Filmmaker Nanni Moretti denounced “violence and rudeness” of the operation. His brothers and sisters Marco Bellocchio, Paolo Sorrentino, Luca Guadagnino, Alice Rohrwacher and more than 600 other film professionals expressed their concern by signing an appeal published in the press. In a Turin daily interview La Stampa, director Mario Martone said he was more concerned about the case than about the social conflict that is paralyzing Hollywood. Since mid-July, the world of Italian cinema has been shaken by the particular attention reserved by the majority, dominated by the extreme right, for one of its most precious monuments, the Experimental Center of Cinematography (or Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, CCS), in Rome.
Without announcement or prior declaration, this foundation, which brings together a school of cinema of excellence and the priceless archives of the Italian National Cinematheque, has seen its governance overhauled and its management de facto landed. at the bend of a catch-all decree passed in the middle of summer. This reform could open the way, according to its detractors, to a political takeover of this prestigious institution by the government of the president of the council, Giorgia Meloni. In any case, it intervenes in a context where, from the public audiovisual sector to museums, the ambitions of the Italian radical right in the world of culture are gradually beginning to materialize, driven by the claimed desire to challenge the left ‘“hegemony” that she has so far been detained there.
“The state finances the institution, and the government of course has a say in the direction it takes, but this rush to take control and disrupt everything inside is inexplicable”, denounces director Michele Vannucci, who taught at the CSC. A paradoxical legacy of the fascist cultural policy and of a period from which it has preserved the characteristic architectural style, the Experimental Centre, founded in 1935, was one of the matrices of post-war Italian cinema. Directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Giuseppe De Santis trained there in the 1940s, Marco Bellochio frequented it at the turn of the 1960s. To date, the institution has provided the sector with generations of directors, screenwriters , producers and actors.
“A very strong discomfort”
The amendment aimed at transforming its operation was introduced by four deputies from the League (extreme right), the second party of the coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, in a decree supposed to carry the measures to be taken for the organization of the Jubilee 2025 celebrated by the Vatican. Adopted on August 3, these unexpected provisions provide for the appointment of members of the institution’s scientific committee to be placed under the direct control of the executive and to give them more power over its operation. They also put an end to the mandate of its current leaders, which was to end in 2025.
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