“Fourth Estate”: films to be reviewed in times of Social censorship. And it also applies to Zuckerberg and associates
The closures of profiles carried out by the three great giants of Silicon Valley ( Facebook Inc , Twitter and Google ) have reopened the eyes of public opinion on the timeless power of the mass media. Powerful weapons, often dangerous if in inexperienced hands, able to shape the public debate to one's liking, choosing the topics and interlocutors.
Orson Welles noticed it very well, in 1939, when he told “ The war of the worlds” (by another Welles, he looks at random) from the microphones of CBS . A masterpiece of science fiction interpreted with the gravity and coldness of a news program and here comes the fear, often exaggerated in the narrative a posteriori, of the alien invasion.
This experience must have struck Welles to such an extent that two years later he would have given birth to " Citizen Kane ", released in Italy in 1949 under the title " Quartopero ".
The plot is well known: a journalist tries to reconstruct the life of the publishing magnate Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles himself, through the memories of the people who were close to him. An investigation marked by a word that obsessively echoes in the protagonist's mind: “Rosabella” .
Over the years it has been repeatedly said that Welles was inspired by William Randolph Hearst, the one who mobilized American public opinion in favor of the war against Spain for Cuba and the Philippines (1898-1899). Hearst himself must have recognized himself to the point that found himself in the elevator with Welles, on the occasion of the premiere, he refused the director's invitation to attend the screening, leaving angrily. " Charles Forster Kane would have accepted, " was the director's response.
But “ Citizen Kane ” isn't just Hearst. " Mr. Hearst was quite similar to Kane, although Kane is not based on him in particular. ”Declared the director. “ So many people 'posed' for that portrait, so to speak ." Among them was Welles himself. Because Kane is a lonely character, a man who has spent his life to get everything at the cost of losing everyone. A man isolated from his own desire for power. Kane's loneliness is Welles's loneliness isolated and marginalized by a Hollywood, yesterday like today, too short-sighted for such acute and uncomfortable reflections and intuitions.
The work tells the world of communication and the public arena with a gaze destined for immortality. The ingredients are all there: the cosmic emptiness of certain audiovisual journalism, the blackmail power of the media (and the fictitious courts that arise around them) on politics, the life lived through the private lives of public figures devoured with compulsive greed, the tyranny of certain publishers over their own signatures, the arrogance of the media which, by affecting public opinion, deceive themselves to affect reality itself.
Alongside this lucid and incredibly current gaze, 80 years later, Welles packs a Shakespearean parable on loss. We can get intoxicated as much as we want by the power we hold but the truth is only one: it is a palliative that dulls us the awareness of being "human too human". Yes, this applies to Zuckerberg and company singer.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/recensioni/quarto-potere-film-da-rivedere-in-tempi-di-censura-social-e-vale-anche-per-zuckerberg-e-soci/ on Sat, 23 Jan 2021 05:01:00 +0000.