two parts: Loro 1 and Loro 2. Loro 1 focuses more on ‘them’ – as the title states – i.e. the people who are infatuated with Berlusconi’s power and money and are willing to do whatever it takes to get close to him. Loro 2 illustrates the private life of the magnate and his wife, on the verge of divorce, as personal and public crises unravel his marriage and political empire. Sorrentino skilfully manages to neither praise nor condemn the political leader, but rather, he portrays the transforming and damaging effects of berlusconismo in Italian society, which promoted and furthered moral corrup- tion and ruthless ambitions while disregarding any ethical principles. As a unit, Loro is a biopic of a man obsessed with power who cannot come to terms with

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the fact that he is losing it. He has grown conditioned to achieving everything he wants in life and Sorrentino isolates moments where Berlusconi cannot accept his failures. However, if ‘everything is not enough’, as he states in the film, he is destined to incessantly search for something that he will never get and he will never find. The agitation that he experiences not only characterizes Berlusconi’s character but is also present in all of us: the Neapolitan director once again asks his audience to reflect on our universal condition of human dissatisfaction, without offering an answer. Sorrentino’s next project is a sequel series to The Young Pope (which will focus on a new character, appropri- ately) entitled The New Pope. The seven articles in this special issue are the result of a rigorous and challenging selection process and shed new light on hermeneutical traits overlooked in earlier studies. Previous scholarship has pointed out that Sorrentino’s work offers a compelling example of what has been termed ‘postmodern impegno’ (postmodern engagement) (Antonello and Mussgnug 2009: 4,11). Millicent Marcus has also remarked:

Sorrentino’s post-realism aesthetics, irony and ethics of political engagement can coexist with his vogue for postmodern stylistic virtu- osity – including the use of pastiche, abundant citation, semiotic play- fulness, imagistic saturation, decorative exuberance, flamboyant camera work, performative excess, over-the-top musical score, obtrusive editing, theatrical lighting, dazzling set design. (2010: 248)

Although a few scholars have pointed out the sexist and misogynist nature of Sorrentino’s views (Mariani 2017), recent studies have upheld that his use of comic irony undermines the apparent sexism in his films. According to Simor and Sorfa, the director hyperbolizes the object of desire for parodic purposes with the help of his excessive film style, and thus the ‘sexist’ presentation of female beauty becomes a humorous subversion. This ironically expressed ambiguity is the main characteristic of Sorrentino’s humour (Simor and Sorfa 2017: 212). The contributors to this special issue masterfully examine Sorrentino’s authorial trademarks: ‘excessive visuals, scathing humour and a yearning for spirituality’ (Simor and Sorfa 2017: 212) and grand themes of memory, nostalgia, ageing, love, thirst for fulfilment, search for the self, identity crisis, human estrangement, marginality, irony and power. In so doing, they offer an unprecedented theoretical angle, new hermeneutical perspectives and unique cues for discussion while enriching the existing literature. Although they refer to previous scholarship, the contributions here go further, advancing unusual perspectives that at times deconstruct the established assumptions and paradigms of Sorrentino’s hermeneutics. The first part of this tripartite issue, entitled ‘Deconstructing Sorrentino’s ethos’, opens with Mimmo Cangiano’s claim of a Romantic and modernist Sorrentino. In his article ‘Against postmodernism: Paolo Sorrentino and the search for authenticity’, Cangiano deconstructs the most common assertion about Sorrentino’s postmodern penchant, stating that his cinematic oeuvre challenges postmodernist theories of identity by focusing on Romantic and modernist leitmotifs, such as the search for identity and authenticity in life. Cangiano furthers this argument by highlighting these characters’ proclivity to follow their sensory impulses and their incessant urge to travel. In his view, these traits

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demonstrate that the characters’ flawed perspectives are rooted in a world of unreality. He maintains that Sorrentino’s archetypal figure is a man who, in seeking his own self, is attempting to resolve and subsequently construct meaning from the conflict between his stable and ephemeral identities. Cangiano states that Sorrentino’s cinema simultaneously supports and suppresses postmodern readings of his work; reflecting this interpretation, the mise en abyme of his entire poetics coincides with the characters’ journey from nihilism to meaning, which coincides with the creation of art in life. Matteo Gilebbi’s article titled ‘Posthuman Sorrentino: Youth and The Great Beauty as ecocinema’ furthers and complicates the deconstruction of Sorrentino’s philosophy by proposing that the standard interpretation of Sorrentino’s cinematic world as dominated by a human-privileged, or anthro- pocentric, perspective over the environment is false. According to Gilebbi, ‘in The Great Beauty and Youth a posthuman condition informs the interaction between the characters and their undivided natural and cultural environ- ments’. Struggling to find meaning in the frailty of their human condition, Sorrentino’s characters seek kinship with nature and the biosphere, exempli- fying a posthuman condition in a world devoid of hierarchies and human priv- ileges. This endorsement grants ecocinematic qualities to Sorrentino’s latest films, where a crossover with ecology reveals a biosphere that exists with and beyond human understanding and control. Moreover, his narrative helps us to reconsider our ethical and political role in the Anthropocene, where we are decisive agents of global ecological transformation. Neatly following on from Gilebbi’s argument, Alex Gammon’s article ‘Rome’s vocalization through architecture in The Great Beauty’ suggests that Sorrentino’s films attribute anthropomorphic qualities to architecture and natural elements. Unlike Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), where the rela- tionship between the characters and architecture is antithetical and unrespon- sive, Gammon cogently demonstrates that The Great Beauty creates a stage where people can establish a fruitful dialogue with monuments, churches and ruins, thus inspiring rebirth and ascension beyond the material. Gammon advances the hypothesis of a dialectic between Roman architecture and film as vocalizing entities through which the protagonist Jep re-establishes his identity and rediscovers his inspiration. Therefore, architecture gains a vocal quality through film that allows Rome to interact with the protagonists of The Great Beauty. Gammon convincingly argues that ‘the architecture becomes a conduit for truth in the protagonist’s identity by vocalizing existential freedom to him’. The second part of this collection is ‘A Journey into Sorrentino’s Psyche’. It opens with Russell Kilbourn’s article, ‘The “primal scene”: Memory, redemption and “woman” in the films of Paolo Sorrentino’, which examines gender and female marginalization in The Great Beauty and Youth. This offers an interesting new perspective on Sorrentino’s aesthetics and on his highly gendered cinematic world. Rather than deconstructing how Sorrentino objectifies the female form, Kilbourn plumbs the depths of his motiva- tion. Having established his theoretical perspective and what he calls ‘the Sorrentinian subject’, Kilbourn furthers some interesting claims about the function of the image as an aesthetic spectacle – which is unquestionably central to Sorrentino’s cinema. Invoking the role of the ‘gaze’ and ‘stare’ from disability studies, he examines Sorrentino’s fascination with non-normative identities that function as radical othering, shedding a more ironic light on the masculine subject. Thus, the author links the objectification of the female form to the director’s proclivity for images of deformed and/or grotesque

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bodies. Kilbourn traces an increasingly complex trajectory in the treatment of gender in Sorrentino’s films, problematized by the connection with the memory of the primal scene, and secular or post-secular redemption. The emergence of Sorrentino’s subconscious in his films is the focus of Sandra Waters’ article ‘Anxiety (of influence) and (absent) fathers in Sorrentino’s English-language narratives’. Waters analyses the mirror effect between Sorrentino’s fatherless characters and himself in an attempt to break the fourth wall between the diegetic and the extradiegetic narrative. Through a psychoanalytical reading of Youth, This Must Be the Place and The Young Pope, she upholds that Sorrentino is not a mere twenty-first-century reiteration of Fellini; rather, his frequent citations of Fellini’s films serve as a catalyst to delve deeper into the director’s psyche, and not as a mere way to ‘mimic’ his predecessor in a Bloomian fashion. As his characters’ fictional lives are spent searching for either their ancestors or a Hitchcockian McGuffin, Waters boldly suggests that the director uses the camera to address his troubling past in his art, to seek his own missing objet petit a, to exorcize his loss and prove his superiority over his predecessors (i.e. Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini). Waters concludes that ‘any deficiencies, failures or crises depicted by the fathers, sons, and father figures on screen is counteracted by the success of Sorrentino himself off screen […] who becomes a “strong” poet-director, perhaps even overshadowing his own poetic forerunners’. The third section of this issue, ‘Sorrentino’s Virtuoso Reception’, features the article ‘The Young Pope: An Italian “celevision” case study’ by Anna Manzato and Antonella Mascio. The authors’ discourse rests on a series of questions on the impact of celebrities on the writing and reception of the series and their role in making The Young Pope a transnational phenomenon. The concept of celevision mainly entails celebrities’ participation in television shows, facilitated by the collapsing boundaries and cultural legitimization of cinema and television. Their argument considers a range of texts linked to medial, para-textual discourse and Facebook pages that have accompanied the broadcast of each episode. Supported by several theoretical models from the field of celebrities studies, the two authors skilfully analyse how celebrity is constructed both inside and outside the text. They reveal that the discourse on these celebrities overshadows any reflection on the filmic text itself, call- ing it an extra-diegetic type of celevision. Conversely, an intra-diegetic narrative trajectory involves the increasing celebrity status of the main character, Pope Pius XIII; part of the popularity of the show rests on this dual celebrity- building strategy. Regarding celebrity status outside the text, the authors cite several quota- tions from newspapers, from the premiere of The Young Pope in the 2016 Venice Film Festival to positive reviews months later, by journalists and film critics alike. They report enthusiastic comments in the Italian and American press that use Sorrentino’s character to portray the series as a Copernican revolu- tion filled with Sorrentinian leitmotifs, his ‘magical realism’ trait in primis. This astonishing coverage is intended to influence the audience’s interpretation and lend, at the same time, an aura of celebrity of the series. Thus, celebrity status is attributed to the individual participants in the series ‘but also more generally to the product itself, which takes on a peculiar resonance thanks to the superposition of cinema and television’. The authors maintain that The Young Pope is a typical example of ‘complex television’ because it engages the construction of celebrity culture through various stages: transmedia story- telling, orienting paratexts, new authorialities and social networking. Finally,

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3. See the online article the celevision status of The Young Pope impacts the social realm through the written by Killough (2013). symbolic power exercised by the media. The last article of this concluding section is authored by Lydia Tuan. She explores how Sorrentino employs a distinctive cinematic style that is linked to theories of cinematic excess, particularly those theorized by Kristen Thompson, in four representative films: One Man Up, Il divo, The Great Beauty and The Young Pope. Tuan shows how Sorrentino’s formal excess appears temporally and spatially through the analytic attention to its aesthetic. Employing Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chronobiopolitics, she argues that the director frequently slows down or speeds up time to portray his protagonists’ thoughts, memories and flashbacks in a way that parallels their suspended states. Distancing herself from Kristin Thompson’s view of excess as a formal element, she borrows a more literal meaning of the term. Tuan views excess as extra, overflow, surplus, ‘more than’ an anticipated quantity – to argue that Sorrentino employs a style that relies on techniques used to an unusual amount, formulating the notion of excess as style. She manages to effectively demonstrate that Sorrentino’s style is inextricably linked to his manipulations of time and space. She skilfully states:

through extended establishing shots and presentations of non-linear cinematic timelines, Sorrentino’s temporal excess and spatial excess produce each other, allowing viewers to formally engage with the idea of decay and slow destruction, which mirrors the slowness of personal decay felt by Sorrentino’s protagonists through their estrangements from their professional lives.

Having outlined the main themes of the articles in this special issue, I hope to show the importance of this publication. It clearly opens the field for new and atypical exegesis of Sorrentino’s opus without disregarding previous hermeneutical approaches. This issue also aims to correct certain misconceptions about Sorrentino’s work. For many years now, and by many film critics, he has been considered a pretentious filmmaker, and somewhat denigratingly referred to as the new Fellini3 for mimicking Fellini’s cinematic style and motifs. However, many Italian and international directors (such as Woody Allen in Stardust Memories [1980]) have included Fellinesque elements that were just shy of plagiarism without being stigmatized in the same way. In my opinion, Sorrentino’s style borrows from the ancient Latin concept of imitatio. In his entry on ‘Imitation’ (mimesis, imitatio) in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, Michael Fronda defines imitation as ‘an author’s conscious use of features and characteristics of earlier works to acknowledge indebtedness to past writers’ (Bagnall et al. 2012: 3416). Imitation dates to nearly every work by Greek and Roman authors. To clarify this, Fronda explains that

ancient theoretical discussions of imitation agree that good imitation required more than simple copying. An imitator was expected to emulate many models, join imitated material seamlessly to his own, reshape and vary it for its new context, and improve upon it. (Bagnall et al. 2012: 3416)

Closer scrutiny of Sorrentino’s films indeed reveals that the director oper- ates within the terms of ancient imitatio. His emulation of some of Fellini’s films, including La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits) (1965) and Roma (1972), does not simply replicate these films but

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rather reshapes them into a more contemporary mould informed by his singu- lar aesthetic of a (post)modernized Italy and Rome in primis. To conclude, in keeping with the aims of JICMS, this special issue intends to revive a post-national and trans-cultural debate on Paolo Sorrentino, a new auteur of Italian cinema, whose unique aesthetic touch is deeply marking the panorama of the national and transnational film studies forum. Finally, I would like to thank the many anonymous renowned Italian film scholars who agreed to blind-review the articles included in this edition. A special thank you to the principal editor of JICMS, Dr Flavia Laviosa, who entrusted me with this important task and assisted me with her professional- ity and expertise every step of the way. Without her precious help, this issue would not have been possible.

References Antonello, Pierpaolo and Mussgnug, Florian (eds) (2009), Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture, Bern: Peter Lang. Bagnall, Roger and Wiley InterScience (2012), The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Bisoni, Claudio (2016), ‘Paolo Sorrentino: Between engagement and savoir faire’, in G. Lombardi and C. Uva (eds), Public Life, Imaginary, and Identity in Contemporary Italian Film, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 250–62. Killough, James (2013), ‘Why Paolo Sorrentino is and isn’t the new Fellini’, Pfc Everything as a Story, 10 December, http://www.purefilmcreative.com/ killough-chronicles/why-paolo-sorrentino-is-and-isnt-the-new-fellini. html. Accessed 10 February 2018. Marcus, Millicent (2010), ‘The ironist and the auteur: Post-realism in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il divo’, The Italianist, 30:2, pp. 245–57. Mariani, Annachiara (2017), ‘The empty heterotopic (non-)space of Sorrentino’s female characters in The Great Beauty and The Consequences of Love’, in S. Byer and F. Cecchini (eds), Female Identity and Its Representations in the Arts and Humanities, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 168–84. Marlow-Mann, Alex (2010), ‘Characters engagement and alienation in the cinema of Paolo Sorrentino’, in W. Hope (ed.), Italian Films Directors in The New Millennium, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 161–73. O’Leary, Alan (2017), ‘What is Italian cinema?’, California Italian Studies, 7:1, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z9275bz. Accessed 10 February 2018. Simor, Eszter and Sorfa, David (2017), ‘Irony, sexism and magic in Paolo Sorrentino’s films’, Studies in European Cinema, 14:3, pp. 200–15. Sorrentino, Paolo (1994), Un paradiso (A Paradise), Italy: Polymedia. —— (1998), L’amore non ha confine (Love Has No Boundaries), Italy: Indigo Film. —— (2001a), La notte lunga (The Long Night), Italy: Indigo Film. —— (2001b), L’uomo in più (One Man Up), Italy: Indigo Film. —— (2004), Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Conseguences of Love), Italy: Indigo Film. —— (2006), L’amico di famiglia (A Family Friend), Italy: Indigo Film. —— (2008), Il divo, Italy: Indigo Film. —— (2011), This Must Be The Place, Italy, France and Ireland: Indigo Film and Medusa Film. —— (2012), Tony Pagoda e i suoi amici (Tony Pagoda and his Friends), Milan: Feltrinelli.

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—— (2013a), Hanno tutti ragione (Everybody’s Right), Milan: Feltrinelli. —— (2013b), La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty), Italy and France: Indigo Film. —— (2015), Youth, Italy, UK, France and Switzerland: Indigo Film. —— (2016), Gli aspetti irrilevanti (The Irrelevant Aspects), Milan: Mondadori. The Young Pope (2016, USA: HBO Home Entertainment).

Contributor details Annachiara Mariani is assistant professor at the Department of Modern and Foreign Languages and Literatures at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests are in Italian cinema, national and transnational media studies and Italian theatre. She has authored a book on Italian Grotesque Theatre and Pirandello (Cassandra, 2013) and published numerous articles, essays and book reviews on Italian theatre, cinema and the interrelation between cinema and literature. Her forthcoming publications include articles on Paolo Sorrentino’s films and TV series. She is currently working on a book- length project on representation of trauma and power in contemporary Italian and American TV series. E-mail: [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8710-191X

Annachiara Mariani has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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