The new, updated, extended, always different edition of the Corriere critic’s repertoire is released on 29 November for Baldini+Castoldi: 35,000 entries, over 7,000 pages
The first to make the sad announcement was Louis Lumière himself: «Ours is an invention without a future». From 1895 to today, the news of the death of cinema — killed by commercial TV, by streaming series, even from porn movies — it’s been relaunched many times, but remains heavily exaggerated. On the other hand, it would not be a great loss, according to a group of writers and intellectuals all taken by the superiority complex. Thus Giovanni Verga, who also agrees to “adapt” his novels to the new medium, warns: “I beg you and I beg you never to say that I have got my hands on this culinary manipulation of my things”. Céline, as is her habit, goes further: «Cinema, this new little wage earner of our dreams, can be bought, procured for an hour or two like a prostitute». With all due respect to these sacred monsters, it is not known who advised them which films to see.
«Il» Merghetti, moreover, has just turned thirty. The definite article is a must, because the dictionary of films signed by the Corriere della Sera critic is now in the cinema as «il» Rocks is to ancient Greek (and like Sean Connery is to 007, if we think of the many imitations…). When the first edition came out in 1993 — it was the time of the Ciampi government, of the first Oscar to Clint Eastwood and Olympique Marseille-Milan — had 13,000 entries in a single volume, just over a thousand pages. The one in bookshops starting today (published as usual by Baldini+Castoldi) is a box set with 35,000 entries in 7,520 pages, plus another 2,400 of indexes with the filmographies of directors and actors and the original titles of all the works mentioned.
In chronological order we start from The exit from the Lumière factoriesthe first film screened to the public on the evening of December 28, 1895 at the Salon indien du Gran Café in Paris, and we get up to Exterior Night by Marco Bellocchio. In the first facade we find AAA Masseuse beautiful presence offered… by Demofilo Fidani: «Painful crossroads of low-cut comedy of manners (but the nudes are never integral) and post-Argentine yellow. Untraceable for years, it enjoys an undeserved fame»; the last entry is dedicated to the silent film Zvenigorathe enchanted mountain of the Ukrainian master Aleksandr Dovženko: “Very free narrative that mixes history and legend”, with a “throbbing and hallucinatory rhythm that owes something to Mayakovsky’s poems”.
Film title, rating in stars (from one to four, as Corriere readers are well aware), cast and technical data, plot summary, value judgment: in these thirty years the formula of Merghetti has remained identical. But in the early 1990s the young critic was forced to rely on the memory of films seen at the cinema, even several years later, on the few VHS tapes available, on monographs and newspaper clippings. So for each new edition, in addition to adding the films released in the previous two years, he has decided to completely rewrite hundreds of entries of works from the past. For the thirtieth anniversary dictionary, Mereghetti has reviewed and re-evaluated, among others, the masterpieces of masters such as Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese, Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci; but he also delved into the filmographies of great directors who are now unacknowledged, from Sidney Lumet to Bertrand Blier, from Mario Soldati to the genius of animation Tex Avery; and still many samples of popular cinema, such as le slapstick comedy Italian style of the couple Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, i peplum with Maciste and thrillers with Philo Vance.
Each sheet is a discovery, beautiful to read even without having seen the film. Lots of anecdotes and details for unrepentant cinephiles, such as the “migration” of the musical theme written by Tiomkin for The Red Riverwhich became eleven years later song — and what a song — for An honor dollar. Or like the bizarre “correction” of the Silenceminor film by Bergman: the Italian censorship took advantage of the dubbing to change the meaning of the film; the scandalous phrase “It’s a matter of secretions and erections” becomes “It’s a matter of hormones”. And in the finale, a child’s voice says the word “soul”, absent from the original version of the work. «A dishonest way», writes Mereghetti, «to recover a spiritualist reading».
Even more than the wealth of information, more than the now dreaded “stars”, there is another value that makes this dictionary truly unique: the secret pact between the author and us, readers/viewers. We may not agree with some of his judgments (by the way: but how can he give just two and a half stars to Harbor front?), but even in his most surprising choices, Mereghetti never writes on bias, as a partisan of an author or a school. Each film is evaluated only for what it is, before the free gaze of the critic. The binperhaps the most massacred Fellini’s work upon its release (go and see it on RaiPlay immediately), he liked it more than the Street, film that went around the world. Mereghetti is certainly not a lover of Tarantino, but a Jackie Brown gives three and a half stars. He was among the first in Italy to praise that genius Adam McKay (The big bet has four stars), but then was disappointed by Don’t look up (even if it’s so fashionable).
Every time he sees a film again, Mereghetti still has the intellectual curiosity (and enthusiasm) to re-evaluate it all over again. For the worse or for the better. In the latest edition of the dictionary he loses points The Squarethe first Palme d’Or by Ruben Östlund (and many, seeing in theaters these days Triangle of Sadness, the suspicion has arisen that the Swedish child prodigy is just a bluff); in the meantime, a film by Douglas Sirk makes its entry into the list of absolute masterpieces: The mirror of life.
The Merghetti it is a dictionary without absolute definitions, but with a certain idea of cinema. Between a film by Godard and one by Truffaut, it’s better to go and see them both. Today, like thirty years ago, this large book is above all a compass, to guide the viewer among the hundreds of titles available in theaters, on TV channels and on the new platforms. His ambition, writes the author in the introduction, is “to always point the way to cinema even when many seem to want to take it upon themselves to hide or cancel it. I continue to believe that that path still exists and that many still want to follow it».
Yes, the way to the cinema. Another great critic of the Corriere, Tullio Kezich – in an episode reported by Gian Piero Brunetta in his essay Dark in the hall — one day he met an exhibitor, who said to him: «Cinema is an ugly beast… Do you know what I think? The fortune of cinema is that it is made in the dark: no jokes, it’s the lovers who make us cut the tickets!». As in Ronde by Max Ophüls, in the darkness of the room the couples keep coming and going in an endless dance.
November 28, 2022 (change November 28, 2022 | 21:28)
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