Videocracy

Presented in the UK for the first time at the London Documentary Film Festival at the Barbican in April, followed by a debate with the director in person, Videocracy is a highly engaging and somewhat whimsical reflection on modern Italian society, and the way in which the more lurid aspects of television culture there have come to dominate public mores to an unusually intense degree. By homing in on the hopes, dreams and personal agendas of a series of Italians living on both sides of the small screen (those portrayed in front of it being desperate to gain entrance to the other side, at all costs), Gandini paints an alarming but at the same time quite touching picture of what makes a nation tick when it can no longer be bothered to read books or newspapers.

Vegas, Copacabana or Beverly Hills were never quite so doggedly grotesque as the “videocratic” Italy portrayed here, and despite his mildly ironic voiceover (his slightly gloomy, Swedish-accented English makes for the perfect antidote to the solid diet of heavy duty glitz‘n’tits on screen), he has no doubt as to why Italy has turned out this way: Berlusconi single-handedly conned and connived his fellow citizens to drop what they were doing and follow him, and his TV channels.

There is much debate in Italy as to the “chicken and egg” nature of the question: just as Mussolini always insisted that he’d “never invented Fascism, he simply drew it out from the Italian people”, many would argue that, fed up with their previous diet of mostly dull and very moralistic television fare (as approved by the twin Scolds-in-Chief in the Vatican and at Communist Party HQ), he simply provided Italian viewers with the catalyst to discover their inner perv.

It is singular that both Lele Mora and Fabrizio Corona (pictured below) both agreed to let Gandini follow them around with a camera. Mora is a cynical “talent” scout who provides Italian TV with aspiring veline – showgirls – in industrial  quantities, as if they were battery chickens. Corona is a sleekly sinister paparazzo puppetmaster whose brief imprisonment for extortion (“If you don’t pay me off, I’ll sell my pics of you shagging that bird who’s not your missus”) catapulted him to superstar status, possibly greater than that of Berlusconi himself. Such is the neurotic vanity of these men that in order to appear on the Big Screen in a foreign-made film, Corona willingly appears nude in the shower and Mora flaunts some very dodgy Mussolini-era nostalgic battle songs on his smart phone. And such is their provincial, mono-cultural worldview that they do not seem to contemplate the possibility that cinemagoers abroad might perceive them as arrogant prats, or worse.

The most interesting figure in the film is undoubtedly 26-year-old machinist Rick Canelli, a wannabe TV star who dreams of combining the martial arts chops of Jean-Claude Van Damme with the hip-wiggling songbook of a Ricky Martin. On paper: great idea. On screen (small or large): a disaster. Poor Rick, he just doesn’t get it. But he does get one thing, big time. “In Italy, if you’re not on television, then you’re no one.” Andy Warhol couldn’t have put it better.

Two factual details of the film niggle. Gandini constantly refers to Berlusconi as “the President” – which in English would mean being President of the Republic – which he most definitely isn’t – whereas in Italian il presidente can be applied, for life, to anyone who has ever chaired a minor committee, and thus has no impact at all. And secondly, he suggests that only the very self-aggrandising and vain can ever make it on Italian TV when in fact almost all the top presenters who made Berlusconi’s TV empire the unassailable commercial reality it has become were extremely self-effacing, apparently anonymous men such as Mike Buongiorno.

The film concentrates exclusively on the glitz‘n’tits aspect of Italy’s “TV Republic”, going to some length to pursue the almost unicorn-like “stripping housewife” myth, which in fact lasted for a brief, albeit intense, period in the late 1980s. Gandini's film shows footage of a show called Colpo Grosso which for two years featured strippers, but didn't mention that it was on Italia 7, a private channel not owned by Silvio Berlusconi. In laying less stress on the “consumer housewives” (who obediently went out and bought the products that Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels promoted, before obediently going out to vote for the man himself), we bypass the possibly dull but factually accurate story of how Italy really became a videocracy, in favour of something much more superficial, lurid and fascinating. A lot like the mindset the film aims to portray.

• Videocracy is on release on Friday