Over recent days, as the film “Amor y Anarquia” was being shot in Genoa following production being moved from Turin after a boycott there, various disruptive actions took place to prevent the film being made and to open up the question for those who want to know more.
Though some naively believe that even in a society where everything is reduced to commodities there can be neutral attempts at transferring historical events on to “film”, the industry of spectacle, on the contrary, has become a champion of the process of cultural banalization that wants to reduce and submit any single aspect of everyday life to the interests of capital, by extracting it from reality. So what is called “art” is a mere commercial product, which complies with business rules and is calibrated according to the spectators’ requests and the views of the dominant class.
This should be sufficient to understand how “Amor y Anarquia” can be no more than a product of this mechanism and how its contents are bound to adapt to the market logic, to its blind and greedy fruition, which we are becoming more and more addicted to. Real art should shatter conventions, not bow down to them or make them stronger.
The director, Agustina Macrì, is the daughter of Argentinian president Mauricio Macri, a promoter of politics of national reconciliation based on the effacement of the massacres and atrocities committed by the regimes that preceded him, and responsible for the genocide of the Mapuche people, regardless of the government in charge, a people gradually evicted with force from the lands they’ve always lived in. These lands have become the property of the new conquistadores, first of all Benetton, a well known company from Treviso which since the 90s has managed to get their hands on 900 thousand hectares of land distributed between the province of Buenos Aires, the cordillera, the Patagonia Steppe and the Argentinian coast.
Probably Agustina Macrì nourishes the fervour of art, and certainly believes she’s a film director. Maybe Agustina is in good faith when she believes that to emancipate herself from such an omnipresent father, nothing could be better than to recount a nice little modern romance, a story of young people filled with love, a little adventure and idealism.
Actually, what could be more useful to support her father’s politics than to divert national public opinion with a product artfully constructed according to the needs of the moment, by telling an engaging and “leftist” story that took place far away from Argentina, and from the always alive clamour of the victims, both known and disappeared?
Can Agustina Macri really not know that her father lied, covering up and misleading about the murder of Santiago Maldonado, who was found dead in the Chubut River 78 days after the raid of the Argentinian gendarmerie in the village of Cushamen, where Santiago was taking part in the resistance against the umpteenth eviction and land expropriation? Did she really not get any news about the recent death of Rafael Nahuel, riddled by federal security forces’ bullets along with other women and men who were seriously injured when they tried to climb down a mountain they had escaped to when the forces of order raided their community?
By reifying and commodifying life to the detriment of those who have lived it, Agustina Macri would like her first film to be the story of Sole and Baleno, two anarchist comrades who died by suicide while they were being held prisoner because they had acted for freedom. Her bourgeois affectation pushes her with extreme arrogance beyond what she will never be able to understand, let alone tell.
It is also remarkable that a film called “Amor y Anarquia” has to be shot under the protection of the digos and the antiriot police. Does anyone still believe that such a profiteering effort could sensitize people who don’t know the facts? What will pass is always the aesthetic one-sided vision of who with love and anarchy makes little films on the skin of those who instead lived love and anarchy with such passion that they died of it.
PERHAPS THE FILM WILL COME OUT BUT THIS IS NOT THE END OF IT, SOLE AND BALENO ARE NOT FOR SALE!
Comrades in Genoa
Translated by act for freedom now!
via: roundrobin.info