Back to the source: Carlo Collodi's "Adventures of Pinocchio" (1883), redux

Three slabs of the Berlin Wall in Potsdamer Platz

I am in Berlin again, attending the 70^th edition of its film festival.  I first landed in the city in February of 1985, its 35^th, thanks to the invitation of Argentine filmmaker Manuel Antín, then director of the Argentine Film Institute, who had appointed me to the Film Rating Commission, and included me in the Argentine delegation.  The wall still divided the city, and it seemed unbridgeable. Manuel Antín advised me to get a press credential for the following year, and I have been coming ever since, skipping only two or three times. What a treat it has been, the highlight of my professional year.  I saw the collapsed wall in February of 1990, three months after it happened – an ideology and a praxis shattered  to pieces. At the time you could pick bits of concrete from the two walls and no-man’s land had stood. Now for a few euros you can get a small piece encased in acrylic.

Every screening I attend in the Competition – a lean 18-title section this year - opens vistas on unexpected things, since I read nothing beforehand, and I get to the Berlinale Palast in Postdamer Platz as much a blank slate as I can be.

Matteo Garrone’s visually dazzling Pinocchio was great treat for me on Sunday, mainly for its Proustian reverberations; but also because the film fits Bruno Bettelheim’s observations on the moral and pedagogical role of fairy tales. Like Capra with the Why We Fight series in WWII, Disney’s handling of the Pinocchio story in the 1940s – “sanitizing” could be, but is not, the right word – shape the way we perceive it today.  It seems as if Collodi has been edged out of existence outside of Italy, or perhaps more kindly made a mute presence everywhere else. Watching this Pinocchio I thought that Pope Francis – a cinephile best explained by his Italian Argentine background – would love it, and have much to comment about fatherhood in a Sunday address to the faithful.

 I had never known who Carlo Collodi - author Carlo Lorenzini’s pen name - was, even though his was a familiar from my childhood. Courtesy of the Britannica, I absorbed the details of a life: Born in Tuscany in 1826 into a working class family, and after a stint in the seminary where he gained an education, Collodi became a journalist supporting Garibaldi and the Risorgimento against Austria, publishing political satires until the reunification of Italy as a kingdom in the 1860s. He then left political writing for children’s literature. I realize that the immediate success of the book in Italy in the 1880s quickly led to translations, and that it must have become a children’s favorite for the generation of my grandparents – born between the 1890s and the 1900s.  I wonder what they made of it.  How did they absorb the adventures of an obnoxious and disobedient puppet, that can still scare the hell out of kids (maybe not the media savvy ones of today). How did they relate to a bratty character that ditches school and wants to have fun.  The novel is fraught with unimaginable dangers, all of them at the hands of  cruel or selfish adults: robbery, kidnapping, hanging, slavery, near drowning, transforming into a donkey, before Pinocchio is reunited with his loving creator Geppetto, courtesy of a mother-figure fairy and the ghost of a talking cricket Pinocchio killed with a hammer at the beginning of the story. But all’s well that ends well. In the serialized novel, the protagonist dies in chapter 15 but the clamor of readers made Collodi resurrect him in chapter 16. 

Matteo Garrone, the director of the brutal Gomorrah (2008), about the Neapolitan camorra, and a take on fairy stories, Tale of Tales (2015), wrote and directed this version, casting the exuberant Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, and the cute child actor Federico Ielapi (who won over the journalists at the press conference) who looks awfully wooden behind the makeup and costume, sporting the proverbial pointy noise. 

What makes Garrone’s a fascinating take on Pinocchio is the issue of what a Midwestern American did with the original novel in the early 1940s when looking for a project after the success of the lovingly-gestated Snow White. This Disney layer of meaning is now such an integral part of the story, that one imagines that “When You Wish upon a Star” may have been culled from Collodi’s original.

The journey from an Italian 19^th century sensibility and landscape – how to live, work, raise children in a society that was quickly being industrialized – to an 20^th century Anglo-Saxon mindset – is the intriguing part for me. The way this creative process unfolded at the Disney studios in Los Angeles has already been written, and it is fun to read about it: the technological achievements in animation in Disney’s second feature, and Pinocchio very soon becoming an archetype recognizable everywhere.

Now I have an idea for an assignment in the adaptation class I often teach: ask the students to read the original Collodi novel, and describe the nuts and bolts of the adaptation process in the Disney and Garrone adaptations, observing the key differences in text and context.  Not unlike what I have been doing since the same 2012 with the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, the Gold Bear of that year, and the 1953 Joseph L. Manckiewicz adaptation of Julius Caesar. Classics matter and Shakespeare speaks to us today. Now its Collodi's turn.  “Para novedades, los clásicos”, as Miguel de Unamuno duly observed.