The process movie

1961. Rosi decisively re-invents the Process movie. Salvatore Giuliano is a film where a protagonist, even a story is mere pretext for exploring discharges and flux in a socio-political force-field, in history too. Protagonist-as-ghost, whose non-existence in conventional terms of narrative realist practice, is a structuring absence that makes other, more secret, things appear. The film is relentlessly anti-spectacular, wedging open spaces in its’ narrative, even in Narrative itself. Rosi’s film and the others that follow are ultimately poetically mysterious, a-definitive, requiring completion, even perhaps, action.

[Matteo Garrone:] The raw material I had to work with when shooting Gomorrah was so visually powerful that I merely filmed it in as straightforward a way as possible, as if I were a passerby who happened to find myself there by chance. I didn’t want to make a film against “the System,” but about “the System.”

2010. The process movie (Trafik, Zodiac, The Wire, Gomorrah, Che, The Social Network, Carlos) is now the fashionable realist symbol for complexity. These are coffee table movies, laced with moral and factual “demi-biguities” but whose energy, in the final analysis, is exhausting, neatly totalizing. They don’t BURN, either. Their factualist fatalism is not earned, not a worldview, but just a style to meet and surpass their apathetic audiences.