FLEWID VOLUME ZERO
The Art, Freedom and Intellectual autonomy of Carmine Amoroso Interview Klaus Mondrian
Carmine Amoroso, after writing the film “Parenti Serpenti/Une Famille Formidabile” directed by Mario Monicelli based on the eponymous play, made his debut in 1996 with “Come Tu Mi Vuoi/Embrasse-moi Pasqualino”, a pioneering Italian film addressing transgender issues, starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel. This was followed by “Cover Boy”, which was selected by over 100 festivals and received awards all around the world and was also included on the shortlist for the Italian film candidates for the Oscars 2008. The documentary film “Porno & Libertà/Porn to be Free” came out in 2016, its world premiere was at the Rotterdam Festival, has already been sold in 22 countries and won the Nastro d’Argento in 2016. Art, commitment and independence are what shine in the words of the filmmaker who openly talked about himself and his work.
You realised the concept of sexual ‘fluidity’ or gender theory would supplant the traditional dualism of hetero/homosexuality, where did your ‘vision’, shown in your film Come tu mi vuoi (one of the first ‘no-gender’ films to come out in Italy, and not only in Italy), come from?
“Come Tu Mi Vuoi” was conceived in the mid-90s, at a time when “gender theory” was still not very well known in Italy. I thought of a simple story, a kind of fairytale: a young policeman, Pasquale, who is planning to get married to a nice, pretty girl, meets Desideria – a person who does not identify as male or female. A person you defined as “no gender”. They had met many years before but only now do the sparks fly. Pasquale tries to resist but in the end he gives in to passion. What interested me was to talk about characters with liberated uncategorized sexuality. The distinction straight/gay has always sat uncomfortably with me. The character of Desideria was an attempt to overcome the binary scheme that has always regulated and normalized our thinking.
Conformism, freedom – also that of desire – and polisexuality, what is your interpretation of this?
“I come from struggles whose battle cry was “freedom for desire”. Standardization and conformity have never been a part of me. I feel that intimate choices should be made autonomously. Personally I assert my polysexuality. From a certain point onwards, the gay movement opted for standardization and conformism, probably to ensure that “social pax” that was wanted by politics. And even transsexuals have complied to a model that has been imposed by the “dominant Western straight male” through an unrestrained and dangerous use of plastic surgery. However, the protagonists of my film – Desideria, along with her friends Gaia and Gioia – were simply what they wanted to be. In a certain way, they demanded the right to be / to love / to desire / to enjoy without it being defined or approved. Unlike what had been done in cinema until that moment (where, at best, gay people /transvestites were talked about) I tried to give “dignity” to the characters and to the story through the formal structure of the film.
To which extent do you think your film work has a popular vocation, though it is and remains basically underground?
“I didn’t want to make an underground film, but I wanted to make a POPular film. For this reason I used a star-studded cast to give more strength to the characters. Really affirmed stars like Enrico Lo Verso, who had come from the great success of “The Stolen Children”; Monica Bellucci, at the time a supermodel; and Vincent Cassel, who had already won a César for the film La Haine (it was actually thanks to this film that their romance started). Just like, for example, for the soundtrack where I used Jazz songs from the 1920s and Paolo Conte instead of Mina and Patty Pravo. I tried to overturn all the canons and clichés, the stereotypes of gay culture. It is probably due to this that the film was found to be less palatable by the critics of the regime as well as by the Church – if you think that I filmed the policeman’s declaration of love to Desideria near St. Peter’s, in Via della Conciliazione, you can understand their reaction; but also by the gay movement, from which I had no support whatsoever be it critical or communicative. Suffice to say that the film has disappeared, it is no longer shown on television: it’s a “desaparecido”. Perhaps because – as you said – it was ahead of its time and, in a way, they made me pay for it.”
Now that everything seems to have been said, to have been seen, to be but a disillusion and there is no more hope, what does an anticipatory filmmaker like yourself ‘see’? Is there hope or will the cultural void be consolidated?
On the contrary, I see a dangerous tide rising that we should fight against. The social control we are submitted to is what worries me most, through the mimetic power of the social media, which they use making us believe that we are free, the “neopuritanism” that is coming back with such strength and telling us that victories are never definitive, issues that I have also addressed to a certain degree in my last work “Porno e Libertà” which, not surprisingly, I self-produced.
Is there something you would like to do or consider necessary to do in the near future?
“Now I would like to make a story about our inability to face uncomfortable truths such as poverty, which is the greatest form of racism, the denial mechanisms we put in place. The social barriers that are rising, the end of the class struggle… but to be able to do this we would need free and independent cinema, which has become increasingly impossible and utopian in Italy.”
