D’Angelo, De Gregori, Pelù: to each artist his “to measure” DOC

The day dedicated to Italian music was the one just closed to the Lido. After the success of the past years of the musical documentaries presented in Venice in fact, the director of the Film Festival Alberto Barbera strongly wanted a fixed presence of the musical documentary genrelocal and international, institutionalizing it with a sort of dedicated mini section. Selection that this year is dominated by the presence of Italian voices in front and behind the camera.

The genre of the biographical feature film of the documentary mold that tells the behind the scenes and the personalities of the music enjoys in the last period of excellent health, As evidenced by the flood of themed outputs in cinemas and platforms. It is not just a promotional need or mere commercial success: it is the very vein of musical documentary that is evolving a lot in its cinematographic grammar, as a form and approach. Less canonical choices, less rigid and “combed” approaches, more products that also aesthetically and narrative level have a tailor -made affiliated by the artist they tell.

In short, the musical documentary is also huddening very much. The era of the cinema firm in front of the musical talent, the long interview recorded in a set, to retrace his career, seems to be definitively set. The documentary exceeds the limits of the news, approaches, follows them in life. It will perhaps be because also the great music,the artists of previous generations, they gone used to the invasion of the media and social media, even outside the institutional spaces in charge of it.

Francesco De Gregori. Nevegreen.

“Francesco De Gregori. Nevegreen.” It is the most musical of the three proposals of the day and sees the return of Stefano Pistolini behind the camera in the story of the musical career of Francesco De Gregori 13 years after “broken windows”. The documentary tells in less than ninety minutes the peculiar residence at the Out Off Theater in Milan (Read the review here), where he composed evening after evening a ladder of beautiful and unknown pieces: The Nevergreen, the songs that have not remained in the heart and in the minds of the crowds and therefore which rarely find space on stage: “We had seventy songs to play, seventy almost perfect strangers” explained the artist, who “gave up” the band with which he is currently on tour to present the documentary in Venice.

The frame is perfect for asking him for his relationship with cinema, which over the years has led him to write many unpublished pieces designed for the feature films of directors who approached and courted him. The most difficult challenge? Writing the entire soundtrack for “The rubber wall”, Marco Risi’s film: “Marco wanted a soundtrack from me. It is not uncommon for the directors to look for me for a musical contribution, but an entire soundtrack? In the end it went so well that Nanni Moretti gave me a Sacher cake to congratulate me with that work that he had appreciated so much. Cake I still keep the box.”

(Photo credit: Venice Biennale)

Nino. 18 days

Instead, it is a journey into personal and collective memory that contained by “Nino. 18 days”, the doc that It tells from an intimate and close perspective the rise to the success of Nino D’Angelo. Behind the camera in fact there is his son Toni who builds an intense and touching story aimed at digging in the soul of an artist whose critical recognition has come very much, much after that of the public. About it, Nino D’Angelo It tells how difficult it was to overcome those years in which for many of the sector it was little more than a golden helmet to make the infinity run to the ralers in films designed for his fans: “Obviously I was grateful to have become so famous, but at a certain point he began to weigh so much to be only that blond helmet. Depression but that pain helped me change, to become a different person. “

With surprising lucidity of angel he also explained that It was that music snubbed by many, that success a change the fate of his children: “I have never been ashamed of my humble origins, I put them in all my songs and I think they also came for that. I am Nino D’Angelo, I am a successful man. He also looked for me the cinema at the time, I lent myself but I never fell in love with it. Even if they were very stereotypical, those hires allowed me to guarantee my children to have an agoned, bourgeois existence, Study is obvious.

Predictably The film also becomes a story of Naples in which D’Angelo became famous, That city that told and woven its musical poetics. A Naples that is no longer there, or to say it is said today in a different way: “Today my city is full of tourists and I say it with great pride of Neapolitan who for years has seen the city always told in its evil, less in its good. The real heroes of the city are those who have gone away from the Spanish neighborhoods, have learned a profession and have returned to change their city.

(Photo credit: Venice Biennale)

Piero Pelù. Noise

“Piero Pelù. Noise inside” by Francesco Fei is instead the film that best intercepts the international trend of biographical documentaries on making music by making music, By inserting himself perfectly in that vein of stories of rebirth of established artists who deal with the worsening of their health conditions and must learn the limits of their art again, dealing with the possibility of no longer being able to return to the park. We have seen something similar in the DOC on Celine Dion And Bon Jovi: Rock and pop star age and are no longer afraid of telling their fragility.

In the case of Piero Pelùwho wrote the subject and script, the casus Belli is the aggravation of tinnitus and tinnitis that had been suffering for years (like many of the sector, specific) after an accident in the recording studio. “Noise inside” is the story of a difficult ascent on stage and attempt “with few friends and a doctor” to return to music after passing a very dark personal period. After that experience, Pelù published “Deserti”, EP then became the soundtrack of the project. During the press activity to present that album, the songwriter tells for the first time of these health problems and is submitted of messages and testimonies by people on social media and in the life that encounter the same difficulties.

He therefore decides that it is worth telling all his story in a job that does not like to define a documentary, but rather a journey. In This story on the road wants Francesco Fei by his side, of which Pelù followed his career closely after collaborating together for the direction of some video clips by trying an undeniable mutual feeling. Fei thus summarizes the intentions behind the project that dares the bold combination between El Diablo Pelù and Santa Sara, synthesis of the great spirituality of the artist but also of his sympathy for the different: “We did not want to make a film about his career, that is a word that Piero does not want to hear. It was a story of a piece of path that opens with a masked party and continues with his solitude traveled by those sounds. It was really exploiting the cinematographic language all to tell the emotions, not just the word. “

Another goal of the project was to change the story about the isolation, for a long time forced: the hypersensitization of his hearing has in fact made it necessary for the artist to stay away from people for a long time, slowly tidying up his life, understanding which events to participate and how. Pelù praised Fei for how he knew “to stay next to me by camouflaging himself in the surrounding landscape, but also in my inner landscape”, thus managing to capture moments such as lunch with Litfiba without anyone feeling observed from an external eye.

(Photo credit: Venice Biennale)