Venice Film Festival, Buttafuoco: 'Cinema and culture increase GDP and turn the economy around'

Bookings for the Venice Immersive section on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio totalled 11,232 (they were 9,674 in 2022, +16%). Who knows if 2024 will confirm the trend.

"In the first week we had 45 per cent ticket sales and 75 per cent subscriptions,' Buttafuoco explains. 'I take this opportunity to give a warning to the so-called 'Portuguese': enough with this idea that culture should be considered a pastime.Enough with those who constantly ask for free tickets, without any justification. It is simply shameful. I have a distinct memory of when I was a theatre manager and of my anger at those who, although they could spend as much as EUR 300 for a dinner, demanded free tickets to go and see shows, where individual actors and actresses took EUR 40 to 70 gross per evening. This is a typically Italian vice: considering all cultural work as a pastime. Artistic work creates inducements. Behind an artistic product, behind a film, a show, an opera, there is also the work of the technicians, the consumption of fuel and electricity. I had fun posting on my personal instagram account an interview with Monicelli's daughter who recounts her father's response when someone asked him for a pass to see films: 'What pass and pass! Pay the ticket!". This Monicelli is my mantra'.

To talk more about the economics of cinema, on the sidelines of the festival there is also a market, the Venice Production Bridge, dedicated to production. "Everyone wants to come to Venice. For those who are interested in presenting their product and getting it into the great sea that is the market, the best showcase is Venice'.

He then returns to the reference to Sciascia: 'I mentioned Sciascia because he discovered Marco Ramperti, while selling cigarettes at Termini Station in Rome, and his Alphabet of Stars with Sellerio. Sciascia's link with cinema is, however, fundamental. So much so, in fact, that Sellerio's marvellous Memoria series has provided a considerable amount of images to the cinema that has forged our contemporary times and has been the privileged interlocutor of our great literature. The great masters, the great directors, the great scriptwriters had the ability to draw on great literature and transform it into an industrial fact.

Unfortunately, I have to use the verb in the past tense. It has now become a rarity. I take advantage of the Sole 24 Ore, which has the ability to understand everything that is economics and trade and the effort to do cultural production for what the 'Sunday' of the Sole 24 Ore represents in our daily lives. I want to raise a political issue in these columns in the sense of polis, because what I am about to say is functional to GDP. It is essential to protect three key places in our society: the bookshop as a physical place, the theatre as a physical place, the cinema as a physical place. These are the three buildings through which the virtuous mechanism develops whereby the investment of one euro returns three. It is necessary to focus on these three buildings, because it is there that, by forging the critical spirit, the need to be together, to bring people together, we can make life and the economy grow. When we have seen bookshops, theatres, cinemas die time after time, we have seen our territories impoverished. The real strong thing about the Film Festival, the way it is constructed, is the return to the theatres. And it is a beautiful reversal - it seems like a twist - that television series are forced to measure themselves against the theatres. This was a brilliant intuition by Alberto Barbera'.

But does Buttafuoco have a serial or cinematic soul? 'I prefer the slowness of the printed page and the enveloping atmosphere of the cinema hall. I prefer the instant of the here and now and the technical non-reproducibility of theatre performance. But I also use and consume digital reading and try my hand at surfing with electronic devices. I believe, like everyone else, that I have a dual nature: digital and non-digital. But I am convinced that only in the crossing of the cinema and theatre, as physical places, is a deeper and much more nourishing ritual consumed than the digital, which corresponds to life and the construction of emotions'.

In terms of surfing not only digital but also disciplines, the recent appointment of Willem Dafoe as artistic director of the Theatre Biennale is a bridge between the latter and cinema. "In cinema and in words," Buttafuoco points out, "because Dafoe's theatre is a theatre of words. The great Italian cinema and the great Italian dramaturgical tradition, for example Pirandello's film notes, are linked to the word. That appointment is consistent with the dialogue between disciplines. Wyne McGregor's Dance Biennale itself took place under this sign. And with it, audiences mingling with each other'.

At this point, a reference to the Art Biennale that took place with some uproar over the opening of the Israeli pavilion is also necessary. The words used by Buttafuoco on that occasion were of peace. Art was born to build bridges and is an instrument of peace in times of war. "It was, is and always will be. The Biennale, in its being the home of the disciplines and, to use a romantic image, the place of the Muses, must do what not even the Olympics can do any more: be the moment of truce, the moment of confrontation, the moment when the whole world comes together, each with its own face, its own history, its own flag. The Biennale will never be closed to anyone. It is the moment when all peoples
come and express themselves through forms of artistic expression. When requests for closure arrive, they are rejected at sender. Here we open, not close'.