Videocracy
Directed by: Erik Gandini

Videocracy is a film that has been slowly gathering momentum. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September and has been collecting accolades everywhere it goes from topping Indiewire’s Critic’s Choice Poll for best Documentary at TIFF to winning the Special Jury Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest this month.

Watching this film is like that moment when a family member that you love dearly, out of the blue says the most racist and obscene thing you’ve ever heard as you sit there wondering if you actually imagined it. It grabs you firmly by the face and subjects you to some of the most bizarre and frankly creepy people you’ll have ever seen whilst simultaneously inviting you into the freakish world of Italian TV, which by the evidence here, is fundamentally shit.

I had been following the news coverage about Italian President Silvio Berlusconi’s attempts to block the film and his general over reactive flapping about his role in the story. So far Italian TV channels Mediaset and RAI, both of which Berlusconi is responsible for, have gone to the extreme of banning even the trailer from being shown. This level of paranoid stifling had led me to believe this documentary would be his version of Outfoxed and so expected a really fierce look into his domination of Italian media. As a means to explain the absurd situation the Italian public are presented with as television Berlusconi’s famed 30 year cultural TV experiment is explained. How this man ever came into power even based on this insane concept alone is beyond me.

So by this point I had sat to down thinking I was about to watch an Italian We Live in Public/Outfoxed, expecting a lot of politicians and media types in serious talking heads complaining about lack of press freedom and an all round media group hug-style bashing of the actions of the Italian President. The joke was on me as for the first 20 minutes I sat with a fixed expression of gormless confusion as I was shown the biggest montage of breasts compacted into a first act segment than I’d ever seen before.

After this delightful journey down a boob-laden memory lane you get a sense of just how epic the impact of this has been. The experiment started with a quiz show in which housewives would undress after contestants answered questions correctly, simple premise but one that appears to have shaped decades of Italian culture.

Italian-born, Swedish-based director Erik Gandini is trying to show us the world of Italian TV, and the repercussions of it being pretty much solely controlled by their playboy president. At the bottom line it seems he has created one based on nothing but an absolutely hunger for fame and money and the glory of being seen on TV being far more important than how much of your dignity you had to lose to get there.

Coming from a British perspective you would think this is something I’m used to, after all we brought the world our ghoulish tabloid obsessions that have manifested in the creation of the various Idols/Got Talents/Dancing with the Stars/Weakest Link-esque cultural phenoms and generally as a culture lap up any on screen time of someone humiliating themselves for our viewing pleasure. Not forgetting we invented the vacuous non-career path that is the celebrity footballer’s wife, which is one that appears to be seen as the pinnacle of achievement by the majority of women shown here. But, as a Brit were I to ever feel shame for our lapses into the lowest echelons (after all we cant try and use the Shakespeare trump card forever) of what can be considered culture, the Italians are here to show me that no, there is one step further below the bar of decency. Videocracy states that 90% of Italy’s media is either directly or indirectly controlled by Berlusconi and his TV stations are kind enough to hold national casting calls, just so that everyone can have a fair chance of course, and of which even the brief insight here leaves you feeling as though you’ve just been given a lap dance and then they’ve thrown up on your shoes. At this point we see a women in the later stages of life stripping and gyrating and you just know that’s someone’s Mum, expect shivers.

Rather than using the aforementioned commentating talking heads Gandini is kind enough to provide us with a selection of tour guides, each with their own place within the industry, and each as eerily unsettling as the next. The first is mechanic Ricky Canevali, who appears to us standing topless in his garden practicing with his nun chucks. Ricky is desperate for fame and is certain that, given half the chance, his overly energetic yet completely out of time homage to Ricky Martin will be the catalyst to the realisation of his dreams. Aside from polishing his as-yet unhoned killer nun chuck moves, Ricky spends his time sitting in TV audiences looking incredibly anxious and as if at any moment he may mount the barrier separating him and the studio and burst into a dance number. We see him finally gain one of the coveted audition slots and balls it up to a spectacular degree culminating in him cursing the day he was born a man as given a set of breasts he would have certainly made it by now.

Gandini uses the currently in-trend highly awkward character-staring-blankly-direct-to-camera shot to illustrate the embodiment of weirdness that is Lele Mora each time we see him, of which the setting gets progressively stranger as time moves on. The best being Mora casually reclining on his bed dressed entirely in white, in his entirely white house. Lele Mora is Italy’s primo TV agent and although I didn’t find him that interesting, he was a fantastic page marker to various other characters. He is also the closest person to ‘the man’ himself and calls Berlusconi a close friend. His house, frequented by the semi-naked TV elite, combined with his pride in playing fascist anthems saved on his mobile phone do give you a sense of the kind of people in the inner circle, and after all this is the gatekeeper to the stardom we see people desperately making fools of themselves for throughout.

The story really kicks into gear, however, with the late arrival of paparazzi king pin and all round slimy cretin that is Fabrizio Corona, introduced as Lele Mora’s former assistant. If you ever wanted an example of the worst caricature of evil within the media compounded into one unapologetically narcissistic and opportunistic bastard, this is your man. He makes a living not by taking photos to sell to the press, but of which he sells back to the celebrities themselves, and unsurprisingly we see him pay for this in numerous ways. Corona is everything you want in a villain, fictional or not, he speaks about being a ‘modern day robin hood’, with the exception that he takes from the rich and gives to himself. There is actually a scene in which he lies topless on his bed counting out his money.

I really relished his villainous nature and I would like to have seen more of him as he was a fascinating and deeply disturbing character, but his frankness gives him a strange appeal which makes you question how it is you’ve related most to the most underhand immoral character in this sordid mess. Corona really is the jewel within this film, completely ruthless but fundamentally transparent. I’m not entirely sure there was a need to see him naked or washing his penis in the shower, but by this point sights like that seem completely normal activity. Squirming is a mandatory part of this film’s experience, and Gandini seems to revel in these kinds of shots making this one in particular one of the few stills available for the press.

At one point we see Corona even taking on Berlusconi himself having obtained ‘unflattering’ pictures of the PM’s daughter. Berlusconi pays up but then publishes the photos himself in one of his own magazines, a bizarre version of parenting if ever there was.

I had to write notes whilst watching this as there are so many bizarre flyaway comments made by the batshit crazy subjects that you frequently do multiple double takes and frankly now looking back at them I can’t actually believe some of this happened, nor can I actually imagine the context in which they were presented to me. Examples such as the suggestion that Silvio Berlusconi has a remote controlled volcano and that at one point for some unknown reason there is a shot of a group of people waving spatulas.

Gandini really wavers between trying to expose this strange ideal of Italy Berlusconi seems to want to present to the world and also explaining quite how much control he has over it. At first I found this frustrating as I wanted to be able to box the film into one category but it was the smart move not to. By focusing on a few of the players in this bizarro world you get an overall perspective of how this ‘experiment’ has affected people. It’s a mentality we are all aware of but I think rarely seen to this magnitude. The access in this is incredible and the behind the scenes footage in the TV studios is really creepy. I would have liked the film to really capitalise on a lot of this and have a far more sinister and menacing tone, the constant drum rolling score tries to do this to some extent, but it could have been more extreme. I can understand the resistance not to play up to the sensationalism, as after all that is what the film is criticising and so it does make a kind of sense, but there was a lot of scope to really push the terror in reality factor. After all if any of these characters appeared in a horror film you wouldn’t be remotely surprised, nor would you if after watching the film read in a newspaper that they’d gone on a mad killing spree. They really are not the kind of people you would invite into your home.

There is, however, one truly sinister and disturbing piece of footage within this film and that is when we are shown a Berlusconi campaign video. It is absolutely terrifying and features essentially a large group of women in a variety of situations belting out a musical number in a trance-like fashion thanking god that Berlusconi exists. My only other slight criticism, and this is from a purely personal point of view, but I found Gandini’s narration again slightly breaks you out of the darker tone of the film, but then I struggle with filmmaker’s doing their own narration on the whole (Herzog being an exception to the rule). I really haven’t seen a documentary like Videocracy for a while and you can understand why it’s grabbed various critics and jury members by the throat. It’s a nice change to be made uncomfortable, not only by content but by style, and I would definitely like to see more documentaries dip into an exploration of this darker Outer Limits style tone of filmmaking in the future. And before you get the idea that Italy sounds like a dream land in which you can feast on nudity in mainstream television to you heart’s content, I’d advise using this film as a quality test before booking the plane ticket.