The other evening I found the 1947 film La Certosa di Parma on the Internet, a black and white film starring Gérard Philippe, and watched it. The reason I did this is easy to say: there are many classics that I haven’t read and, due to time constraints, I probably never will. So if they make a movie out of it, I’ll say to myself: Well, at least I know what this acclaimed novel is about.
In fact, La Certosa di Parma is a classic by Stendhal: I’ve always heard of it, but I’ve never read it. And now that I know the story, I’ll never read it. It doesn’t matter whether the film differs from the original, whether the ending is different, whether the director changed something important. I’ll never know. It’s not that important to me to know either. Like I said, we don’t have time. And you can’t read everything. As for The Charterhouse of Parma, the 1947 novel, although contemporary with those of Hugo and Dumas, is, to my knowledge, the only theatrical film. Maybe there was a TV drama, I don’t know. Think of the countless film adaptations of “Les Misérables” and “The Three Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” How come? Maybe the political rewriting of history has something to do with it? But Stendhal was also left-wing, the left-winger of his time. I don’t know.
You may be wondering why I’m talking about this stuff. It’s easy to say. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup and for all I know there may be a specific film in the works. Of course, given that cinematography is also in the hands of the left in South America, the campaign has already begun and what matters is that the new generations, who think like me with the film La Certosa di Parma, from Pinochet convinced are bad, Allende=good. But the older generation knows that things were a little more complicated. Allende, a communist, came to power thanks to the experiment in historical compromise with the Christian Democrat Frei. And since Chilean society is comparable in composition and mentality to that of Italy, Berlinguer wrote an academic editorial in Rinascita, the intellectual magazine of the PCI, with the telling title “The Chilean Lesson.”
As a good communist, Allende organized a large alliance which he quickly formed and with it Chile became continental Cuba. I remember the great copper truck drivers’ strike, the Chilean gold strike, and the “pots” strike in which the housewives, also close to starvation, threw corn at the doors of the barracks, making them cowards (“Galinas”) ) insulted ») to the soldiers who did not intervene. And finally the military intervened. But if the generations after me (and it only takes a few years for a child to become an adult) know everything about the “desaparecidos” of the South American dictatorships and nothing about the other side of the coin, then that is because of international cinema Institutes here for (the study of) resistance that does anything but deviate from mere apology.
Whoever controls the past controls the future: Orwell’s lesson was and is useless. The right, even if they are in government thanks to popular applause, do not remember the lesson of the Duce: “Cinema is the strongest weapon”, written at the newly founded Cinecittà and immediately following the Venice Festival, which first in the world. And when they remember it, they are afraid of seeming “nostalgic.” Whoever has the narrative in hand can also lose some elections Marxists think in terms of eternitynot about election deadlines.
Rino Cammilleri, September 16, 2023