Haec propter illos scripta est homines fabula, qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt. (Phaedrus)
This fable concerns all those who, by inventing pretexts, crush the innocent.
This fable concerns all those who, by inventing pretexts, crush the innocent.
The press conference presenting the 83rd Venice International Film Festival opened with a prologue that, rather than introducing the programme, sought to define a field of tension. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco did not choose the language of administration nor that of institutional diplomacy: he preferred the language of myth, fable and literature, constructing a discourse in which the defence of the Biennale was transformed into a reflection on cultural freedom and, inevitably, into a political statement.
His introduction was marked by a web of learned references. From the wolf evoked through classical tradition – oscillating between Livy and Phaedrus’ moral parable – to the poetic suggestions of Ezra Pound, Buttafuoco constructed an imaginary framework in which the Biennale becomes the lamb subjected to the judgement of an external power that claims the right to establish the boundaries of cultural legitimacy. The reference was far from abstract. The president recalled that the European Commission had sent three official letters to the Biennale and subsequently revoked approximately two million euros in funding, a decision that the Venetian institution intends to challenge on legal grounds.
It is precisely here that the most interesting paradox of the intervention emerges. While forcefully claiming that the Biennale and the Festival “do not engage in politics”, Buttafuoco transforms that very claim into an inevitably political gesture. The denunciation of the behaviour of European institutions, the appeal to freedom of expression as a threatened value, the use of the allegories of the wolf and the lamb: all these elements contribute to shifting the discourse from the sphere of cultural organisation to that of symbolic confrontation. The idea of neutrality is thus affirmed through a combative rhetoric that ends up staging precisely the conflict from which the Festival declares it wishes to remain distant.
This, however, is not a casual contradiction. Rather, it reflects an era in which no major cultural institution can any longer present itself as merely a place of exhibition or artistic selection. Every choice, every exclusion, every funding decision becomes a matter of public debate. Buttafuoco appears perfectly aware of this and therefore chooses to occupy that space before others define it. His is an identity-based rhetoric, built upon the vocabulary of freedom, research and artistic autonomy, but also upon the conviction that culture today is constantly subjected to external pressures.
It is significant that, once this long preamble had ended, the tone of the conference changed radically.
With Alberto Barbera, language abandons metaphor and returns to the concreteness of cinema. Where Buttafuoco had constructed a narrative about the freedom of institutions, Barbera constructs a narrative about the vitality of images. His introduction is less emphatic and more analytical, but no less ambitious. Faced with recurring diagnoses of the crisis of cinemas and the alleged decline of cinema itself, the artistic director overturns the perspective: one only needs to observe the international landscape, he argues, to realise that cinema continues to be one of the most powerful instruments for understanding the present, capable of interpreting conflicts, social transformations and the anxieties of our time better than any chronicle. Even the spectacular success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is evoked as proof that cinema, far from being an exhausted language, continues to regenerate itself and produce new forms of wonder.
This idea runs throughout the entire programme of the 83rd Festival. Rather than pursuing a single aesthetic direction, Barbera proposes an extremely broad geography of contemporary cinema, in which established auteurs and new voices, European, Asian and American productions, intimate works and vast political frescoes coexist. The competition appears constructed as a map of contemporary anxieties: historical memory, identity, migration, wars, transformations of the family, crises of democracy and new forms of imagination are reflected in films that are very different from one another, yet united by the desire to question the present rather than merely describe it.
Looking at the programme as a whole, a precise curatorial impression also emerges. Barbera seems to have favoured a cinema of measure rather than excess, of reflection rather than provocation, creating a competition in which works prevail that question the present through memory, history, family bonds, geopolitical fractures and transformations of identity. Alongside the major international names, the presence of a particularly solid Italian cinema stands out, represented by filmmakers who, despite very different poetics, seem to share a common need to confront reality without indulging in self-complacency. The national selection conveys the image of a mature sector, capable of combining formal research and storytelling, avoiding both mannerism and the anxiety of pursuing international production models.
Naturally, it is difficult to formulate judgements on artistic quality before seeing the films. However, the composition of the programme reveals a rather recognisable cultural line: a confidence in auteur cinema as a place of responsibility, discipline and intellectual rigour. A line that, curiously, seems to evoke what Max Weber would have defined as a Protestant ethic of work: sobriety, method, control, rejection of unnecessary ornament, and the appreciation of the seriousness of the work over its spectacularisation. It is a festival that appears almost distrustful of easy effects, preferring the patient construction of an artistic discourse.
Yet, precisely as in Weber’s analysis, this apparent austerity does not eliminate the logic of the system, but ends up coexisting with it. Behind the composure of the selection one can in fact glimpse a machine fully aware of its role within the symbolic and industrial economy of contemporary cinema. Auteur prestige, the presence of major directors, the balance between independent cinema and productions with strong international appeal, the ability to intercept global critical debate: all these elements contribute to consolidating the competitive value of the Festival within the circuit of major international events. Paraphrasing Weber, one might say that beneath the surface of an ethic of sobriety, the spirit of cultural capitalism continues to pulse, where even aesthetic rigour becomes a form of symbolic capital, a tool of legitimacy and, inevitably, of positioning within the international market of images.
In this sense, Barbera’s programme appears both coherent and conscious. It does not chase media spectacle for its own sake, but neither does it renounce the strategic function that Venice occupies today within the global audiovisual industry. It is precisely this subtle and never completely resolved balance between cultural vocation and economic centrality that constitutes one of the most interesting aspects of the edition just presented.
The return of Nanni Moretti also assumes a symbolic value. Barbera recalls, with elegant self-irony, the exclusion of Palombella rossa in 1989, defining it as a mistake that the Festival can finally correct today. It is a gesture that reveals a vision of artistic direction capable of confronting its own history without transforming it into a monument, recognising that a festival also builds its identity through revisions, reconsiderations and self-criticism.
At the end of the conference, this dual impression remains above all. On one side, a presidency that feels the need to publicly defend the autonomy of the Biennale, using a deliberately polemical, literary and symbolic language; on the other, an artistic direction that prefers to leave films with the task of responding to the present. Two very different, almost opposite registers, which nevertheless end up completing each other.
Because while Buttafuoco insists on the right of cultural institutions to exist without political conditioning, Barbera demonstrates, through the programme itself, that cinema inevitably continues to engage with politics, history and the fractures of the world. Perhaps this is the true image that emerged from the press conference: a Festival that claims its autonomy precisely at the moment when it accepts that cinema, by its very nature, can never be neutral. Not because it becomes propaganda, but because every authentic work of art ultimately questions the time in which it is born.