The first fake news? He reproduced it George Melies, one of the noble pioneers of cinema. Think, taking advantage of ideas, scenographic cartoons and actors used in Le voyage dans la lune in 1902, what films, series, news programs and the web would develop in the following hundred years was invented. The coronation of Edward VII is filmed, all perky and kitsch as only the immense Melies could do, and he also receives a lot of compliments from the king of England. “It seems real, George,” the sovereign told him from the enemy coast across the Channel. Thus for many that event of the time was immortalized for the masses as true in its plastic fiction. Because we start from this episode, widely documented, to tell the documentary Fantastic Machine, directed by Swedish directors Axel Danielson And Maximilien Van Aertryck, in Italian cinemas from today? Because it is one of those tasty and appetizing operations of accumulating video clips (and photos) that tries to demonstrate how moving images have a subtly deceptive soul.
That’allure which has bewitched and hypnotized us for almost two hundred years (let’s not forget the photograph from which everything was born and to which everything will continue to return) and fundamentally pushes us to believe at first glance, fleetingly, involuntarily, in everything we see on large, medium and large scales. small screen. An undulating and jolting visual path, that of Danielson and Van Aertryck, from the darkroom with the brain that overturns the image seen by the eyes up to the Lumiere locomotive that arrives at La Ciotatpassing by monsieur Niepce who in 1825 was the first to sprinkle a photographic plate with bitumen and then dust it, magically making an urban panorama appear with a small guy in the back left cleaning someone else’s shoes.
The illusion of images, ladies and gentlemen. More deceivers than faithful reproducers of reality. Look for example at the crossing of the field of many photos and war scenes of the late twentieth century: everything seems like a stolen and courageous shot in the midst of rubble and bullets, then the secret is revealed by placing the lens on the opposite side at 180 degrees with photographers and cameramen asking soldiers to strike an active war pose. And for those who haven’t yet understood what we’re talking about, here it is Leni Riefenstahl in 1993, now physically decrepit, but still with an Eiseinsteinian twist, in exalting the functions and tricks of technique and editing. Leni exalts the magniloquence of Nazism by drawing hyperbolic lines of human processions that are barely visible in reality, exponentially multiplying the arrogance of the Nazi crowd with telephoto lenses and crane movements. Manipulation is everything and available to everyone. Nobody is exempt from it.
So the big leap, Danielson and Van Aertryck explain with playful irony, the intrusion directly into the living room of the house (then will come the one in everyone’s pocket with the mobile phone) is with the TV. The Homersimpsonian story of a couple who falls slave to the television cube during the sixties is exemplary. TV always on and constant presence in front of you even while you sleep. From a magical gesture inside a room, therefore, to a literally physical intrusion into the home. The power of images is unstoppable. The arrival of Youtube and the web finally closes the circle, with the video of the girl who wants to show herself (there is no WhatsApp yet) to her sister who doesn’t take her into consideration: she shoots a video where she falls from a table and even hurts herself , loads it up Youtube to show it to him, it is seen by millions of people and an even more subtle chapter of contemporary online voyeurism opens. Perhaps the least exciting part of the documentary but most Ostlundian (Ruben Ostlund Palme d’Or in Cannes, producer of the film, who knows something about pseudo-realistic sophistication).
Terrorists who show online how to make a bomb in the kitchen or members of ISIS who take multiple takes, giggle like idiots, misspell written lines, before the good version of the fatwah. The madness of showing oneself in every way above and below. The sense of representing ourselves as a new frontier. Think of the native of Papua New Guinea who sees a photo of himself only in 1970 and spends hours observing himself or that chimpanzee who scrolls through Instagram photos obsessively like you who are reading and us who are writing. Maybe a Trumanian video camera is filming us, who knows. Maybe in the next chapter of Fantastic Machine they will show us. The narrator is Elio Germano. Distributes Teodora.
