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Videocracy (2009)

Director: Erik Gandini

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From Time Out London

All roads lead to Silvio Berlusconi in this spooky documentary about Italy’s tacky and sinister TV and celebrity culture – a culture that implicates producers, agents, wannabe stars, politicians, paparazzi and Italy’s prime minister in one bottle-blonde, busty, poolside circle of hell. Director Erik Gandini captures a mood of ground-level desperation – we meet a karate-chopping mechanic who wants to be on reality TV and a gaggle of girls who gyrate wildly in the hope of becoming weathergirls – before introducing two grotesque puppet-masters: Lele Mora, an ageing playboy and agent who throws parties at his Sardinian villa for the C-list crowd and is proud of his Mussolini ringtones (‘great man, great leader’), and Fabrizio Corona, a former paparazzi boss and extortionist who thrives on his ruthless, self-serving image and boasts: ‘I’ve become a symbol.’ A symbol of all that’s wrong with modern Italy, we assume.

Gandini’s voiceover explains his purpose – ‘television and power are one and the same’ and, of the culture of Berlusconi, ‘we have the feeling he’s everywhere, even when he’s not visually present’ – but he allows his often jaw-dropping images to do the talking, and hats (or maybe Y-fronts) off to him for persuading Corona to be filmed preening in the shower. He reminds us that Berlusconi owns three commercial TV channels and controls all state television (so influencing 90 per cent of the country’s viewers), but he prefers intoning a sense of a culture overrun with corrupting vanity to making specific accusations. The combination of terrific footage with a low, rumbling score of doom makes this a compelling horror show.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2076: June 3 – 10, 2010

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User reviews of this film

Phil Ince said...

Posted on Jun 07 2010 15:20 Not a very good film.
The subtitles feature grammatical errors and mischosen words - as a camera proves that it exists by photographing it, the voiceover describes a celebrity agent's home as 'mythical'. At one point, even an caption in English is given a subtitle - and incorrect one at that.
The proposition seems to be that Italian society is degraded by celebrity culture and the attendant popular desire to participate in it. The fact that the country's prime minister is the main peddler and benefactor of this is clearly made but that's about it. It's not a film of much depth and is one that depends on a considerable amount of insinuation.
The scene of the moon-faced agent smilingly playing videos of fascist songs on his mobile phone (swastikas and all in the graphics) is quite startling but possibly only to a person like myself who doesn’t know a great deal about Italian politics.

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