Rai as a public service

Have you ever tried RaiPlay? I think so, but for the laggards I like to praise one of the small innovations that can really help pass your free time (and unfortunately we know how much we have in this period of forced respite) in an intelligent way. RaiPlay is a site and a free downloadable app that allows you to watch the RAI program of the week but also and above all to review films, documentaries, fiction and dramas produced in recent decades.

A treasure of visions lost in inaccessible display cases has been available to the curiosity of many for some months. A service that honors RAI, which for once really proves to be the most important cultural industry in the country.

An industry that in the 1970s financed some of the works of one of the most famous directors of Italian cinema, that Roberto Rossellini considered the inventor of neorealism with Rome open city. His cinema that from the beginning broke with the past and founded an aesthetic based on a flat and illustrative cinematic narrative carried forward by a traditional acting of actors sometimes taken from the street.

After decades of cinema and now 50 years ago, Rossellini took his poetics to its extreme consequences and approached the most popular medium capable of allowing him, without economic and commercial conditioning, to continue his didactic and informative project, arriving via television in the homes of many .

Therefore works are born that have an informative intent that should not be conditioned by formal suggestions but that had to convey messages and contents for a spectator who wanted to experience the vision with an active participation, available to knowledge.

Some titles: The seizure of power of Louis XIV is a work of 1969 on the affirmation of absolute power in France, Socrates of 1971 outlines the crisis of a culture and the affirmation of the freedom of knowledge and the moral dignity of man as well as in Pascal and Augustine of Hippo (1971/72). Rossellini approaches the philosophical knowledge, religious faith and the intellectual independence of man.

Not all of them are visible on RaiPlay but one in particular can be followed. These are the Acts of the Apostles, a cycle of 5 episodes on the advent and spread of Christianity from Pentecost to Paul's Roman imprisonment.

A suggestion of vision that - it must be reiterated - requires an active participation in the curious viewer to rediscover the founding reasons of our present in the past. But it doesn't always happen that TV helps us to develop “virtue and knowledge”.

Davide Bracco
NP June / July 2020