"'Napule' is a thousand colours…". Pino Daniele says this about Naples in one of his most passionate songs, but this is also proven by Pappi Corsicato's cinema. He is a D.o.c.. Neapolitan film director born 1960, who has wanted to call a documentary of his form 1998 "The colours of the celestial city".
The celestial blue of the Neapolitan sea is one of those tonalities which are always present in the cinema of Corsicato and in Parthenopean cinema in general, matched with the blood red of Iaia Forte's lips (the director's female alter ego) and the yellow of the sun, the green of the curtains, the blue in the windows and other strong hues which dominate the market places, the streets and the balconies.
The most famous Corsicato films, Libera (Free) and I buchi neri (the black holes) tell Naples through the colours which become the symbol of passionate, happy, angry or desperate feelings of a city with strong roots. In the images of Pappi Corsicato Naples is not a postcard.In Chimera, his latest film, characters move in a surreal and even a little paradoxical atmosphere and for the first time the location is not necessarily Naples.
Why did you make Naples unrecognisable in Chimera?
Chimera describes a couple who want to save their failing marriage by inventing a new situation and new characters to interpret every day, and they're always different. I didn't want Naples to be immediately recognisable to give the film a more universal feeling, telling a story which is not just for Naples, but it involves all individuals in every place of the world. I filmed some scenes in an uninhabited area of the harbour and along the disused tracks of the railway, and you can recognise the alleyways, but this time colours speak of a rarefied and special atmosphere to underline the metaphoric sense of this film.
What did Naples represent in your previous films?
In Libera the Mediterranean landscape was a background to the plot, because I needed to represent the burning, the sun to hear the noise of the balm-crickets and the summer heat. In the three episodes of the film I was describing three women who lived immersed in the environmental unease: the great glass buildings of the Directional Centre, the Spanish quarters and the suburbs of Secondigliano, they were the symbols of environmental and human devastation. In The black holes, on the other hand, I was telling an unlikely love born in the midst of misery, between two battered characters. It was a typically Neapolitan story, filmed in the suburbs between desolation and poverty.
Can we speak of a Parthenopean film direction?
Neapolitan cinema doesn't move in one direction only. The film industry here is not like in Rome and this allows us to work in a n independent way and to express ourselves a little more freely exploring the most diverse subjects. The only thing that we have in common, among directors, is refusal of closed patterns and the search for a new language which is in constant exploration.
And the settings?
Yes, in this case we can speak of a great bond with our land, of "Napleness".
:: ITALIAN STYLE :: CINEMA ::
