Avatar: Requiem for the seventh art 
Wim Wenders was absolutely right when he said, more than 30 years ago that "the Americans are colonizing the subconscious."
With the worldwide success of movies like Avatar, we can say we have succeeded in full. This film in fact decreed the complete, final and irreversible death of what once was called "cinema".
Unfortunately it is not easy to talk about cinema, because there is no absolute standard for judging the films. The only objective means that we can do is use the so-called "box office success," which at least allows us to establish a ranking of universal rating that exceeds the court individual.
In the 50's "Gone With the Wind" was a commercial success, so we can say that "Gone With the Wind" was a film "beautiful" for its time. In the 80's "Bladerunner" was a commercial success, so we can call it "beautiful" for the tastes of those years. In the case of
Avatar we are again faced with absolute record collection, so we can say that this film is certainly "good" rating from the current fees.
All this does not mean that we can not judge these fees, drawing any conclusions about cinema in general, ...
.. and not on film in particular.
When the cinema was born - from the greek "Kinema", which means "movement" - seemed above all a great miracle of technology at that time: the idea of \u200b\u200breturn of the workers leaving the factory, or the arrival of a train station in order to review them "as is" on the screen of a darkened room, all seemed exciting and magical and wonderful.
Soon the first authors realized that the true magic of cinema was not in the reproduction of a fact, but in being able to modify the final meaning, thanks to the technique of assembly.
These proved the potential expression of the assembly, the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein came to theorize the main rules in his famous book "The shape of the film."
From that moment on, the film earned the right to appear next to the noblest forms, to be universally acclaimed as the "seventh art".
Meanwhile, the film became increasingly long and complex, and began to think of cinema as a narrative device itself, thus introducing the same structural problems already known in the literature.
was always a Russian, Vladimir Propp, to define the universal principles of narrative structure in his book "Morphology the fairy tale. " After analyzing hundreds of fairy tales and folk tales, Propp noticed that all follow the same narrative scheme, despite the characters and environments were completely different from each other.
It was, in fact, the same principles already identified by Aristotle in Greek tragedy, but Propp had deepened to the extent that they might represent a precise mathematical formula, which contained over thirty narrative functions.
Meanwhile had fallen in the field of Hollywood.
always sensitive to new ways of making money, the Americans had realized that this film could become a virtually inexhaustible source of income.
To achieve this, however, it was necessary to remove the film from the hands of the author to turn it into a real industry, impersonal, efficient, capable of operating independently of the individuals used in various roles from time to time. Just
"Gone With the Wind" gives us one of the most striking examples, as it was possible to make a box office champion engaging in three different directors during production.
The other element that Hollywood was concerned was to standardize the narrative structure. Just like Propp's fables - which the Americans had learned their lesson - even Hollywood films received green light only if the scripts were complying with certain narrative patterns, which on one side provide easy popular reception, but on the other confined to the root of the imagination of the authors.
is why many people today in American movies seem to "all the same." In reality they are: just change the characters and setting, but the "history" as "protagonist", "ID", "search for the desired object", "antagonist", "conflict" and "resolution" is invariably the same .
began as two parallel stories: that of European cinema, auteur and independent, and one of American cinema, impersonal and programmed, which would travel without ever meeting until the end of the '70s. While Hollywood churned
entertainment products, which regularly sacrificed in favor of the commercial content, on our side as people realized Rossellini or Visconti masterpieces improvising with actors of the road, using scraps of film sets and existing, and doing everywhere appeal to our proverbial "invention" to compensate for the chronic lack of resources.
In the '60s touched the French take up the camera and dive among the people, thus creating the so-called cinema-verité, while in the 70s were the Germans to create their "new wave" with the works of Herzog, Wenders and Fassbinder, which now belong to the history of cinema. Over the same decades we have valuable projects by authors isolated as Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky and Luis Bunuel, who were not tied to a particular film, thus confirming the importance of the author in the creation of a European film.
But in the late 70's was a short circuit between the two systems.
Worried by increasing production costs, mainly due to the birth of the star system, the Americans realized that the domestic market was no longer sufficient to repay their investment with good margins, and began to look to the rest of the world market as a possible add-on. (Today is the foreign market for American film about a 40% return on investment).
Meanwhile we had reached the TV, the "Trojan horse" culture that had already begun to erode our system of values \u200b\u200bin favor of that, more vacuous and superficial, the Americans.
This fact, coupled with the economic power of the dollar, made it easy for the progressive achievement of our market by the production of much of our business, which is obviously more pleasing to the general public.
Since then, the cinema Europe has slowly dying, without ever having the chance to recover, as doomed from the start by the prohibitive costs, which prevented him from competing at the American product. (To cover their backs, in any event, the Americans also thought it best to buy all the major distribution channels in Europe, so as to be however they decide the fate of any film on the market).
In 1980, the undersigned had the opportunity to meet Wim Wenders, New York, the presentation of "Lightning Over Water," the heartbreaking document he created along with the dying Nicholas Ray. It was on that occasion, and asked him for tips to make my first film, I said bitterly, "Forget it, the film industry is dead." I found it surprising, especially in the mouth of an author who was at that time the peak of his career, but then I understand very well the meaning of those words. Of course, for "cinema", Wenders wanted the European one.
The rest, unfortunately, is history.
The American superpower in our rooms, and consequently on our TV screens, has gone from strength to strength, up to now assimilates cultural quell'appiattimento lead an Italian to Portuguese, a German, a Frenchman, no longer any substantial difference.
Maybe change the way of saying "Wahoo!", But the word is pronounced the same. That brings us to
Avatar quintessential film "spectacular" American, and the last nail in the coffin of an already moribund European cinema for over 20 years.
Without going into the merits of the case, we can say that the primary importance given to the computer than the camera provides, in itself a substantial change in the language, so that the effect becomes predominant in relation to the content.
In other words, the scene "has value," especially if it works, the visual effect, and only secondarily if the passage is narrative interesting. (This phenomenon occurs for some time, in many Hollywood movies, but rarely has there been such a preponderance of the effect on content).
The characters also use "artificial" - that is generated by the computer, even if the trace of human movement - it allows a huge saving from the production point of view (you do not have to pay either the "great actor" neither to build real sets) but penalizes the expression to the point of reducing it to a cartoon where the characters have six or seven words at most, and those you do throughout the film.
The subtle emotions, given the nuances of the human drama, are thus sacrificed in favor of a "universal code" much more simple and understandable, but very limited in scope. (Even the grammar of Word, the famous writing program of Microsoft, calls openly to use simple words, short sentences, possibly avoiding the passive voice).
It 's always been the dream of Americans, perhaps they sense that their cultural limitations, to reduce to a minimum all that could escape their understanding, creating an accurate, organized and labeled it easier for them to control.
Some call it pragmatism, others as a powerful tool of cultural imperialism.
is in any case to explain the great success of the film, which is given above - as you read a little bit everywhere - the "interesting story", or rather to the "innovative concepts" that it represents.
Again, without considering the merits, it must be remembered that the training content is of paramount importance in any means of artistic expression. "Bicycle Thief" would be laughable if it were shot in Hollywood-style shots with "licking", superstar actors and contoluce at full blast. Just like Bladerunner would laugh if it were shot with two pounds in the garage of our house.
More generally, all the elements expression that make a movie (subject, language, narrative structure, style of shooting, editing, etc..) should be better harmonized to each other, while such a gap between a "good story" - assuming that it is - and use so pervasive in the computer can only harm the final result.
It can have a tangible feedback every time the story moves from the real world that made the computer, and vice versa. The former is very hard to "live" the transition from the perspective of the protagonist, with whom he completely lacks the mechanism of identification. In the latter, you notice every time a brutal return to reality, we had momentarily forgotten.
But the two levels of narrative does not penetrate ever in a single, fluid and engaging, precisely because of the abysmal distance between the two languages \u200b\u200bused.
Yet, as we said, like the film.
This can only mean, in my opinion, that the Americans have stoned to the point to lead us to appreciate any smoothie items - stylistic, technical and narrative - without rhyme or reason.
There is a very simple rule to be applied to assess the balance between the various elements that make a film worthy of that name: if the same concepts can be expressed with equal effectiveness by a speaker who speaks on the radio, it means that this is not a film but only a text with images.
My suspicion - as the natural revulsion I feel for the characters created on the computer - is that Avatar would be even better as a simple radio.
least one face of the protagonist eggplant as much as we could imagine.
Massimo Mazzucco
We all have images in disbelief after the damage caused by January 12 earthquake that destroyed almost everything the capital of one of the poorest countries of the West. The screens showed dead files lining the streets, shops and homes destroyed, and underlines the tragedy of those who, having lost everything, wandered the streets, wringing their hands with volunteers and relief workers. Another 
