XXV edition
8/13 December 2015
Five Colors For 25 Years
Noir comes in five colors in this 25th edition of the Festival: five shades of noir, just right for celebrating an important milestone in the story of Europe’s most prestigious and longest-running festival devoted to a narrative genre that characterized the past century better than any other, and thrives today at a time of jarring contrasts and dire omens.
And thanks to the special support of our many friends keen to celebrate our Festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Noir 2015 is sure to be a ‘collector’s edition’. These are all fine reasons to invite the many people in the Vallé d’Aosta who have made us feel at home there over the years to join us for a virtual toast here and now. The people of Courmayeur, who first saw as aliens who’d landed in their midst, then adopted us as distant relations who come home once a year. The team of remarkable professionals who enabled us to build the Festival, one edition at a time, into the model event often imitated but never equalled. The producers, publishers, writers, artists, journalists and historians who are in the spotlight starting this year. We dearly hope that all of you will always cultivate the spirit of freedom and justice and the thirst for truth that is the genuine soul of noir.
By Marina Fabbri and Giorgio Gosetti
Noir comes in five colors in this 25th edition of the Festival: five shades of noir, just right for celebrating an important milestone in the story of Europe’s most prestigious and longest-running festival devoted to a narrative genre that characterized the past century better than any other, and thrives today at a time of jarring contrasts and dire omens.
In the "heart of darkness" of a civilization grappling with the ferocity it has fed like a serpent’s egg in its midst; in a world that lives in terror of a global war, rivisiting its ghosts from the past and its eternal fears; in such a context, crimes, investigations, and the war of justice against lawlessness may well pale into insignificance; like the rage of those who rebel against the losing hand they’ve been dealt and cross the line between justice and injustice. Yet this very frontier - in the fight against the siren song of egotism and the thirst for wealth and power, as evil casts its dangerous spell and a collective ethics loses its way - is precisely where our civilization is fighting its toughest battle day in and day out. So even the entertainment provided by a festival - combining films, books, stories and reminiscences - can serve as a priceless occasion for cultural reflection and a hard look at the values, or lack thereof, that concern each and every one of us.
The brightest color on our palette belongs to a writer who has shaken up the genre, rewritten the rules and cultivated the tradition in the heat and the dust of his native Texas: Joe R. Lansdale, who thoroughly deserves our Raymond Chandler Award this year. The rightful heir to the crown in a series of mystery masters that started with Graham Greene and culminated last year with Jeffery Deaver, Lansdale is the creator of the irresistible duo of accidental detectives, Hap & Leonard, and the Festival is delighted to have this "champion" author represent the spirit of an event immune to the emotional blackmail of celebratory backward glances, intent on staring into the future instead, going beyond the conventional definitions and rules of the noir genre.
Our darkest color is that of our theme this year, as seen in the conference entitled "The Long Italian Night: 40 years of crime and politics, from the murder of Pasolini to Mafia Capitale". It’s a dialogue between four writers who have spent the last few months discussing a place both real and symbolic at the same time - the corrupt Rome and the ‘killer’ Rome, forty years ago and today - and we consider it a troubling metaphor for the wounded, disfigured society to which we are by turns mute witnesses, involuntary accomplices, and distracted observers. "The dead speak," declares Carlo Lucarelli in his latest book on the death of Pasolini. "Sprawled out in the middle of the street, limp bodies in the seat of a car, blown to smithereens or simply missing, they speak out even without words. They’re hanged with their feet touching the ground: since while a perfect crime undoes itself - once it’s done, it ceases to exist - an imperfect crime lingers and can be manipulated thereafter, to protect or blackmail parties to it. Cut down on a soccer field with their noses shoved in the grass, the dead always speak. ‘Silence’, they say."
The most dazzling color belongs to the writers and directors who have consigned their latest works to us so we could trace the spectacular trajectory of the noir in the new millennium: amusing, surprising, crossbreeding successfully with all kinds of storytelling (be it sci-fi, comedy, fairy tales or graphic novels). These are the artists who put the sense of play back into the Festival, that festive atmosphere that outdoes ordinary celebrations in placing the novelties and constants of our ongoing inquiry on the crest of the wave sweeping an extraordinary array of narrative forms onto the contemporary arts scene. Our "champ" in this category is Morgan Lost, and we’ve made him a symbol and the face of our poster created together with our marvelous team at Sergio Bonelli Editore.
The newest color is that of auteur television, the renaissance of TV drama. Serialized storytelling has been part of our lives for years now, and more recently it has taken center stage at the world’s leading festivals. For us the story started twenty-five years ago, when David Lynch invented the enigmatic cult classic, Twin Peaks. That was the season that became a inimitable model of new television, thanks to the success of The X-Files by Chris Carter (Special Chandler Award in 1996); not only had TV programs grown up, they’d become the ideal terrain for experimentation with the medium and auteur entertainment. We start with X-Files for our romp through contemporary television that ranges from America to Europe and from narrative formulas to their extension to films broken into episodes, with a freedom in the design of our agenda that we will be describing, and promoting, together with the Scuola Holden and the experience of the "Film Garage" (MEDIA project), along with a group discussion devoted to European and American models.
Lastly, the color of nostalgia. Firmly convinced that the imagination of tomorrow is rooted in our collective memory, we have dedicated this "silver anniversary" of ours to three film personalities who would have turned 100 in 2015. First, the ‘misfit’, Anthony Quinn, who left his mark on American and Italian film as a gypsy, pirate, cowboy, adventurer, cop and bandit, partisan and guerrilla fighter. Then Frank Sinatra, the Italian-American ‘angel face’ with a career as a crooner and an actor seven decades long, a member of the ‘Rat Pack’ in the Kennedy era whose success partly depended on his controversial connections. It was Sinatra who inspired the Ocean’s Eleven legend and The Man with the Golden Arm, at once cop and gangster, who linked his name to the most prophetic political thriller ever, The Manchurian Candidate. Finally, as is obvious this year, the ‘third man’ Orson Welles, with his personas Quinlan and Kane, Arkadin and Lime; his tortured, black-hearted Macbeth and enraged, homicidal Othello; his lover dazzled by the Lady from Shanghai and his ruthless Nazi in The Stranger. Thanks to a collaboration with the Istituto Luce - Cinecittà, the ‘Magnificent Three’ are the standard bearers of the Courmayeur Noir in Festival this year.
And thanks to the special support of our many friends keen to celebrate our Festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Noir 2015 is sure to be a ‘collector’s edition’. These are all fine reasons to invite the many people in the Vallé d’Aosta who have made us feel at home there over the years to join us for a virtual toast here and now. The people of Courmayeur, who first saw as aliens who’d landed in their midst, then adopted us as distant relations who come home once a year. The team of remarkable professionals who enabled us to build the Festival, one edition at a time, into the model event often imitated but never equalled. The producers, publishers, writers, artists, journalists and historians who are in the spotlight starting this year. We dearly hope that all of you will always cultivate the spirit of freedom and justice and the thirst for truth that is the genuine soul of noir.
