In Nanni Moretti's latest film, The Sun of the Future, there is a particularly brilliant moment. The filmmaker who plays himself watches as a colleague is about to shoot an action scene in which a well-dressed, standing, commanding character shoots over the head of another, kneeling and cowering . Then brains and blood will splatter across the screen. Moretti cannot tolerate this and prevents the shot, letting loose a speech about the importance of aesthetic choices that end up always being ethical. "You are glorifying violence, showing it as something cool and beautiful, with background music."
But killing is not posturing. Take as an example Kieslowski's You Won't Kill, in which we see one person painstakingly murdering another – these things don't last a second – and witness the suffering of the victim and the struggle of the perpetrator for about ten endless minutes: like this it is killing, he tells them. To expand the debate, phone none other than the architect Renzo Piano or his colleague Martin Scorsese.
As a young man, in a foray into Fraga's Florida 135 nightclub, I witnessed from the vantage point of an upper floor, with the owner of the place, the late techno grandfather, Juan Arnau, a fight on the floor with broken glasses that some threw themselves in the face, with movements syncopated to the effect of the strobe lights and the rhythm of the music. Arnau looked at me shuddering: "I found it beautiful", he said, scared of himself, while the security took away those involved.
Scorsese has released a shocking contemporary Western that tries to overturn the codes of the genre, already from its formal choices. More radical and parodic is El gran libro de Cuttlas with the Cherokee going to Ikea, exclamations of the style “Wretched ruffian!”, cavalry soldiers who hesitate (“I never remember if the Arapaho are friends or enemies”) and, above all, an endearingly naive character who is easy to imagine, like Moretti, dancing in circles with outstretched arms, lit by a bonfire, with the Indians, Voglio vederti danzare by Franco Battiato.
