Italy As Seen On Netflix: Horror, De Sica and Soft Porn

When you live away from your country, you start looking at it with different eyes. I lived my whole life in Italy and since moving to New York six years ago, I've learned new things about the place I thought I knew.

I made the most recent discovery while browsing through the titles of the Italian movies available on Netflix. Every once in a while I check on "Foreign" movies, then on "Italy" hoping to find a pearl I lost (I am usually disappointed, since Italy, unlike other European countries, hasn't produced many good films lately). This time I checked them all. Of the 18 pages of titles I found, a third (6 pages) were horrors, then there were some spaghetti westerns, some recent movies and, naturally, the masterpieces of Fellini, De Sica & Co. There were also many "kinky" titles (like Ubalda, All Naked All Warm) and the master of Italian soft-porn, Tinto Brass, has six movies available (Michelangelo Antonioni has ten).

I wasn't expecting that. It is strange to know that my country is represented in this weird late-night-TV way: some classics, some slashers and some porn. How did it happen? I imagine blood and boobs are winners almost everywhere, but for Italy I would have expected more movies confirming the traditional pizza, sun, scooter-with-no-helmet stereotypes. It's a strange turn the way Italy is "netflixed".

Why are we represented by screams and moans? Actually, why not, after all? It's interesting. Would I feel more at ease if Italy were represented only by La Dolce Vita stars like Mastroianni or Loren? I never really liked the stereotypes we exported abroad. Still I wonder why, although beautiful recent movies are listed, like La Meglio Gioventù or Mio Fratello È Figlio Unico, so many of the good Italian films from the last 20 years aren't. What about 1992 Oscar winning Mediterraneo (and the earlier and beautiful road movies by the same director Gabriele Salvatores like Marrakesh Express and Tourné)? What about Benigni's Piccolo Diavolo with the great Walter Matthau (much better than the overrated but more "Sicilian" Johnny Stecchino), or quirky and delightful smaller films such as Italia-Germania 4-3 or Tre Uomini e Una Gamba? What about Caro Diario, whose director, Nanni Moretti, won at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival? It's true that there is the sporadic appearance of jewels, like Kaos by Taviani, but could we at least distribute all the movies that have won international awards?

On Amazon you will find more classics and some imported titles (which are PAL and can't be watched in the US without a special DVD player). And speaking of PAL, when I buy DVDs in Italy, why don't great comedies like the Roberto Benigni and Massimo Troisi's Non Ci Resta Che Piangere even have English subtitles? I naturally fall into Italy's favorite sport: complaining. It seems to me that it is the fault of the Italian distributors for failing to represent Italy abroad with the best of what we have. Is this our inability to represent our modern image abroad? Has the reliance on the past glories made it difficult for the emergence of the new? Or is it just poor distribution? Maybe other countries are "misunderstood" or "under-represented" as well. Is there a "correct" way to distribute Italy in movies? Is there a "correct" way to interpret a country from its film production? For instance: do American movies distributed abroad really represent the US?

Nexflix's bizarre Italian landscape of zombies, sex and the post-war economic boom is maybe just a point of view, but I'd love to have America see what our cinema can and did produce recently, it could be a start to drag ourselves out of the Dolce Vita, preparing for another renaissance.

Comments

[lanerush]

There are many great Italian films, but she's right the distribution is horrible. When I lived in Iowa Netflix was my only source for film. I had a special interest in Italian film but most of the movies we received were horrible. Today I live in the north of Italy and the problem of finding good Italian movies still persist. For one, a lot of the new releases are complete junk; secondly you see the same actors in everything (TV and film) doing story lines that haven't been changed in 50 years; and thirdly the lack of subtitles is a BIG issue. OK I'm not so ignorant to expect everything to have english subtitles, but the EU is not one nation with one language. In the very least you would expect most, hell all! Italian movies to have at least a few different subtitle options. And... yeah one of those languages should be english (maybe I am ignorant) especially since a huge majority of the film and TV shown in the country is straight from the US. And that is maybe the biggest disappointment. My family thinks I'm living some European fantasy in Italy while I'm to embarrassed to tell them that Walker Texas Ranger has a prime time slot. I agree Marta, sometimes it's hard NOT to complain about the insanity of Italy but it's really one of those places that you have to love and hate.

[jerkzilla]

ummmm....yeah. Some of us Americans actually ejoy the works of visionary directors such as Mario Brava, Dario Argento and Sergio Leone. It's a pity they can't be appreciated by their own countrymen (or women). I know that those directors don't encompas all of Italian cinema, but by only relying on only Netflix (really? You live in New York City, one of the few places in America where you can get almost ANY movie if you know where to look and you only rely on Netflix?) and a dvd player that isn't region free (they're actually quite inexpensive. My OPPO plays everything and with the HD upscaling, my movies never looked better) you are limiting the choices you have and you only have yourself to blame. So stop complaining, get off of your butt and go out into the world to look for your cinematic treasures instead of complaining that a corpoation won't do your work for you.