Siftings
Two Critiques: ‘Avatar’ vis-à-vis ‘Cinema Paradiso’
(Last of 3 parts)
Cinema Paradiso” as Critique of Global Materialism
The film shown last week at the UPV Cinematheque, the newly opened (since November of 2009) venue for noteworthy Cinematic endeavors, is still arguably one of the finest films I have ever seen.
Filmed in 1988 by Italian director Guiseppe Tornatore, the movie is patterned after the classic bildungsroman or novel of growing up, which traces the growth and development of a young boy named Salvatore, who, in the years after WWII, becomes attracted to the art of cinema through his association with the projectionist of his town’s only theater house, the Cinema Paradiso. The theater house indeed lived up to its name, being the venue of the inhabitants’ multifarious joys, both sacred and profane – mostly the last, as they are seen necking in dark corners, playing with themselves, crying at sad scenes and blowing their noses, or humping it up in the backroom, etc., usually at the onset of love scenes which the town’s parish priest invariably censors at the most crucial moments, an activity which initially pricked the young Salvatore’s curiosity and lured him to the projection room where he meets the projectionist. Eventually, the latter takes the boy under his wing and teaches him how to run the projector, until one night, the film ( in those days films caught fire easily in some kind of spontaneous combustion) catches fire which immediately spreads, trapping the projectionist whom the young boy saves. But the old man goes blind due to his injuries. As the boy now becomes the town projectionist, he is guided by his blind mentor, even in the matter of his first love. Soon the object of Salvatore’s love, the daughter of the town’s bank president, is taken away and is lost to him forever. Conscripted into the Italian Army of WWII, the letters he sends to his love from the front are returned, unopened. In time, he is told by his mentor to go away and build a life for himself, and never to come back to his hometown. He follows the old man’s advice; he does not go home even to see his mother, who would only call him long distance. When his old mentor dies, Salvatore goes home for the funeral. His mother asks why he has not married: “Each time I call, a different voice answers,” she scolds him. The funeral takes place and the day after, the Cinema Paradiso is blown up to make way for a mall (Isn’t this familiar?) The film ends with the middle-aged Salvatore watching in a dark room the censored clips of the movies the old projectionist had cut according to the parish priest’s instructions, clip after clip of love scenes from the timeless cinema classics of Garbo, Clark Gable, Ramon Navarro, Rudolph Valentino; From Here to Eternity etc., etc. As the chips roll, Salvatore’s shadowy face glistens with the combined smile and tears that he did not shed during the whole run of the film as it recorded his experiences–from the innocence of his youth to the pains of his first love, to the devastation of lost love that rendered him unable to love again. In this release of tears, the viewer may conclude that now, Salvatore can love again and get on with his life, no longer bound to the past symbolized by the Cinema Paradiso now gone up with the smoke and rubble: the rolling of the censored scenes of love, like his own censored love, restored to him by the love of an old man who was the father he had never known.
This is the second time for me to see the movie, but the end is so emotionally powerful that it needs another viewing, and another, and another… because its insights about human loss, love, hope, and the endurance of the Humanity that lives within us become so valuable in the face of this present materialism, this drive for progress fueled by technology and human greed, this globalization of a materialistic culture that threatens to reduce our civilization to rubble, with the constant threats of natural disasters, economic wars, cultural annihilation of the human species and the annihilation of the environment and the natural world. Both “Avatar” and “Cinema Paradiso” are emotionally moving “Warning Shots”: the first, of Global Economic Imperialism, the wave of the future; and the second, of Global Materialism which has always motivated the imperialistic advance of the Strong against the Weak ever since the start of Human Time.
It is time we heed these Warning Shots.
