Swastika Combinationalt

eyelid

Authors: Gianni Canova Publisher: Garzanti, Milano, 2010 Collection: - Pages: 230 Price: € 13 Language: Italian

Index: First Movement ANDANTE WITH BLOOD Second movement MOVED IN THE RAIN Entr'acte Third Movement SLOW BETWEEN THE EARTH Fourth Movement SOON WITH FIRE Epilogue ADAGIO THE PUNISHMENT Thanks, annotations and notes

As you know, Gianni Canova is one of the most tireless critics Italian: founder and director of the monthly Duel (now Duelists), curator of the Cinema Garzantine, dean and professor at the Faculty of Communication filmology IULM of Milan, and author, among others, one of the most significant theoretical texts of the last fifteen years, The alien and the bat - The crisis of form in contemporary cinema . For his first test fiction, thriller Canova chose the robes of the historical novel with pretensions. We are in fact in 2003, the peak industry-post-11/09 of fear and war in Iraq, on TV when you can see the beheading of Nick Berg and salt Tarantino's Kill Bill. In Milan barricaded by racism and fear of the Other, Giovanni Vigo, precarious university researcher and collaborator of Radio Popolare in his spare time, is involuntary witness to a series of heinous crimes that would lead, after a hellish this will scorched earth of its resources, psychological and emotional, to an underground market in human bodies, a totalitarian system for the sale of monstrous images, where a new "meat" crystalline film seems to declare itself as a metaphor for the times of terror and monstrosity exhibited of the first millennium . The fact that eyelids, starting from the title, seems propose, rather than as a novel, short treatise on the visibility (and, in this case, the policy that is written), it is clear from many indications. Already the names of the characters are self-explanatory: Giovanni Vigo, trying to see reality better than the surface even at the risk to undermine the existing and lose his own life, in the name refers to Jean Vigo, film director dead heretic prematurely, while the same can apply to the dall'eloquio exciting polemicist George Simmel and the dark lady Mia Quentin Tarantino (as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction ). The process seems to follow the naming of the characters didactic Manzoni, not surprisingly cited among the references: Manzoni as moralistic characters are defined a priori, from the pen of Canova leaving the three-dimensionality of the types that have nothing, with the fate already written clearly in the name. But the problems are much deeper on the visual and woven throughout the novel, back in fact many of the critical issues Canovian, dall'accecante flow of contemporary images, which thins the memory to the present and avoid the possibility of distinguishing truth from artifice , until the monstrous hybrid body obsession for a clear brand cronenberghiana (which Canova wrote the indispensable Castorino). The theoretical starting point in this sense is more evocative and stimulating in the difference placed between the representation of Inferno from Dante and Giotto's version, head in modernity: the first type of hell where those who sin of envy is forced to cigliatura (or the seam of the eyelids), to finally see each other in after have seen for so long out on their own, shown in the fresco by Giotto in the Hell of the Scrovegni Chapel envious are forced to keep my eyes open (in this regard, Canova does not miss the explicit reference to A Clockwork Orange ) as the possibility of being part of the same conviction to suffer, and how in the audience today, it is worth all the and the fault of contemporary life. Place the unique charm of these reflections on poverty is difficult to defer the substance of their narratives eyelids. As Canova, be sure to mention Scerbanenco and Houellebecq, the characters seem driven by topoi more worn, the plot seems a bodycount without backbone, imaginative in the final images but well known in its entire course, and, what is worse perhaps justifying the kind adopted (chosen field or saleability?), opt for a neutral prose, submissive, little or no staff. The critical Canova, also in the style of writing, we have become accustomed to something else. Dario Stefanoni