Abstract
Gian Maria Volonté became famous interpreting real-life figures of postwar Italy whose beliefs were antithetical to those of his left-wing persona. The study focuses on the two versions, a decade apart (in 1976 and 1986), of Aldo Moro, the Christian Democrats president who was assassinated by Red Brigades in 1978. Volonté shot his last movies in Latin America, and it was a Mexican star that kept this heritage alive. Gael García Bernal played Ernesto Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries while also appearing in commercials for Nike and Levi’s. Bernal’s stardom is one in which idealism, rebellion, and commerce coexist. In Even the Rain and No, Bernal self-reflexively problematizes his global popularity, following in Volonté’s tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
Other actors in the film were directors Ferreri , Glauber Rocha, and the German student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
- 2.
In Investigation, Volonté offered a virtuoso performance as the head of the police homicide division, who murders his lover Augusta Terzi on the day of his promotion to the secret service. Volonté’s character delivers his program plan to the other officers at the appointment ceremony, equating political dissent with crime and stating that suppression of subversives is essential to the democratic state. The police chief attempts to simultaneously cover up and also exhibit his guilt. Such behavior is attributable to a paradox that lies at the heart of the protagonist’s psychopathology: “Since the chief considers himself above the law, he can commit any crime with impunity, but since his power derives from the authority of the law, he must prove his potency by getting caught and undergoing the appropriate punishment” (Marcus, 267). He eventually finds that his social position protects him from every accusation when a young student does not denounce him because he believes that every policeman is corrupt, while his superiors refuse to consider his confession because institutions cannot lose credibility. Investigation constitutes the propeller of a golden moment in Volonté’s stardom, but not a paradigmatic role that imprisoned him for the rest of his career.
- 3.
As Rosi declared: “I do not expect an actor to be a puppet that moves according to how I move my strings … The actor clarifies his role together with me, according to his sensibility – I can modify a line together with him, or accept a certain gesture, a behavior he proposes. Volonté has always collaborated with remarkable intelligence” (in Faldini and Fofi, 81). Such synergies between actor and director also characterized the collaborations of Volonté with the directors of the movies about Moro.
- 4.
Similarly, because of the presence of Volonté, “The Mattei Affair essentially remains a film about Enrico Mattei,” rather than on the oil and gas oligarchy of the “seven sisters” and the exploitation of developing countries (Zambetti, 99).
- 5.
Volonté spent a great part of the last phase of his career in artistic exile: Actas de Marusia (Littín 1976; Mexico), Mort de Mario Ricci (Goretta 1983; France), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Rosi 1987; Italy-France-Colombia), L’oeuvre au noir (Delvaux 1988; France-Belgium), Pestalozzi’s Berg (Van Gunten 1989; Germany), Funes, a Great Love (Raúl de la Torre 1992; Argentina), Tirano Banderas (García Sánchez 1993; Spain-Cuba-Mexico). He died on the set of Ulysses’ Gaze (Angelopoulos 1994; Greece), after having shot a few scenes among the ruins of Mostar, depicting the genocide that took place in the former Yugoslavia.
- 6.
The term was coined by Tom Wolfe when composer Leonard Bernstein invited the Black Panthers at a party in his apartment in New York. The clash between militant minorities and the liberal establishment is described in Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers (1970).
- 7.
Volonté approached the adaptation of Ramon del Valle-Inclan’s homonymous novel with rigor, taking three years to prepare for the role. As Deriu remembers, “He contacted some Hispanic scholars so that they could help him understand the ‘linguistic’ Babel of which the novel is made, that syncretizes with anti-academic elements of classic Spanish of the Siglo de Oro, creole dialects and indigenous Latin American linguistic structures, and neologisms coined by Valle-Inclan himself; furthermore, in order to recuperate the abstruse physicality of the dictator, he followed some indications in which Valle-Inclan talks about actual dictators that inspired him, going to research iconographies and historic notes on those figures” (359).
- 8.
Cfr. “A Panel Discussion on Transnational Stardom,” in which participants Mary Beltran, Corey Creekmur, Sangita Gopal, and Raphael Raphael discuss some of these issues at large (in Meuff and Raphael, 19–28).
- 9.
Shot in the mid-1970s, Letters from Marusia reconstructs the massacre that took place in Northern Chile in 1925, ordered by the government to preserve the exploitative control of local saltpeter mines by a British company. Volonté plays Gregorio, a self-educated miner who advocates social revolt by pointing to the incongruities of reformism. The film was produced in Mexico, under the presidency of Luis Echeverría (Institutional Revolutionary Party), by the National Cinematographic Corporation (CONACINE), after left-wing Chilean director Littín was exiled by Augusto Pinochet’s regime. In 1984 Littín decided to reenter Chile using a false identity to shoot a documentary that showed the condition of the country under the regime. This event became the subject of Gabriel García Marquez’s book Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín. Volonté became fascinated with Marquez’s novels and played the role of Cristobal Bedoya in the adaptation of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The fictional drama is set in Colombia and relies on journalistic techniques to ascertain, through a non-linear narrative, the impossibility of discovering the truth regarding an honor crime 20 years after it has taken place.
- 10.
The images that Sánchez-Prado discusses are those of Amores Perros, where a car accident connects three intertwining narrative segments, each of which focuses on a different social class. For Bernal’s Octavio, the clandestine world of dogfighting provides the opportunity to find a getaway from the peripheries of Mexico City with his abused sister-in-law, with whom he has developed a secretive relationship. Y tu mama también instead follows two teenage boys, ironically named after the protagonists of Mexican history, Julio Zapata (Bernal) and Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna), in a road trip that leads to a secluded beach called Heaven’s Mouth, where they consummate an affair with the older Spanish woman Luisa Cortés (Maribel Verdú). Cuarón’s subtle manipulation of foreground and background Mexican countryside displays construction workers operating in precarious conditions, a fisherman whose life is being destroyed by modernization, and students’ demonstrations (“Interview with Slavoj Žižek” in the Criterion Collection DVD of Y tu mama también). Finally, The Crime of Father Amaro is an anti-clerical work that blends sacred and profane iconography. For this reason, it generated censorship controversies that in the end functioned as a sounding board for the film at the box office.
- 11.
The Motorcycle Diaries earned $16,756,372 at the US box office and $57,641,466 worldwide; Amores Perros $5,383,834 in the United States and $20,908,467 worldwide; Y Tu Mamá También $13,622,333 in the United States and 33,616,962 worldwide; and The Crime of Father Amaro 5,709,616 in the United States and 26,996,738 worldwide.
- 12.
The Motorcycle Diaries expands on the discourse that Salles initiated with Central Station (1998). This is another road movie whose protagonists, an aging woman and a child, find spiritual catharsis by leaving a violent Rio de Janeiro to wonder in the Northwestern Sertão. The latter is shown with its families falling apart, wounded animals in semi-abandoned gas stations, and fervent candlelit religious processions. The importance of such location in the Brazilian imaginary is crucial, since it has been the backdrop to three Cinema Novo films in the 1960s: Barren Lives (Pereira do Santos 1963), The Guns (Guerra 1964), and Black God, White Devil (Rocha 1964) (Oricchio in The New Brazilian Cinema, 140).
- 13.
Just two years earlier, Bernal was cast for the first time in the role of Che Guevara as a supporting actor in the TV mini-series Fidel. Even in this work, he displays himself as an ambassador of the Pan-Latin American cause. In a sequence set in Mexico City in 1955 Che is seen by a freshly exiled Castro while discussing politics with an American girl at a private party: “Look at Batista. He’s the worst man for Cuba. And he is a dictator. In my country, Argentina, it’s almost the same. Everywhere in Latin America, it is the same. The worst rise to the top always. Because each of these dictators have one thing in common. You, you, the Yankees. Everything you do is done for the profits of your companies … We Latins must create our own destiny. Not alone but together. Everywhere in Latin America, everyone – Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Cuba. Do you know Neruda? At the sound of the trumpet everything was ready on earth. And Jehovah divided the world to Coca-Cola incorporated, Anaconda, Ford Motors. But the juiciest slice of all was kept for the United Fruit Company.”
- 14.
See the “friendly fire” thrown at The Motorcycle Diaries by North American magazines (e.g., Owen Gleiberman on Entertainment Weekly, Anthony Lane on The New Yorker, and Paul Berman on Slate).
- 15.
Shot almost in real time and with a documentary attitude, Bernal’s directorial debut Deficit (2007) was produced by Canana. Bernal plays Cristobal, the son of an economist who is temporarily in Europe to solve some legal issues. He takes advantage of the father’s absence to organize a party in his villa. Under the influence of drugs and alcohol the racial prejudices, class, and gender divisions between the privileged participants and the servants violently emerge, and Cristobal, who finds out that his application to Harvard University has been rejected and is caught cheating on his girlfriend, ends up in a nervous breakdown.
- 16.
For a detailed article based on research in the archives of the Center for Documentation and Information Bolivia see Assies, “David versus Goliath in Cochabamba: Water Rights, Neoliberalism, and the Revival of Social Protest in Bolivia.” See also the account of the non-profit, consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen. “Water Privatization Case Study: Cochabamba, Bolivia” www.citizen.org/documents/Bolivia_(PDF).PDF. Other useful insights come from Emanuele Lobina at the PSIRU (Public Services international Research Unit), University of Greenwich. www.psiru.org/reports/Cochabamba.doc.
- 17.
For an account based on a series of interviews with Oscar Olivera, one of the local activists that took part to the revolution see ¡Cochabamba!: Water War in Bolivia (2008).
- 18.
For a historical overview of key events generating a wave of documentary or documentary-like films in Latin America and a textual analysis of some of these works, see also the volume edited by Burton, The Social Documentary in Latin America (1990).
- 19.
In addition, Aduviri , who delivers a memorable performance in Even the Rain as an activist/indigenous chief, is an aspiring director and teacher at the Film School in Los Altos (Cabitza).
- 20.
“The great advantage of Third Cinema is that while it is politically oppositional to dominant cinema (and Second Cinema), it does not seek, at the level of form and cinematic language, to reinvent cinema from scratch (it is too interested in cinema to do that), nor does it adopt a position of pure opposition on the question of form (it is too interested in communication for that); instead its relation to First and Second Cinema is dialectical: i.e. it seeks to transform rather than simply reject these cinemas; it seeks to bring out their stifled potentialities, those aspects of the social world they repress or only obliquely acknowledge; Third Cinema seeks to detach what is positive, life-affirming, and critical of Cinemas One and Two and give them a more expanded, socially connected articulation” (Wayne, 10).
- 21.
For an interesting case study, see Falicov’s “Programa Ibermedia: Co-Production and the Cultural Politics of Constructing an Ibero-American Audiovisual Space.”
- 22.
The commitment and sensibility shown toward local Bolivian communities by the real crew of Even the Rain were documented in The Cinema of IciarBollaín, which makes the insinuations by critics appear unfair, since they provided support for a local film school, a new water deposit and a bridge, and paid the extras $20 a day (Santaolalla, 209).
- 23.
This is evident in the opening credits of The New World, which feature historical maps, or the old master prints in Scott’s Conquest of Paradise, showing a red background followed by the superimposed title: “500 years ago, Spain was a nation gripped by fear and superstition, ruled by the crown and a ruthless Inquisition that persecuted men for daring to dream. One man challenged this power. Driven by his sense of destiny, he crossed the sea of darkness in search of honor, gold, and the greater glory of God.” These titles reveal that what follows is a Eurocentric (it is a full hour before indigenous people appear in the film) portrayal of Columbus as an ambitious and progressive idealist. At the end of Scott’s film we see an aged Columbus looking over the sea dictating the memories of the expedition to his son.
- 24.
Malick’s work is informed by a grid of literary sources such as James Fenimore Cooper, James Jones, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, and by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.
- 25.
Bernal’s Canana also distributed Tony Manero (Larraín 2008), about a man in his 50s obsessed with John Travolta, and produced Post-Mortem (Larraín 2010), set during the 1973 Chilean military coup.
- 26.
By voting Yes one would endorse Pinochet’s presidency for eight more years, while a No supported holding democratic elections within one year. The political opposition to the regime won, with 54.7% voting No.
- 27.
Larraín began his career by making television advertisements and in 2011 directed the TV series Prófugos, distributed by HBO Latin America. Both experiences were crucial when it comes to the capacity of managing archival material and the awareness about the logics of television he displays in No .
- 28.
At the beginning of the film, Saavedra’s boss, Lucho Guzmán, is affiliated with the Pinochet regime and strongly disapproves of him collaborating on the No campaign. He then reports Saavedra’s activities to his supervisors, who engage in harassment and intimidation such as vandalistic acts and intrusion in the protagonist’s home. However, after the plebiscite, we still see Saavedra and Guzmán working together within the democratic regime on the promotion of the already mentioned soap opera.
- 29.
In particular, Genaro Arriagada, director of the No campaign, said: “The film is a gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality. The idea that, after fifteen years of dictatorship in a politically sophisticated country with strong union and student movements, solid political parties and an active human rights movement, all of a sudden this Mexican advertising guy arrives on his skateboard and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is what you have to do,’ that is a caricature” (Rohter, 2). Similarly, Francisco Vidal, a cabinet minister in two recent Socialist governments, wrote on his Twitter account: “To believe that Pinochet lost the plebiscite because of a TV logo and jingle is not to grasp anything of what occurred.” Arriagada also discussed the discrepancy between the real-life events and the movie with Olga Khazan at The Atlantic.
- 30.
No is a loose adaptation of The Plebiscite, an Antonio Skármeta play. This is where the fictional character of Saavedra was originally conceived, blending together the characteristics of two different real-life campaigners.
- 31.
See, for example, the last Episode of Season 3, “You’re the Best or you F’ing Suck,” in which Rodrigo agrees to shooting a super-salsa tacos commercial.
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Cilento, F. (2018). Stars and Stardom in Investigative Cinema: The Movies of Gian Maria Volonté and Gael García Bernal. In: An Investigative Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92681-0_4
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