REVIEW: DVD Release: Videocracy

Film: Videocracy
Release date: 27th September 2010
Certificate: E
Running time: 90 mins
Director: Erik Gandini
Starring: Silvio Berlusconi, Flavio Briatore, Fabio Calvi, Rick Canelli, Fabrizio Corona
Genre: Documentary
Studio: Dogwoof
Format: DVD
Country: Sweden/Denmark/UK/Finland

Italian president Silvio Berlusconi has built a media empire that allows him to control the output of ninety percent of the country’stelevision. However, instead of focusing on the man himself, Videocracy concentrates on the culture that his propagandist, sexually exploitative enterprise has created.

We follow the lives of people who have been seemingly corrupted by this fantasmatic world. There is obsessive TV fan Ricky Canelil, who openly admits that his desire to be on television has taken over his life, as well as Lele Mora, one of Italy’s top agents, and a man happy to admit that he is a ‘fan’ of fascist ideology. The film then begins to concentrate on the paparazzi ‘Robin Hood’, Fabrizi Corona, a man who insists that his snapping of celebrity hi-jinks is a form of punk rebellion.

But behind these men is the ever present Veline’s, the seemingly logical conclusion of female objectification. A group of women who are hired to stroll around TV studio’s in revealing outfits and are directly prohibited from speaking while on air…


During the opening of Gandini’s documentary it is genuinely difficult to tell if what we are watching is real or an elaborate prank. The characters seem so delusional; the sexism so pronounced that it is all too easy to assume that they are simply comedic caricature. To complicate further, Gandini, like Herzog in Grizzly Man, mixes found-footage with intricately staged, and impeccably detailed mise-en-scene, which does nothing but add to the surreal nature of what is being described. When Gandini’s film-crew are allowed into Berlusconi’s illustrious TV studios, the film becomes a carnival of disorientating angles, hideously bright colours and awkward framing. This otherworldliness is sharply contrasted with our chosen protagonists, who struggle to live in reality, when television offers them such tantalising perfection.

The difficulty is that over time the ‘un-reality’ of the situation becomes distancing. While the footage shot by Gandini is artfully constructed, this very construction distances the audience further from a story which is already hard to believe. This problem is not helped by a musical score that trades in sentimentalised bombast, or an editing style that seems as exploitative as any of Berlusconi’s out-put. Canelil’s dream of being a TV star is openly mocked, Mora comes across as being monstrous, and Berlusconi is portrayed as being nothing short of demonic. This extracts any humanity from the film, and soon it becomes a rather mechanical exercise in political posturing, and one that comes across as not just looking down on its subjects, but actively sneering at them.

It is in the portrayal of the Veline’s that the film is most successful. A camera stands completely still as hundreds of women audition, willing participants in their own objectification. The auditions quickly become a ritualistic form of sexual humiliation, the women grinding their hips directly towards the camera, and hence the audience. The image is mirrored when Fabrizi Corona stands completely naked in a shower while explaining, in voiceover, that to be famous you must be willing to become completely exposed. It is in moments like these, when the role of the audience is brought into question, that the film transcends it’s rather cold and judgemental filmic style, but these moments are few and far between.

What begins as a darkly comedic look at the camp nightmare of Italian television becomes something all the more nihilist. It portrays a country of delusional morons, run by an institutional evil, where women are condemned to objectification, and the men either work for the media or are on the outside looking in.


An interesting documentary that is marred by a simplistic and overtly judgemental morality. Gandini’s filmic style, while undeniable artful, is simply too distancing, a problem furthered by an over-the-top score and unlikeable protagonists. AC