WASHINGTON

Giandomenico Curi is a radio and television writer, essayist, and film director. After graduating from the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico, he worked in theatre, but primarily in film and music. His published books include Il cinema francese della Nouvelle Vague; Vorrei essere là (cantautori in Italia); Dalida - La voce e l’anima; Chiedo scusa se parlo di Gaber; I frenetici (50 anni di cinema e rock); Django Reinhardt - Una leggenda manouche tra cinema e jazz; and “Il me pais al è colòur smarit”: Pier Paolo Pasolini e Giovanna Marini. In addition to a notable series of music videos (from Venditti to Madness, from Battisti to Skiantos), he directed two films also linked to music: Ciao ma’ and Lambada. Among his many music documentaries, Quando la banda passò (on Claudio Baglioni) and A Sud della musica – La voce libera di Giovanna Marini are particularly noteworthy. Last but not least, he taught Semiology of Film and Audio-visual Media at Roma Tre University for many years.

by Valerio Carando
Let’s start with some basic biographical notes. You were born in 1946, graduated with an MA, and obtained a degree in film directing from the Silvio D’Amico Academy. Early on, you worked extensively in radio: as a host for a folk music show with Anna Melato and then for L’uomo della notte, but most notably – still as a host – for Un certo discorso, which lasted for many seasons, alongside Massimo Villa, Gino Castaldo, Stefano Bonagura, and others. Dozens of radio dramas and documentaries were to follow, not to mention two films for the big screen (Ciao ma’, 1988, and Lambada, 1990) and a TV series (Valentina, 1989). All the while, you worked variously as a film and music critic, being a long-time contributor for il manifesto, Il Venerdì di Repubblica, and the Enciclopedia Treccani. On top of this, you published a dozen insightful, necessary books, including Il cinema francese della Nouvelle Vague (Studium, 1977) and “Il me paìs al è colòur smarit” - Pier Paolo Pasolini e Giovanna Marini (Besa Muci, 2022).
All this considered, how did you come up with approaching music video practices, becoming one of the main outright pioneers in Italy? Let’s do some archaeology here.
The ’80s started with MTV, the pay TV channel from the US that worked like an FM radio station, but one that you could watch; it broadcast music videos round the clock. In Italy, our version of MTV was called Video Music, which began broadcasting in April 1984. Video Music was foreshadowed, outclassed, and possibly inspired, by Mister Fantasy, a show that Rai had broadcast no less than three years earlier, beginning on March 12, 1981, almost at the same time as the American giant. In this show, music videos were the real protagonists; they were respected, introduced, spotlighted, and even produced. Mister Fantasy lasted for four years under the guidance of its inventor, Paolo Giaccio, and with Carlo Massarini as a host - the latter coming from the same radio entourage as Per voi giovani. Mario Convertino’s presence and work were crucial to all this – he was a genius graphic designer whose task was to design the appearance of the entire show. Other young creatives and I, including Gianfranco Giagni, Piccio Raffanini, Emilio Uberti, Dante Majorana, and Mimma Nocelli ended up working on this Rai show. From then on, Veejays began to take over Deejays at other TV stations too, as did the unrelenting viral spread of music through images, ‘polluting’ – slowly but surely – the entire pop music market in Italy. This was a new way of promoting things, with video taking the place of the performer, just as Elvis Presley’s pink Cadillac did.
You must have encountered a lot of prejudice at the beginning…
Of course. We should acknowledge that many purists of the second art felt like the video format was encroaching on the field of music, but not all of them were acting in good faith. Until when, in 1984, Michael Shore of Rolling Stone defined music videos as the bastard by-product of a shotgun wedding between a self-conscious 'artistic' sensibility and a crass, commercial, 'promotional' necessity, and soon after this, Joe Saltzman of Usa Today called them “predigested dreams.” The underlying meaning was that, before MTV, a song was supposed to be like a trampoline for a set of emotions in which young listeners could plunge for a few minutes, thus evoking an exclusive inner world, whereas with music videos this experience was replaced by such predigested dreams, as if they told us what to see, what to think, and how to feel (and in the process, they rob us of our own imagination). Some singer-songwriters in Italy were saying more or less the same thing; for example, Francesco De Gregori blamed music videos for “clipping imagination’s wings,” and Franco Battiato said that they were “actually murdering music.”
And yet, several masters of cinema tried their hand at the artistic experience of the music video ever since the 1980s.
Let’s name some names: Michelangelo Antonioni directed Gianna Nannini’s Fotoromanza; Mauro Bolognini directed Amanda Lear’s Assassino; last but not least, Federico Fellini was set to direct the new song by Boy George, Karma Chameleon. Famously, though, the latter project failed – a real pity, also because, in some way, I became involved in it. In the same period, I was working on a rock music film project starring Scialpi, who in turn was riding high on the success of Rocking Rolling, thanks in part to Piccio Raffanini’s video. My co-workers were Franco Migliacci, the author of Scialpi’s lyrics, and Stefano Ubezio, a long-time collaborator of Fellini’s whom I had met on the set of City of Women. Ubezio was interested in producing the film. The Scialpi project didn’t come through, but I was recruited by Ubezio as an ‘expert’ and ‘advisor’ to Fellini, who was deciding whether to direct Culture Club’s promotional video following the huge success of Do you really want to hurt me? Then it happened that, precisely in the summer of 1984, I was directing Cervia Video Clips, the first international festival of “music to watch.” Cervia welcomed not only the most interesting videos on an international level, but also half a dozen of their creators, including A-listers like Don Letts, Bernard Rose, Tim Pope, Godley & Creme, even Steve Barron, who had directed the beautiful Michael Jackson video for Billie Jean. One night, Ubezio and I thought we would take them to the Rimini Grand Hotel, where Fellini had a room reserve as he did every year. For them, young directors of music videos, it was just an invitation to dinner at a historic hotel on the Adriatic coast – just imagine their surprise when they found Federico Fellini at the head of their table. This proves not only that the music/promotional video had now established itself in Italy, but that an ‘Italian way’ of putting songs into images was equally developing.
How would you position your contribution in the wake of this change?
From the spring of 1983, Mister Fantasy created a new chart besides the International Video Top Ten: a separate list for the five Italian music videos most voted by the TV audience. For example, in the March 21, 1984 episode, Massarini presented the following Top Five: Fabio Concato ranked fifth with Severamente vietato, Alan Sorrenti fourth with Angeli di strada, Flavio Giurato third with Orbetello ali e nomi, Tony Esposito second with Caravan and, with Vogliamoci bene, Mimmo Cavallo first thanks to a slide of postcards from Taranto, his native town. However, there are at least two mistakes in Massarini’s charts (in spite of his competence), namely regarding the songs of Flavio Giurato and Mimmo Cavallo. I directed both videos, shooting not just two promotional music videos, but two actual small films that last for a much longer time, possibly up to fifteen minutes, and feature four or five songs. They are juxtaposed and edited precisely to tell a story through the songs. In short, this represents something that I like to define as the Italian way to the music video. It took shape very early on, ever since one of the first episodes of Mister Fantasy, that is, since when Gianfranco Giagni and I began to think about how to put Gianfranco Manfredi’s 1981 record for Philips into images. This record ruthlessly captured the ebb and flow of the silent majority, from Allo sbando to Noi abbiamo scherzato, until it becomes an illness that consumes you and turns into Insonnia. The aesthetic reference was that of magic and horror, which Manfredi was fond of. Hence, we decided to focus on two songs: Il Mago, an amusing and grotesque portrait of a token seller of dreams, and Case, with music by Jannacci and an upset Frankenstein wandering among the grim tenements in the outskirts of Rome. He is only the first Monster, the one who paves the way for the wonderful era of silent cinema, which was to reach its climax with Lon Chaney. The latter’s striking abilities as a quick-change artist are key to interpreting the whole film. In other words, a homage to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in which everything becomes a pretext for an extraordinary musical delirium. We applied a similar approach to the record of Mimmo Cavallo (Stancami stancami musica, 1982), which best conveys the critical, sharp attitude of the Apulian singer-songwriter. Thanks to a succession of songs reminiscent of Pino Daniele and Rino Gaetano, but with an absolutely original style and sound, it produces rock music that is at once heartrending and poetic. The film opens on a refrain of Una canzone commerciale, then moves on to an entire song, Giù le mani – a dance stands by a city, Taranto, and Southern Italy, robbed of their past and their present. Another fragment of Una canzone commerciale follows, taking us into the antechamber of one of the many Milan-based record labels. It is precisely in a wide road of the Milanese outskirts, with the last bands of punks and skinheads, that we set the tight-paced Stancami stancami musica, i.e., the title track and angry driving force of the whole album. After another passage with the Hawaiian notes and dances of Una canzone commerciale, we closed with the triumphant notes of Aria di Risorgimento, complete with a marching band, majorettes on the catwalk, hugs and kisses and candyfloss hearts. The ‘short’ for Flavio Giurato’s song Il tuffatore was even more overwhelming and somewhat confounding. Created to promote the album with the same title, it featured four of the most captivating songs from the record: Introduzione, Orbetello, Orbetello ali e nomi, and Il tuffatore. According to Giuliano Ciao, at its centre, “the image of the race, filled with ‘grammar mistakes’ and yet elegant and persistent, seems to capture Flavio Giurato’s own human and artistic story: emotional explosion, exhibition of beauty, and an unrelenting thirst for freedom…” The subsequent work was an equally interesting and experimental video, in that it attempted to bring together several bands, whether they were musicians or solo singers, into a single narrative. Something that generally works well because it allows to stage a dialogue and a contrast between the participants, injecting rhythm and energy into the entire video-story, especially if supported by editing.
The 1980s were also characterised by your collaboration with Antonello Venditti, who by that time had established his name as a pop singer-songwriter.
That is a whole different story. I made three music videos for Venditti, Grazie Roma (1983), Ci vorrebbe un amico (1984), and Centocittà (1985). They were remarkably successful, because of the connection with Venditti, the city of Rome, and the local soccer team Roma. These were his first music videos. They accompanied the three 45 rpm records and unquestionably left an indelible mark in time. I noticed this recently when reading comments in various languages below the videos on YouTube. For example, regarding Ci vorrebbe un amico, “Ogni volta che vedo questa clip, penso ma che bella l’Italia degli anni ’80” [Whenever I watch this video, I think how great Italy was in the 1980s]; “Very nice, very 80s, melancholic pop;” “Venditti è Roma, è casa, è ‘na forza! E la notte era veramente magica” [Venditti is Rome, is home, is cool! And nights were magical]; “Un souvenir incroyable avec cette petite vidéo et cette chanson pleine de sentiments et d’histoires volées.” That’s right: a small video with plenty of feelings and stolen stories. This is precisely what happens: he’s at home, at night, with his piano, recounting the stories that he has gleaned through the windows of the surrounding apartments. The same structure as Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Venditti never leaves his piano, just as he never gives up his jeans, sneakers, Panama hat, and white dust coat. For this reason, in Grazie Roma we had to bring the piano inside the Colosseum and set up two separate tracks, one for the camera and one for the piano. However, the most suggestive and complicated sequence was that of the refrain. We shot this in one take, with the camera mounted on a helicopter, moving from a close-up up to an aerial shot of the entire Colosseum at the end of the refrain. Last, the third video, Centocittà, revolves around the presence and talent of Carlo Verdone, as well as Antonello’s unbelievably powerful voice. Carlo, here, plays a young fireman who, after an unfortunate and eventful journey across Rome, finally gets to a Venditti concert just as the people are leaving. Exhausted and sweaty, he sits on a barrier licking an ice cream when Venditti arrives in his red convertible and invites him on board.
Following Mister Fantasy, another key stage in your journey of putting songs into images was Sotto le stelle.
Yes, in 1984 Giagni and I took part in this summer variety show, which was broadcast by RaiUno. We made twelve music videos: six in London with the ska band Madness, and another six in Rome with Skiantos. All of them featured Eleonora Giorgi, the host of the show. Both bands championed the new wave and the ‘nutty sound.’ It was overwhelming. The British band was more ingenious and more pop-oriented; Skiantos – with Freak, Sbarbo, and Dandy – was more wacky, falling somewhere between punk and avant-garde. I would like to evoke at least two of the latter’s titles, remembering the late Freak Antoni, a great artist who left us too soon: Ti spalmo la crema, which we shot in Fregene with the gorgeous Giorgi almost naked on Cleopatra’s sedan chair; and then Karabigniere blues with the uncontainable Freak who sings the song himself during a candle-lit romantic dinner with Giorgi. He wore a carabinieri uniform with the gun, handbag, and hat laid out on the table.
In my opinion, Oh! Era ora is the masterpiece among the music videos that you directed. It was a true act of avant-garde art, transcending genres and definitions.
Of all the videos that I have made over the years – including for Tempi Duri, Enzo Avitabile, Shampoo, Alberto Fortis, Marco Ferradini, Nikka Costa, Lucio Dalla, Mietta, Pino D’Angiò, Pitura Freska, Stadio, Lucio Battisti, Ron, Claudio Baglioni, Mia Martini, Tullio De Piscopo, and some more artists who are now lost to memory – I still remember at least two with affection, and I feel unhealthily nostalgic every time that I see them. One of these, from 1983, is precisely Oh! Era ora, a song composed and sung by Adriano Pappalardo, arranged and produced by Lucio Battisti, with the lyrics of Pasquale Panella. In his book Musica per i nostri occhi. Storie e segreti dei videoclip, Domenico Liggeri speaks of “measured folly, muted erotic vegetarian delirium, irresistible gags… with Pappalardo becoming an icon despite only appearing for a few final seconds.” In simpler terms, it was the story of a wronged lover who seeks vengeance with a bagful of various greens and vegetables. I am equally fond of Bungaro’s Voce, which was inspired by the forms of early twentieth-century Russian constructivism, reworked graphically by Giovanni Madonna especially with regard to the lettering. On top of this, some musical repertoire from the 1920s was the ‘re-used’ to emphasise the jazz soul of the song.