INTERVALS GAIA

Amarcord, F. Fellini

C’è un punto della città dove non passa quasi nessuno. Lì il rumore è puro ritmo meccanico: ventilazione, neon, passi lontani. Quel posto mi ipnotizza. Mi piazzo al centro e chiudo gli occhi per sentire il battito. Non il mio. Il suo.

Ogni mattina mi fermo un secondo sulla soglia, prima di entrare nella città. È un gesto minuscolo, quasi ridicolo, ma è lì che avviene lo spostamento: da Gaia a parte di un organismo più grande. Mi chiedo sempre cosa sto attraversando: un confine? Un diaframma? Un’apertura della città stessa, come se mi aspirasse dentro il suo torace.

Lago di Garda: Sirmione, Salò, Garda, Gardone

Napoli and Costiera Amalfitana

Roma

Bolzano

Innsbruck

The Stairs

As cinema approached its one hundredth year, filmmaker Peter Greenaway (British, b. 1942) embarked on perhaps his most ambitious project to date: The Stairs. This massive installation project would take place in ten cities around the world over the course of a decade, with each installment focusing on one of ten themes related to the language of cinema (location, audience, projection, and so on). At the same time, each exhibition would be an attempt to push the medium’s language forward, displacing film from the darkened theater to the space of everyday life. 

In 1994, Geneva, Switzerland, was the first city to host The Stairs. Greenaway and his team placed the custom-built white, wooden staircases at various locations around the city, from highly populated tourist sites to quiet residential streets. Though they varied in shape and size, the staircases were united by a common attribute: a circular “peephole” at the top, which offered a view that the artist conceived as a live, ongoing “movie” of the landscape. According to Greenaway, the staircases were “special viewing-platforms, modest positions of privilege from which to view the sites at all times of the day and night.” While the Geneva installation was followed in 1995 by one in Munich, Germany, the remaining eight were never realized.

That is why I think it is important to print and keep those pictures, not just the 'aesthetically pleasing' ones, but the ones that mean something to us, the ones that make us travel in our heads.

Elegantly attired, his gray hair swept back and curling at his neck, a handkerchief fountaining out of his jacket pocket, Jep is the very picture of the flâneur, the 19th-century urban stroller and spectator immortalized by Charles Baudelaire and in whom, Walter Benjamin wrote, “the joy of watching is triumphant.” What the flâneur watches is modern life, and other people.

Benjamin wondered why the flâneur, born in Paris, did not spring from the glorious archaeological sprawl that is Rome. “But perhaps in Rome even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved.” He suggested that for a flâneur, Rome’s “great reminiscences, the historical frissons” are so much junk better left to the tourists. The tourist, that familiar figure of contempt, plays a crucial role in “The Great Beauty,” which opens with a prologue set in the Janiculum, a hill west of the Tiber. There, scattered amid busts of heroes of the Risorgimento, the 19th-century movement for Italian unification, a smattering of Italians mill about while a group of Japanese tourists take in the sights — a view, a city, a people, a history — that, Mr. Sorrentino suggests, the natives no longer necessarily see.

The Great Beauty - La Grande Bellezza

Paolo Sorrentino

Sorrentino’s film is suffused with nostalgia for origins: the Saint tells Jep that she eats only roots because ‘roots are important’; Dadina teaches Jep that real friendship means occasionally helping the other feel like a child again; Romano ultimately leaves Rome to return to his hometown, but not before writing a play that seeks to redeem nostalgia as the only thing left to those who have lost faith in the future; Jep’s ultimate redemption becomes possible only through a return to the home-bound memory of his first love.

This nostalgia for origins sits uncomfortably with Sorrentino’s repeated references, in various interviews, to the figure of the flâneur. He wanted, he says, to propose a re-valuation of the semantic potential of the usually maligned figure of the tourist, attributing to it some of the subversive potential formerly associated with the flâneur. But while the figure of the tourist is central to the film’s opening sequence, setting up the rest of the film as a reflection on the different gazes directed at the Eternal City – the flâneur’s versus the tourist’s – and while Jep, himself disillusioned with Rome, declares that ‘The best people in Rome are the tourists’, in various interviews Sorrentino seems to make no meaningful distinction between the flâneur and the tourist. When asked why he chose to make a film about Rome, he replies that as someone originally from the provinces, he ‘still look[s] at it with the eyes of a lover, a tourist…a Neapolitan in Rome’.