«La Giunta» of then and the emptied city of today

Alessandro Scippa, son of Antonio, councilor from beginning to end with Valenzi, tells the story of the party officials who entered and left the six different councils of the time with the gaze of the child, from the bottom up: an almost unattainable height of too big stories that distanced his father and all the communist fathers from their wives, children, from the normal lives of normal families. They are the children of the Giunta, the real protagonists of the documentary: Lucia and Marco Valenzi and Federico Greremicca with Antonella Di Nocera, producer and guest star, walking among the industrial wrecks of Bagnoli together with their father, a former Italsider worker.

When the protagonists speak and you see the remains of family films set among other clips taken from archives of the time, the John Ford-like horizon dominates the screen and fills the gaze of us viewers today. We see masses of bodies in rallies, in processions, in parties, against domestic scenes in rooms with stale furnishings, overflowing with books, while in the foreground, vintage faces of parchment-wrapped actors tell about themselves by smearing themselves on the lens like geographical maps of exemplary lives printed there forever.

Alessandro Scippa brings very close to us, in short, he slams us in the face with a personal and collective story of a handful of political heroes who no longer exist, so distant as to become mythical and in some ways even a little too imaginative. But his is not a documentary on the good governance of those years, he doesn’t want to tell any truth and doesn’t intend to teach anything. It is his authorial way of looking at the distant horizon (the beautiful politics of once upon a time) pressing his child’s nose on the pane of the window that steams up while his father goes towards a life unknown to him.

When he looks up where John Ford said it is wrong to point the camera, Alessandro Scippa instead sees today’s Naples emptied of real people, crossed by small crowds of busy tourists admiring posed landscapes. The city without real life, without us who would be citizens, is the reverse shot of a lifeless passion with the hoarse sound of the old communist song sung by Canio Lo Guercio. Because it will be appropriate to remember in the end that this strange, falsely lively city today is governed by a left whose modern commitment does not seem to want to arouse collective passions by promising many public works in return. He doesn’t want to doubt that the promises will be kept, the now adult director seems to wonder if they are enough to make politics.