the director Gianfranco Rosi in aesthetic overhang

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WE CAN AVOID

Italian-American director, born in Eritrea in 1964, Gianfranco Rosi is a renowned documentary filmmaker, whose work is exhibited all over the world of cinema. In 2013, Sacro GRA, variation around the Roman ring road, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, with the nose and beard of the competing fictions. In 2016, rebelotes: Fuocoammare, testimony on the migratory crisis seen from the strategic island of Lampedusa, received the Golden Bear in Berlin as well as an Oscar nomination.

His last feature film Notturno, competing in Venice in 2020, paints a fragmented picture of the situation in the Middle East, sailing along the borders of Iran, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon, areas torn by geopolitics, interference foreign and fundamentalist threat. Between war scenes and genre scenes, the film brings together various aspects of the region, sailing in turn among Peshmerga fighters, inmates of an Iraqi psychiatric hospital, Yazidi orphans who escaped from prison camps, or more. mostly civilians trying to make a living.

Itinerant principle

So where does the film get a deep sense of embarrassment? First of all of its itinerant principle which tends to align, and therefore to generalize, very different situations, experiences and regions, irreducible to one another. Absolutely wanting to paint a picture, Gianfranco Rosi transforms each station into a vignette, one sweeping the other over the course of an imperturbable montage, without commentary or contextualization.

It emerges a certain position of aesthetic overhang. No shot in the film resists the temptation of the beautiful, well-licked image, like that of poeticizing the chaos – which seems ridiculous in the face of the seriousness of the events described or the remarks made. All in his tapestry of the Apocalypse, the documentary filmmaker does not even realize the indecency that sometimes characterizes his point of view: filming from the window of prisoners crammed into a cell, or over the shoulder of a mother in tears for, the time of a review, to frame the photos of her executed son. As if, always ready to sacrifice people in pursuit of the motive, Notturno wanted to be an object of art, and of the greatest. He is above all as cold as death.