ON FILM AND FILM LANGUAGE: “IL RESTO DELLA NOTTE”

1. ON FILM AND FILM LANGUAGE:“IL RESTO DELLA NOTTE” Michaela Praisler University of Galati, Romania

2. OVERVIEW • Director: Francesco Munzi • Writer: Francesco Munzi • Release Date: 20 June 2008 (Italy) • Genre: Drama • Language: Italian and Romanian • Setting: Brescia, Italy • Cast:Sandra Ceccarelli (Silvana Boarin), Aurelien Recoing (Giovanni Boarin), Stefano Cassetti (Marco Rancalli), Laura Vasiliu (Maria), Victor Cosma (Victor), Constantin Lupescu (Ionut), Veronica Besa (Anna Boarin), Valentina Cervi (Francesca), Ditta Teresa Acerbis (Eusebia), Susy Laude (Mara), Bruno Festo (Luca), Corrado Invernizzi (Driver), Giovanni Morina (Davide), Mauritio Tabani (Vincenzo), Simonetta Benozzo (Operator) • Nominated at the Cannes film festival

3. VERTICAL STRUCTURE • Three stories are interwoven (connector - Luca): • of a wealthy upper middle class Italian family (the Boarins) • of a set of Romanian migrants struggling to get by (Maria, Ionut and Victor) • of the collision between the Italians and the Romanians • The three layers give the filmic text in-depth and announce: • the complexity of inter-human and cross-cultural relationships • the net (trap) that the broader social context lays out for individuals and individual lives • the clashing world views, politics and aesthetics of the local meeting the global

4. HORIZONTAL PATTERNING • The collision between worlds is actually manifold, supported by numerous dichotomies: - West / East - Italians / Romanians - (upper) middle class / lower class - rich / poor - man / woman - married / single - urban / suburban - good / evil - day / night - young / old - non-violence / violence • All induce the notions of split, break, fracture, conflict, opposition and thus define the hard core of the filmic text.

5. STORYLINE (1) • After having been “ambushed” by what looked like Romanian gypsy beggars in the street, Silvana Boarin comes home determined to fire her maid, Maria - an immigrant from Romania (that they had, up to that point, considered as a member of the family). Accusing her of stealing a pair of expensive earrings (which actually proves to be true), the Boarins let her go, despite the opposition from their daughter, Anna, Maria’s friend. • The constant fear (of immigrant intrusion/violence) Silvana is governed by is apparently nonsensical, but takes material shape in the events to follow. It determines, somewhat inexplicably, the film’s tragic denouement, as if, through her intense feeling, she brought disaster upon her family.

6. STORYLINE (2) • Two other Romanian immigrants, Ionut (the fiance Maria had left to find a better life, through honest work, with the Boarins) and Victor (his teenage brother), live in poverty and promiscuity somewhere in a ghetto. While Victor earns his living by hard labour and daily employment, Ionut is after the easy life; although handsome and charming, he is a thief, a crook, a dealer. • Together with the good-for-nothing Luca, his Italian mate, Ionut plans and carries out a burglary at the Boarin residence, based on the information unknowingly provided by Maria. Their action (that Victor witnesses) goes wrong, however. While her parents are away at a concert, Anna entertains a boyfriend, who accidentally gets shot by the burglars, as does her father, Giovanni, who surprises them by arriving early.

7. GUIDELINES FOR ANALYSIS • Theoretical background • Description of genre • Narrative • Moves, frames, environment, strategies • Multimodality, context of situation and culture • Myth and intertextuality

8. Theoretical background • Cultural texts contribute to building imaginative geographies, mental maps of the world (not territories). • The main contributor to this kind of cartography is the media, under its many contemporary guises (film included). Empowered by its social and communicative role, the media now controls the political and economic stage. Its truth controlling apparatus shows in the grammar of its language and the structure of its narrative. • The universal modelling filters involved in the process of map making are (D. Katan, Translating Cultures,2004): • generalisation - reduces choice, oversimplifies, imposes viewpoints and lacks specific context • deletion - involves omission, works on presupposition and generates mismatch of world representations • distortion - transforms what is real or objectively verifiable so that it fits preconceptions

9. Description of genre • Format/medium: film, drama, 101 minutes • Historical Period: the present day • Covers (events): international migration • Generic Plot: see slides 3 and 4 • Character type: constructions of migrant Romanians • Geography: Italy • Iconography (the content of images): - setting: Brescia (a succession of city centre, elegant suburbs, slums – foregrounded and backgrounded in turns) - key visual signs: streets, buildings, rooms (as the camera zooms in on significant locations) - key sounds: incidental, urban and domestic, public and private; music – Romanian folk, popular and Western orchestral - kinesthetic icons: movement, behaviour (specific to social roles) - verbal content: dialogues in formal and informal Italian and Romanian - ideological content: tensions accessed via dichotomies

10. Narrative • The film is a complex semiotic event, which makes meaning inside its audio-visual textuality, as already suggested, through the use of words, gestures, sounds, music and pictures – all narrating the imaginative, possible world of intercultural conflict. • Its cine-poetics lacks linearity (despite its sequential nature), the three layered narrative pattern reflecting on the invisible area of the cultural iceberg more than on its manifest tip. (Hall) • The thus built imaginative geography is crippled and small (Eco), generalisation working to impose standpoints (Silvana’s experience – itself fuelled by news of other, similar events nationwide – leads to her concluding that all Romanians are dangerous; at a broader level: all Italians see immigration as a threat, all Romanians are beggars, thieves, criminals), deletion overstating presupposition (Maria joins her low life friends… Ionut is a killer…) and distortion modifying actual happenings to fit prejudiced attitudes (once formed, impressions are resistant to change: the opening scene of the gypsy “attack” builds the fear and reluctance to keep Maria on).

11. Moves, frames, environment, strategies • The film sequences dealing with representations of Italianness or Romanianness are characterised by equilibrium, while those featuring the overlap are basically disrupted; so are the sudden moves to and fro, in between the constructed cultures (cuts, breaks, flashbacks, close-ups etc) • The framing storyboard and character type bring forth - behaviour (what is happening): a case of theft and accidental murder - identity (who participates, the roles played): Italians are good, Romanians evil • The events presented and their sequencing narrate the background environment – all part of the film’s schema: intercultural contamination. • The discourse within individual frames reveals relationships, being related to the film’s strategies: observable in vocabulary, register, mode of address etc

12. Multimodality, context of situation and culture • The film works on an interplay of possible, negotiated meanings which emerge as the film is watched by insider/outsider readers (combinations and permutations of ‘we want to be left alone’ or ‘home is sweet, distance is bitter’) • Reading a text/watching a film is a process of social negotiation: We are usually interested in discovering the dominant or preferred insider reading (but taking sides is unavoidable). • The reading or decoding of the film means imagining the ideal viewer(s) and anchoring the text to its: - context of situation (the immediate context within which the story evolves, its input – clipped as it may be) - context of culture (the implicit, hidden context – slippery but pertinent)

13. Myth and Intertextuality • A myth is a set of signs which imply extremely familiar and influential structures of thinking or naturalised codes of social meanings and values or sets of beliefs and attitudes that the viewer is invited to accept as true and natural (the recently but powerfully constructed myth of the Romanian in Italy). • In general, myths reflect normality. The extreme effect of myth is to hide the semiotic workings of a text’s signs and codes. The denotations seem so true that the signs appear to be the things themselves (a situation worth mentioning: the actress, Laura Vasiliu, having her hotel room forcefully broken into a year earlier, while she was filming in Italy, by armed carabinieri pretending to be after someone accused of trafficking underage girls) • No text acts alone, but will always cue other texts (similar films, well-known quotations, people, etc.): the many Romanians accused of crimes in Italy, that the media have popularised, seem symptomatic (see the notorious Mailat case)

14. TO CONCLUDE… • As stated, the mental map is not a territory, but a series of signs (arbitrary, culture bound, relationships between signifier and signified) or a myth, a misrepresentation, a lie. (Barthes) It is constructed with power and feeds on ideology; both need to be exposed. • Il resto della notteis a media(ted) cultural text. • Cultural texts build mental maps of the world. • Mental maps are myths. • Myths are truth controlling. • Truth control is also specific to film. • Il resto della notteexposes the mechanisms of truth control bytackling culturally constructedxenophobia.