Breaking up Power Relations
Working at the threshold between fiction and reality, Italians Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino explore the relationship between workers and bosses, fathers and daughters, and between politicians and the people.A ticking noise. Like a countdown, like the automatism of a machine. One moment later: a shaky handheld camera, brief impressions of a cloak-and-dagger operation, with four workers sneaking into a factory building to occupy cranes that are scheduled to be dismantled.
Then, a view of Milan Cathedral: four statues looking down from the spires on a city crowded with construction work. The symbolism preceding Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino’s DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR from 2012 is not a coincidental one. What is blended here is the documentary and an artful narrative style. “Opening scenes are very important for us: we want to put everything in it at once,” Bellino stated in an interview with Cineuropa.
The four men, Enzo, Luigi, Massimo, and Fabio, get a chance to speak in interviews. Outside at the gates, their comrades are on strike. Together they want to prevent the closure of the INNSE (Innocenti Sant’Eustacchio S.p.A.) plant, Milan’s last and largest steel factory.
The struggle of the working class, the relationship between people and power, is a defining theme in the two Italians’ oeuvre. Whether it is a factory boss, a politician, or just a father. At the beginning of DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR, mention is made of protests against the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez – an allusion to the duo’s first documentary, LA MINACCIA / THE THREAT (2008), which deals with the Bolivarian Revolution.
In the latter, which stylistically is still rooted in classical documentary, Luzi and Bellino work with images of civilian life and the president’s propaganda TV. One can see the population laying illegal water pipes, increasing armed clashes, and the new constitution printed on foodstuff. What hovers over all of this is oil. Even the social housing units are called petrocasas.
DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR is where a visual language begins to crystallize that has become their characteristic, the tendency to gradually shift the visual focus on the details. Softer lenses, and more targeted angles. Released in 2021, the short documentary PRINCESS also uses these stylistic tools to narrate from the perspective of the protagonist. She is a member of a Filipino settlement by the river Tiber whose accommodations have burnt down; the community lives in their ruins. In blurry images, Princess dreams about her former home. There are only occasional flashes of the austere reality of existence when Luzi and Bellino pan on the grown-ups: charred, toothy ruins, no roof above their heads.
Dream, fiction, and reality. With Luzi and Bellino, the boundaries of theses spheres are blurred in an almost playful manner. For DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR, they adapted parts of the script together with the workers. The same applies to their first fiction film, IL CRATERE / CRATER, made in 2017, which in its naturalistic style has a documentary appearance. It focuses on real-life father-daughter duo Rosario and Sharon Caroccia. Their characters, however, are fictional versions of themselves, which they co-developed during rehearsals and filming: Sharon is a talented singer. Her father, a fairground seller, wants to turn this gift into money. But his methods quickly become exploitative and the daughter begins to oppose him. The events unfold primarily through Sharon’s perspective, the surroundings disappear from our notice. Rosario as the father assumes the boss dynamic. One of the few to side with Sharon is the engineer at the recording studio: “We are humans, not machines.”
Workers and the machine coquet with each other in Luzi and Bellino’s films, whether it is the four INNSE men or Sharon who is to sing like a windup doll. It is up to them to oppose the system. “No one’s gonna help you up if you fall. We gotta help ourselves,” is also Sharon’s mother’s opinion. In Luzi and Bellino’s second fiction film, LUCE (2024), it is a nameless assembly line worker, brilliantly portrayed by Marianna Fontana, who says: “I’ve gotta earn my living, no one’s helping me.”
LUCE, too, revolves around power relations with bosses and fathers. The protagonist works on an assembly line in a leather factory. She breaks her loneliness by taking a drone and sending a phone over a high wall with barbed wire. It is not long before she receives mysterious calls from a man (is it her absent father?), with the filmmakers always leaving open whether they are real or fantasy. The camera is always focused on Fontana’s expressive face and the background is remote.
Factory and workers are real, just like in IL CRATERE / CRATER, and Luzi and Bellino once again developed the screenplay together with them. And yet, the film does strike a different note: LUCE shows the protagonist’s loneliness, which grows from the monotony of her professional and private daily life. “She has no life,” a colleague notes about the main character.
Loneliness is what Luzi and Bellino also evoke in the music video for the song “Povero Tempo Nostro”, posthumously released in 2019, by famous singer-songwriter Gianmaria Testa, who was known for his political beliefs. “Poor these days of meager humanity that passes the days and wears them out,” Testa sings while a boat with a girl onboard is making its way through a ship graveyard, the camera, as usual, always aligned with her view.
What always remains shrouded is the view of the bosses. What’s going on in Hugo Chávez’s head? “He’s got no idea what he wants, and people are suffering,” someone says at the Italian Venezuelan Club. Almost twenty years later, a real revolution seems far away. The feeling among the people, according to Bellino, is that they have already lost the fight. The INNSE crane men also bemoan that their struggle was perceived as but an attempt to save their jobs. Despite having been a matter of principle. “We simply wanted to show that the will of the boss isn’t absolute.”
Then, a view of Milan Cathedral: four statues looking down from the spires on a city crowded with construction work. The symbolism preceding Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino’s DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR from 2012 is not a coincidental one. What is blended here is the documentary and an artful narrative style. “Opening scenes are very important for us: we want to put everything in it at once,” Bellino stated in an interview with Cineuropa.
The four men, Enzo, Luigi, Massimo, and Fabio, get a chance to speak in interviews. Outside at the gates, their comrades are on strike. Together they want to prevent the closure of the INNSE (Innocenti Sant’Eustacchio S.p.A.) plant, Milan’s last and largest steel factory.
The struggle of the working class, the relationship between people and power, is a defining theme in the two Italians’ oeuvre. Whether it is a factory boss, a politician, or just a father. At the beginning of DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR, mention is made of protests against the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez – an allusion to the duo’s first documentary, LA MINACCIA / THE THREAT (2008), which deals with the Bolivarian Revolution.
In the latter, which stylistically is still rooted in classical documentary, Luzi and Bellino work with images of civilian life and the president’s propaganda TV. One can see the population laying illegal water pipes, increasing armed clashes, and the new constitution printed on foodstuff. What hovers over all of this is oil. Even the social housing units are called petrocasas.
DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR is where a visual language begins to crystallize that has become their characteristic, the tendency to gradually shift the visual focus on the details. Softer lenses, and more targeted angles. Released in 2021, the short documentary PRINCESS also uses these stylistic tools to narrate from the perspective of the protagonist. She is a member of a Filipino settlement by the river Tiber whose accommodations have burnt down; the community lives in their ruins. In blurry images, Princess dreams about her former home. There are only occasional flashes of the austere reality of existence when Luzi and Bellino pan on the grown-ups: charred, toothy ruins, no roof above their heads.
Dream, fiction, and reality. With Luzi and Bellino, the boundaries of theses spheres are blurred in an almost playful manner. For DELL’ARTE DELLA GUERRA / ON THE ART OF WAR, they adapted parts of the script together with the workers. The same applies to their first fiction film, IL CRATERE / CRATER, made in 2017, which in its naturalistic style has a documentary appearance. It focuses on real-life father-daughter duo Rosario and Sharon Caroccia. Their characters, however, are fictional versions of themselves, which they co-developed during rehearsals and filming: Sharon is a talented singer. Her father, a fairground seller, wants to turn this gift into money. But his methods quickly become exploitative and the daughter begins to oppose him. The events unfold primarily through Sharon’s perspective, the surroundings disappear from our notice. Rosario as the father assumes the boss dynamic. One of the few to side with Sharon is the engineer at the recording studio: “We are humans, not machines.”
Workers and the machine coquet with each other in Luzi and Bellino’s films, whether it is the four INNSE men or Sharon who is to sing like a windup doll. It is up to them to oppose the system. “No one’s gonna help you up if you fall. We gotta help ourselves,” is also Sharon’s mother’s opinion. In Luzi and Bellino’s second fiction film, LUCE (2024), it is a nameless assembly line worker, brilliantly portrayed by Marianna Fontana, who says: “I’ve gotta earn my living, no one’s helping me.”
LUCE, too, revolves around power relations with bosses and fathers. The protagonist works on an assembly line in a leather factory. She breaks her loneliness by taking a drone and sending a phone over a high wall with barbed wire. It is not long before she receives mysterious calls from a man (is it her absent father?), with the filmmakers always leaving open whether they are real or fantasy. The camera is always focused on Fontana’s expressive face and the background is remote.
Factory and workers are real, just like in IL CRATERE / CRATER, and Luzi and Bellino once again developed the screenplay together with them. And yet, the film does strike a different note: LUCE shows the protagonist’s loneliness, which grows from the monotony of her professional and private daily life. “She has no life,” a colleague notes about the main character.
Loneliness is what Luzi and Bellino also evoke in the music video for the song “Povero Tempo Nostro”, posthumously released in 2019, by famous singer-songwriter Gianmaria Testa, who was known for his political beliefs. “Poor these days of meager humanity that passes the days and wears them out,” Testa sings while a boat with a girl onboard is making its way through a ship graveyard, the camera, as usual, always aligned with her view.
What always remains shrouded is the view of the bosses. What’s going on in Hugo Chávez’s head? “He’s got no idea what he wants, and people are suffering,” someone says at the Italian Venezuelan Club. Almost twenty years later, a real revolution seems far away. The feeling among the people, according to Bellino, is that they have already lost the fight. The INNSE crane men also bemoan that their struggle was perceived as but an attempt to save their jobs. Despite having been a matter of principle. “We simply wanted to show that the will of the boss isn’t absolute.”
