THE ICICLE THIEF
With Nichetti, Caterina Sylos Labini, Federico Rizzo, Heidi Komarek, Renato Scarpa, Carlina Torta, Lella Costa, and Claudio G. Fava.
This is the opening sequence of a poetic, lunatic farce called Ratataplan (1979), the first feature of director- writer-actor Nichetti (who plays Colombo), the world premiere of which I happened to see quite by chance at the Venice film festival, where it won the Golden Lion, then went on to become a monster hit, running as long as six months in some Italian cities. I was there not for the festival but as a participant in a three-day international conference called “Cinema in the 80s”–a deep-dish Tower of Babel affair devoted to “language, industry, and audience,” where three dozen jet-lagged filmmakers and critics from six countries tried to converse in five languages with simultaneous earphone translations. No one had a stroke, but there were moments when we felt we were drowning in our own gibberish.
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Born in 1948, Nichetti trained in architecture and theater before finding work as an acrobat and circus clown. He started out in movies scripting cartoons for animator Bruno Bozzetto, including Bozzetto’s Allegro non troppo (1976). He also appeared in that film, in the live-action linking sequences, as a beleaguered and befuddled animator. But his charming gifts as a clown give no warning of Ratataplan’s shrewd and singular observations on the peculiarities of contemporary life: they are at once prescient and unpretentious, deceptively simple and provocative. For instance, there’s the scene in which the shy Colombo collects odds and ends from the city dump and puts together a robot replica of himself with a video camera inside the head. Guiding his suave, remote-control double out the door with a fixed steering wheel, like a puppeteer, and picking up its precise point of view on a TV monitor, he manages to make a date with his downstairs neighbor and take her out disco dancing without ever having to leave home.
It took seven years for Nichetti to secure the creative control he wanted to make a fourth feature. The Icicle Thief won the grand prize at last year’s Moscow film festival, and soon after, I saw it in a packed house on the opening night of the 1989 Toronto film festival. It fully lives up to the promise of Ratataplan without any hint of repetition (pantomime and echoes of Tati are no longer apparent), and that joyful North American audience found it hilarious and wonderful. Seeing the movie a month later at the Music Box during the Chicago film festival with an equally rapturous audience, and subsequently learning that the film had been picked up by a small U.S. distributor, I figured it was only a matter of time before Nichetti was declared a comic genius and his other pictures were shown coast to coast, the New York commissars notwithstanding.
Eleven minutes into the movie, it screeches to a halt before the end of a scene (oddly, even the actors seem taken aback), breaking for a string of glitzy color commercials selling American-style images of the good life: candy bars called Big Big, an artichoke aperitif, an all-temperature detergent, and aerodynamic cars. In the studio Nichetti goes into a rage about these cuts and intrusions. We return to the family watching TV, and after the film within the film resumes, it gradually emerges that the one-way communication of TV is starting to become two- way, and that the apparent discontinuity between the film and the commercials is breaking down as well: the little boy, slowly building an elaborate Lego model of the Kremlin, is eating a Big Big candy bar, and Bruno, eating a dinner of cabbage, eyes it greedily from the TV; a bit later, Bruno starts to sing the Big Big jingle to himself, and Antonio and Maria wonder where he heard the song.
In the last chapter of The Ticket That Exploded, William Burroughs proposes that “what we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear,” and suggests that if we turn off the sound on our TV and arbitrarily substitute any new sound track, the new sound track will not only match and seem “appropriate,” but will also determine our interpretation of the images. I think one could add that the reason his experiment works is the fundamental discontinuity of both TV itself and the way that we watch it. I’m thinking not just of commercials and other forms of program interruption but the interruptions that we commonly impose ourselves–whether we leave the room, engage in other activities, switch channels, adjust the controls, or simply let our attention drift. Sound tracks, story lines, familiar faces, and countless other conventions conspire to make the experience seem continuous, but only an act of massive repression on our part can sustain such an impression.
