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.