By Luigi Pingitore

(From left: internationally acclaimed sculptor Jago; Academy Award winner Robert De Niro; and filmmaker Luigi Pingitore)

There was a moment, lasting roughly until the mid-1960s, when Cinema and Capital spoke the same language, even as they conversed from opposite frontiers. They had established a pact of mutual aid—perhaps turbulent, often conflictual, but in any case
founded on respect and a clear understanding of their respective domains: industry put up the money to buy prestige and ennoble its profit-driven mission; the artist contributed genius to ennoble the money. Each held 50% of the bargaining power. In such a scenario, even the producer’s blindness of that era, with his obsessions about commercial viability, became a vital reagent. The producer was a physical enemy, a concrete obstacle against which the director had to struggle, and in that struggle, the work of art accumulated the kinetic energy necessary to come into being. It was a fertile dialectic.
With the uncontrolled explosion of commercial television in the early 1980s, the pact between art and capital definitively broke, and for two reasons. First, because the image was no longer Sacred, since it could proliferate on every small screen at every hour of the day and night. And second, because the perpetual Schedule had transformed every representation into spectacle first, and then into entertainment. Cinema thus lost the identity-based primacy that had distinguished it from its very birth as the medium that  demonstrated the superiority of imagination over reality.
On the strength of this, one of the two ceased to consider the other a counterpart. And if many producers of the past were adventurers, sometimes megalomaniacal and a bit charlatan-like, they nevertheless seemed to retain a carnal and deeply human intuition. They knew that to make a profit, they had to bet on the unexpected, on the uniqueness of the director’s vision. Today, Capital has taken the driver’s seat—and it matters little whether it is often the fruit solely of State coffers—and has decided everything: the route, the duration, the destination, and even the driving style. But as if that were not enough, to join it in this mad race that has as its only possibility (but do they really not understand this?) the irrelevance of aesthetic experience, another even madder Totem has arrived. The stupid God of Communication. A phenomenon that in the last 10-15 years has grown
 to such an extent that it has demoted art to content—a horrifying term that equates a three-hour film with a thirty-second video on TikTok. Both are fossil fuels to be burned on the altar of the viewer’s attention.
Since Marketing and Communication are today omniscient and blind Gods who have planed down all complexity, abolished all experimentation, and immolated originality on the altar of conformism, transforming visual syntax into bait for attention, we are witnessing a truly perverse and unspeakable historical reversal. If it has always been art that educated and formed the public, flushing it out of its comfort zone to show it the unexplored, today art is expected to conform to the public—or rather, to the caricature of the public invented by marketing departments. We move within an abstract schema, governed by pseudo-experts, data analysts, and content managers convinced they hold the thermometer of people’s desires. The result is a mysticism of the banal. A counterfeit reality in which interest is schematized, differences are smoothed over, and the particular is sacrificed to be transformed into a fake, empty, repetitive, and above all elementary universal product. If everything must be immediately digestible by an increasingly fleeting attention, then everything must resemble everything else. Cinema has been
 reduced to being the decorative appendage of a permanent advertising campaign.
Federico Fellini’s observations come to mind then, worth rereading in their entirety, spoken when he himself probably sensed the first creakings, the first signs of the Pact’s rupture: “Producers are sweet prophets of the public’s intuition, and the worst part is that almost always their idea of the public, their dialogue and their nose, are inaccurate and unfortunate. They are nourished by a conception of the ‘commercial,’ of the ‘marketable,’ that is a true maniacal delusion, an abstract scheme, aggravated by a sort of plebeian intellectualism and a categorical mysticism, dominating a reality invented by themselves, nonexistent, counterfeit. They always end up making films that are not only ugly but also unmarketable, while most of the films we remember were made DESPITE the producers… This struggle against the producer to defend the film is ultimately an advantage for the film, because struggling means charging oneself with aggressive energy, and energy is a good thing, vital for creativity. Long live the producer!”
 In this scenario, the solitude of those who want to make art, who still consider cinema a language capable of surprising, moving, connecting to its own expressive urgency, experimenting with forms that demolish people’s psychic sleepwalking, is now abyssal. Because one no longer has to fight against a flesh-and-blood producer, against whom to accumulate aggressive and vital energy. One has to fight against a rubber wall made of Excel spreadsheets generated by an algorithm, engagement metrics, focus groups, and against a suffocating conformism disguised as market inclusivity. So, as in Wenders’ famous film, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick, today’s director is a man alone, anguished by the presence of a triple threat: the demands of capital, the motional
 illiteracy induced in the public, and the dictatorship of marketing that a priori excludes the unexpected, the mistake, the sacred fire of intuition that answers to no market research.
Those who still seek the particular, the scratch, the singular unrepeatable expression, find themselves isolated in a desert of standardized content.
But it would be dishonest, as well as foolish, to long for that time as a golden age. Even then, cinema betrayed, even then it produced rubble, and even then it was often in the service of ideologies and vanities. The pact between art and capital was not simply virtuous.
What we can truly miss is not so much the era itself—which, like all we have not lived, appears to us in dreams with more lights than shadows. Rather, we miss a condition. That condition in which the image still possessed a margin of the Sacred. Sacred in the most ancient sense of the term—something that escapes immediate consumption, that demands time, silence, and space within us. It asks us to let the world open a breach in the armor of our ego, an act of surrender on the part of the one who looks. Today we are
 saturated with images and precisely for this reason we have lost our hunger for them. We see thousands a day, but how many have the power to fertilize us, to instill themselves in our depths? The truth is that the more images we see, the less we imagine. Excess has anesthetized the seductive capacity of the gaze.
Yet human beings cannot live without imaginaries that cross through and transform them. They need them as they need myths, stories, symbols that do not immediately let themselves be translated into meaning. Jung said that the true Master is the one who does not explain. He accompanies us to the threshold of the unknowable and leaves us there, at the mercy of our capacity to see, feel, imagine. Cinema, when it is cinema and not content, does exactly this work. It leaves a residue that continues to work inside the viewer long after the lights have come back on—an impregnation, as the early film theorists called it, capable of silently rewriting our perception of the real.
That is why, in an era obsessed with entertainment, with the need to fill every instant of attention, to never leave a void that might resemble boredom or thought, the sacred
 dimension of visual representation is an urgent need as much as that of food or sleep. Those who continue to make images that resist explanation, that are not consumed in thirty seconds, that know how to germinate producing dreams or nightmares, are protecting the collective. They are defending the possibility of being seduced once again. And how can we love if we have not first been seduced?
 So is it all over? As in every war, signs of life and new possibilities will come only from the front of resistance, which today more than ever is not merely an aesthetic choice, but  an act of pure devotion against the disappearance of the human from the big screen.
Greek cinema of the early new millennium, the more recent Romanian cinema, the cinema of Southeast Asia, of Argentina and Lithuania (and one could cite dozens and dozens more examples) demonstrate this. There is still life in that mysterious and magical world that appears precisely when the light around us goes out. On Netflix, there is a documentary that testifies to Orson Welles’ long and stubborn battle against everyone and everything in order to make cinema. The title of the documentary: They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Today we should claim another possibility. To love the world and those who produce Sacred, true, and unique images while those people are alive. And if this should disturb the plans of those who only want to perpetuate the Kingdom of stupid entertainment and spectacle that produces not emotion but habituation, so be it. It will mean that they will hate us as long as we live.