Silvio Berlusconi's grip on Italian television meant that cinema and video became the outlet for those who criticised his government. The film-makers who dared to dissent talk to John Hooper.
Among those interviewed for Sabina Guzzanti's "satirical documentary" Viva Zapatero! is Furio Colombo, a former editor of the Italian left-wing daily L'Unita. He recalls how his family kept bound editions of the newspaper from previous years. As a boy, he says, he used to leaf through the volumes from the years that saw the rise of fascism.
"I remember I used to wonder why people didn't see," he tells Guzzanti, "because at first there were so many who later became anti-fascists, and even joined the Resistance, who took part or said weak-kneed things like 'Despite everything, Italy's still a democracy'." But, looking through the yellowing pages, he gradually realised how Mussolini had established his dictatorship almost by stealth. "The second volume was more fascist than the first, the third was more fascist than the second, and the 10th was infinitely more fascist than at the beginning, so that by the end of a year of bound volumes, there was fascism."
Guzzanti's riveting movie is one of three to be made in Italy in recent months that have the same underlying contention: that, before he was ousted from power in April, Silvio Berlusconi was on his way to pulling off a similar trick. In 2006. At the heart of the European Union. And without anyone - least of all Tony Blair, who makes a brief appearance in Viva Zapatero! courtesy of the British impressionist Rory Bremner - caring very much.
Because of Berlusconi's extraordinary grip on Italian television - directly or indirectly, he controlled six of the seven main channels while he was in office - cinema, DVD and video became places of refuge for those who were banished from the airwaves. Beppe Cremagnani and Enrico Deaglio, for example, had a television programme until they made the mistake of carrying an interview with the former Economist editor Bill Emmott. They later had the idea of making a documentary on the life of Italy's then prime minister. "We tried to do it for television. But they just said, 'Come on. Don't be silly'," says Deaglio. In the end, the two film-makers distributed their movie, Quando C'era Silvio, on a DVD sold with the weekly Deaglio edits. It sold 100,000 copies, he said.
The funny stuff (both comic and peculiar) about Berlusconi is all there in Quando C'era Silvio. We meet the man who arranged for his hair transplant. We listen to his personal minstrel. And, with the help of some extraordinary footage, we even get taken inside the mausoleum Berlusconi built in the grounds of his home. But the troubling questions are there too: the ones about Berlusconi's start-up capital; about why he had a mafia godfather working at his villa, and about his association with Marcello Dell'Utri, the founder of his political party, who is appealing against a conviction for associating with Cosa Nostra. As the anti-mafia prosecutor Antonio Ingroia recalls when interviewed, Berlusconi had an opportunity to answer those questions. Instead, he availed himself of his right to silence.
The prelude and epilogue of Quando C'era Silvio make clear Cremagnani and Deaglio see Italy's prime minister as a grand trickster - a blend of the Fox and the Cat who duped poor, gullible Pinocchio. But for Nanni Moretti, the most celebrated of Italian art-house movie directors, Berlusconi is something more dangerous - a deadly reptile, "the Caiman".
His film of that title came out in March, in the middle of this year's general election campaign. And, no doubt because Berlusconi lost, The Caiman has scarcely been shown outside Italy. That is a shame, because it is a thought-provoking work, recounting the story of a producer with a failing career who is talked into making a movie about Berlusconi. Partly because of the media tycoon's pervasive influence, the film within Moretti's film is whittled down to almost nothing. But what is shot contains The Caiman's most controversial sequence. An unrecognisably grim-faced Berlusconi emerges from court after being convicted, and incites a mob to turn on the judges. The final shots, hinting at civil war in Italy, initially struck most movie-goers as simply incredible.
Yet, in the final stages of the election campaign, as Berlusconi cast aside his mask of joviality, and his rhetoric became increasingly incendiary, many came to feel there was more than a grain of prophetic perception in Moretti's work. The former prime minister's refusal to accept the outcome of the poll only reinforced that concern. As Viva Zapatero! shows, by the time Berlusconi left power, it had become almost impossible to make fun of Italy's leader on television. Willingly or unwillingly, those at his beck and call had managed to block off the airwaves to the handful of genuinely subversive comics.
Sabina Guzzanti's film, like Cremagnani and Deaglio's, was a direct result of censorship. In November 2003, the third channel of the broadcaster RAI aired the first of what were meant to be five comedy programmes starring Guzzanti under the title RAIot (pronounced riot). Despite being put out in the hour either side of midnight, it drew an average audience of 1.8 million. True to the name of her show, Guzzanti attacked Berlusconi, whose television group, Mediaset, threatened to sue RAI for letting her say that one of its channels was on the air illicitly.
Berlusconi's minions used that technique again and again to try to silence critics. RAI's executives cancelled the remaining episodes of Guzzanti's programme. Their argument was that, had Mediaset won, it would have put RAI's third channel out of business. However, as later became clear, Mediaset did not have a leg to stand on. Having muzzled RAI, it turned its attention to Guzzanti and sued her for €20 million. A judge threw out the case on the grounds that what she said on air was true.
Sitting in a cafe in San Lorenzo, the down-at-heel student quarter of Rome, Guzzanti, whose crafty smile and rounded cheeks are made for clowning, says she decided to make Viva Zapatero! "to re-establish the truth, not just of the facts, but of a series of concepts - freedom of expression, the meaning of satire, and the concept of public service."
The most shocking thing about her film is the vividness with which it shows how she was abandoned by those who, in a healthy society, ought to have rallied to her defence. She was vilified in the liberal press and her cause was disowned by Berlusconi's left-wing political opponents. Two of the favourite arguments used to justify that were, first, that what she performed was not satire (because it did more than just make people laugh) and, second, that her use of facts was an invasion of the territory that belonged rightfully to journalists.
In Viva Zapatero!, Guzzanti sets out to identify, examine and challenge those arguments. What she delivers is a priceless visual document - a dissection of the way in which people who consider themselves progressive can cave in to creeping totalitarianism. The most depressing interviews in the movie are with Antonio Polito, the editor of a left-wing paper, and Claudio Petruccioli, the former president of the parliamentary committee responsible for guaranteeing RAI's independence and a member of what was then Italy's main opposition party, the Left Democrats. Both seek to mitigate the banning of Guzzanti's programme, which, though she won the case brought against her by Mediaset, was not put back on the air. I ask her if she thinks now that Italy has a new centre-left government, led by Romano Prodi, RAIot might at last be shown.
"No," she says. "I don't think they'll ever put it on."
I put the same question to Enrico Deaglio about his own documentary. There is a very long silence. "I don't know," he says eventually. "I'm optimistic that Prodi would let it be shown, but not that the Left Democrats would. They think that to tell all these stories about the mafia will bring [ Berlusconi] support."
Support? Had I misheard, or did he really say support? "Yes. Some people say, '[ Berlusconi] is from Milan. He hasn't got anything to do with the mafia. He's just an entrepreneur.' But others say, 'If he did, well, why not?'" Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from the current batch of celluloid Berlusconi-bashers is that, despite low-cost flights, Erasmus exchanges and EU integration, there remain vast differences between the various societies of Europe. Or are there?
Rory Bremner says in Viva Zapatero! that it is "inconceivable" such a programme as Guzzanti's would be pulled off the air in Britain. Now he is not quite so sure. "What I had forgotten, of course, was the [late UK Iraq weapons inspector] David Kelly [who committed suicide in a field near his home] saga," he says. "There, you had a point of view against which the government took such exception that it flushed out the journalist's source and then hung him [ Kelly] out to dry." Bremner had also been troubled by the case last month of a man who was arrested in central London near the Houses of Parliament under the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act, which prevents demonstrations within a kilometre of parliament.
Steven Jago's alleged offence was that he had been carrying a placard bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." "I don't think we can be as complacent as I once thought," says Bremner.
The Caiman reaches Irish cinemas in the autumn. An Irish release date is yet to be confirmed for Viva Zapatero!
