City of film has just one cinema left
The Venice Lido is bursting at the seams this week as thousands of paparazzi, critics and stars descend for the annual film festival, putting the city at the centre of the cinematic universe for a few brief days.
Across the lagoon it is a different story. In narrow streets off the Grand Canal, residents are rising up against rent increases and a dwindling headcount which has left the historic heart of Venice with just one cinema for the rest of the year.
While each neighborhood used to have a cinema, showing everything from Saturday morning cartoons to obscure German arthouse movies, Venetians are today forced to congregate at the Giorgione, a former soft-porn cinema now reopened and showing mainstream fare thanks to city council funding. "Under the red carpet there is nothing," wrote Cesare Fiumi in Venice newspaper Corriere della Sera this week.
"Other cities in Italy have suffered the same fate, but it's a paradox in the home of the festival," said Roberto Ellero, who relaunched the Giorgione. "The only thing making money now is tourism."
As the number of tourists entering Venice every day passes the 55,000 mark, visitors are soon set to outnumber the city's population of 60,000, down from 164,000 in 1931 and destined to disappear altogether by 2046 if the decline is not reversed.
As nurseries close and butchers turn into tourist trinket shops, cinemas have followed suit, with venues such as the Rossini, Progresso, Olimpia, San Marco and the Art Deco Cinema Italia all vanishing. Local activist Matteo Secchi, 38, who is campaigning for Venetians to stay put, said he got his celluloid education at the Moderno, now a supermarket. "I saw all the Bruce Lee films there, and Towering Inferno," he said.
One of the first cinemas to disappear was Il Vecchio at Campo San Margherita, built inside a disused church. "The Giorgione closed later, perhaps because its soft-porn films drew a more devoted clientele," said Secchi, who joined fellow activists this year in erecting an electronic screen in the centre of Venice which counts down the dwindling local population in real time.
Even as cinemas go missing from the center of the city, Italian film-makers have this year enjoyed a boom at the festival out on the Lido, a short vaporetto ride away, with four films looking to follow in the footsteps of Gomorra and Il Divo, hard-hitting Italian dramas that received honors at Cannes.
The Observer
(China Daily 09/01/2008 page8)
