Mecca (of cinema)

There is a period in the history of cinema which is misunderstood, almost deliberately forgotten. This is the birth of the film system in the USA, in that land near Los Angeles called Hollywood. Since the early 1900s, Hollywood has been able to attract from all countries (including Europe) a race of artists (producers, directors, actors, costume designers), capable of creating, from the nascent technology of reproduction of moving images, a series of films that took the form of a system of myths that still fascinate viewers today.

In 1987 the Taviani brothers told in Good morning Babilonia a minor case in history with the life of two brothers who from Tuscany arrived in California in 1916 and ended up collaborating with the director David Griffith to the creation of Intolerance, one of the first masterpieces of US cinema. A film that the Tavianis focused on the relationships between brothers and the development of their lives, preferring to leave the milieu around them in the background.
It was only at the end of the 1970s that, also thanks to a book by Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon, we began to analyze in depth how scandals, gossip, suicides, love affairs, suspicious deaths, perversities, triumphs, crimes and cheating were the glue of the industry and star system (from Chaplin to Valentino) that lit up the screens of half the world.

Damien Chazelle came close to this who, after his award-winning musical La La Land, returns to a Los Angeles story that right from the title recalls the examples mentioned above, Babylon indeed.
Both the musical showed a romantic, colorful, sweet and chaotic city as this time Los Angeles appears dark and ambiguous as a sort of negative version. A tale in pictures of the decadence and excess of Hollywood in the 1920s starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt. For the director: "An ode to the Wild West", for the critics conflicting opinions.

Chazelle is at a crossroads: after the dazzling debut in 2014, not even thirty years old, with Whiplash and the valuable La La Land in 2016 (youngest winner of an Oscar for directing) seemed to stop with the obvious First Man of 2018 (biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong). Hollywood is no longer that of the 1920s, but it is certainly more inclined to forgive excesses than failures.


Davide Bracco
NP January 2023