Camera turns on ‘Videocrat’ Berlusconi at Venice

Silvio Berlusconi was accused Thursday of turning Italian television into a laughing stock as a searing documentary about the impact of the prime minister’s media empire premiered in Venice.

“Television has invaded the collective imagination of the country,” Erik Gandini, director of “Videocracy”, told a press conference at the Venice film festival.

“Outsiders laugh at our television, and at Berlusconi … but it has had a very notable impact on our country.”

The documentary by Gandini, who lives in Sweden but was born and brought up in Italy, takes an eye-opening look at both the output on the Italian prime minister’s three channels and how it has shaped the country’s psyche.

Game shows and variety shows featuring scantily clad women, now seen by many as a ticket to wealth, fame or power, dominate the channels operated by the Berlusconi family’s Mediaset group.

Gandini said that there was an unusually strong link between television and those who exercise power in his native land.

“In Italy, television and power are really connected in a way that’s very unusual,” he told AFP.

“Banality is presented as innocuous… but in Italy it has become a political tool,” he added.

“You can have a career without knowing how to do anything,” he said, pointing to the most prominent example of the Minister for Equal Opportunities, Mara Carfagna, a former showgirl from one of Berlusconi’s TV networks.

In the film selected for the “Venice Days” and “International Critics’ Week” sections of the festival, a young man hoping to make the big time complains that he is outnumbered by woman wanabees.

“So many girls are willing to do anything to get on the fast track to stardom,” he sighs.

Also Thursday, the 66th Mostra in the lagoon city showcased US directors vying for the Golden Lion, cult filmmaker Todd Solondz with his neurotic dark comedy “Life During Wartime,” and John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic drama “The Road”.

Solondz, who won the International Critics Prize in Cannes for “Happiness” (1998), said Thursday: “I have approached things always first from the point of view of the characters and their stories.”

His new film involving intersecting love stories explores tortured consciences and self-destructive lives in a heavily Jewish southern Florida locale where people are peripherally aware that the nation is at war.

Hillcoat’s film, based on the best-seller by Cormac McCarthy, while billed as post-apocalyptic, was much more about love, its creators said Thursday.

A barren world heading toward total annihilation after an unspecified cataclysm is the setting for this struggle by a father, played by Viggo Mortensen of Denmark, to ensure the survival of his son (Kodi Smit McPhee).

“I was stripped down to the essentials,” Mortensen said. “It’s about character, about how you behave… when you have nothing left but your heartbeat and the heartbeat of your son.”

The pair evade gangs who had resorted to cannibalism and enduring long stretches without food, making the father ever more desperate but kindling a protective force in the son.

“The child winds up being the teacher,” Mortensen said.

In all more than 80 films will be presented at the prestigious festival, which runs to September 12.

by: AFP