A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria 2-24: Gaber, De Andrè, Rai and us (ca, de, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

January is the month of good resolutions and for 20 years Rai has been 
the time to remember Giorgio Gaber and Fabrizio De Andrè, both of whom 
died this month. This year, then, the opportunity was double. If for the 
Milanese singer-songwriter, who died on 1 January 2003, the occasion was 
the screening of the documentary "Io, noi e Gaber", released just a few 
months ago at the cinema, for the Genoese singer-songwriter it was 
instead the 25th anniversary of his death, with public television which 
in this case opted for a simpler retrieval from the rich archive. 
Allergic as I am to anniversaries, I still subjected myself to viewing 
these tributes. Partly because these are two still fundamental artists, 
with incredible writing and wonderful voices, partly because I am 
fascinated by the life paths of these two men born bourgeois who then 
become a little anarchic (Gaber) and a more completely anarchist (De 
Andrè), partly because I want to be surprised by the ability of state 
bodies like Rai to misrepresent and trivialize complex thoughts.

The documentary "Io, noi e Gaber" immediately betrays the authorial 
desire of Riccardo Milani, who is also a well-known film director and is 
always looking for the effective shot or suggestive juxtaposition, even 
if it often turns out to be didactic. If it is true that it is difficult 
to make Gaber's theater-song accessible to the new generations, it is 
undeniable that Milani tries very timidly, preferring to give only one 
space to the "young quota" and peppering the documentary with bourgeois 
and "illustrious" voices. Indeed, the testimonies are all "excellent" - 
journalists, singers, TV presenters, politicians, actors - and an 
unpleasant "guess who will be next" effect is generated which undermines 
the story. There aren't even captions to introduce who is speaking from 
time to time, evidently we rely on the fact that watching the 
documentary will be veterans and nostalgics. Above all because the only 
gaze allowed is, in fact, that of the artist, the only one who can talk 
about Italy changing together with Gaber's lyrics, first light and 
predominantly Milanese, then socially committed and finally bitter and 
resigned. There is no space for the opinion of a scholar on the economic 
boom or the j'accuse of "I if I were God", the feminist analysis of love 
songs, not even a voice of an ordinary person who tells us what it meant 
or what Gaber means to her. There are few moments worthy of note: the 
version of "Addio Lugano bella" with five guitars and five voices 
(Giorgio Gaber, Enzo Jannacci, Lino Toffolo, Otello Profazio and 
Silverio Pisu), imposed, so it seems, by the most well-known and 
powerful of the five artists, that is Gaber, to a recalcitrant TV at the 
beginning: Gaber who in an interview at the theater conducted by his 
friend Mario Capanna says that "'68 changed me"; Luporini (the true 
author of the theater-song) who says of Gaber that he "was a lower 
middle class but with a drive for change and curiosity". For the rest, 
the documentary lingers too much on the memories of her daughter Dalia. 
But this is a flaw that unfortunately De Andrè also has to deal with.

More generally: never let family members treat artists. Under their 
control, the return of a glance becomes an affective meatloaf. For 
example, the fiction "The Free Prince" had done this, which had 
compressed ideology and existence outside the box into the most obvious 
of narratives. Luckily RaiPlay, Rai's web platform, has chosen to take 
advantage of the potential of the web and has guaranteed for the month 
of January the possibility of enjoying Fabrizio De André's few 
television appearances. What emerges is a rare sensitivity, the ability 
to weigh every single word, the hard-won gift of rejecting the 
deleterious mechanism of visibility that trivializes any message. Two in 
particular are my favorite moments. In the first report, introduced by a 
very young and then unknown Christian De Sica, Gaber and De Andrè are 
interviewed on the choice, then very new, to include some of their songs 
in school anthologies. For a Gaber who limits himself to providing a 
modest comment ("this thing makes me laugh a little, it embarrasses me, 
maybe it's not the case"), De Andrè is more multifaceted: at the 
beginning he admits the injection of self-esteem, with a witty phrase 
("I happened to tell it to some friends"), and then walking away from it 
shortly after, confessing annoyance at the obligation of having to study 
it and learn it by heart, and adding at the end that in his songs the 
lyrics without the music make little sense. The other noteworthy moment 
is the visit of a Rai crew at the time of the retreat to the farmhouse 
in the countryside in Sardinia.

There is a naturalness that almost stuns, an absence of poses that in 
the absolute fiction of today's TV shines even more: to the journalist 
who tells of the difficulties in reaching the place the 
singer-songwriter replies by explaining the works carried out and those 
to be carried out, and then the lunch with friends, the shyness of his 
son Cristiano, the loving eyes of his wife Dori Ghezzi who with 
trepidation waits to join Andrea's choir, played by De Andrè and his son 
in one of the most beautiful moments of Italian TV, the toast to Renzo 
Arbore with De Andrè who asks who has the empty glasses and instead they 
are all already full. We really seem to be there, confirming that art 
belongs to everyone and not the prerogative of a few, of the bourgeois 
who would like it all for themselves and who see it rather as an 
excluding tool.

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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