Posts tagged Italy
Identity
Jun 29th
In January 2004, while the French government was debating banning religious and political symbols from schools, Catherine Balet began taking pictures of signs, labels, codes and icons that have social and aesthetic significance in the teenage world. As she extended that project from Paris to London, Berlin, Barcelona and Milan, it quickly became a record of the dress codes in European schools, a reference work on tribal subdivisions there. Teenagers in their struggle for identity and self-esteem, troubled by an urgent desire to be different, usually adopt the codes of a group, often inspired by music trends and always tweaked by circumstance, conscious individuation or both. In each city, Balet discovered the same music, fashion, brands, bands and labels. Only the details differed, reflecting the complexity of the history of each country or the influence of its migrant populations. In London and Barcelona, where the uniform is a school institution, details are all that students have by which to define themselves: Balet captures the way’s in which these students customize their outfits. Her large, richly descriptive portraits, set in the street, combine documentary style with poetic sensibility, capturing the complex mix of youth and age inherent to adolescence, its fragility and determination, and the era’s new mix of global homogenization and local individuation.
Some People got the wrong Job
May 20th
Italy’s new minister for equal opportunities has angered rights groups by refusing to back a “gay pride” march because, she said, gays no longer suffer discrimination in Italy. The appointment of Mara Carfagna, a 32-year-old former Miss Italy contestant and television showgirl, to the equal opportunities post was seen by some rights groups as a deliberate provocation by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Genesis Children
Jan 14th
Some people think Genesis Children don’t has a plot at all but there is a at least some kind of central theme: A priest who teaches at the international school in Rome puts an advertisement in the local paper which is designed to entice boys from the school who are bored, or at least not content, and rebellious enough to take off on their own and skip school. The advertisement is in English, therefore all the responses are from English speaking students at the school. The priest plants the advertisement where one particular student will find it, but the other seven come across it on their own.
When the eight boys (ages about ten to sixteen) arrive at the place indicated by the advertisement, they are lead to a secluded stretch of beach and left on their own for about a week. The Priest leaves one box of food, but does not tell the boys it is there. He does indicate by what he tells the boys when they first arrive that he expects them to learn something by way of this adventure, but is very ambiguous as to what he expects them learn. The movie is narrated by one of the boys, and if you pay attention to what he is saying, you will see something of what the boys are learning, or at least something of what they are thinking.
