NAPLES, Italy — Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film “The Hand of God” begins with a bird’s-eye view of Naples, his hometown, at dawn, with a lone vintage car driving along a coastal road while the rest of the city sleeps unusually.
As the backdrop to this autobiographical coming-of-age story, Naples is alternately fantastic and decadent, sunny and unpredictable, comfortably familiar and ultimately limiting.
Off-camera it’s even more so.
In the 20 years since Sorrentino last made a film here – his directorial debut “One Man Up” – the city has also matured as a center for film-making in Italy. Today, film and television crews are a common sight on Neapolitan streets, both downtown and in the rugged hinterland. These productions have led to the formation of a local industry including actors, specialist technicians and cinematographers.
“There has been tremendous growth,” said Maurizio Gemma, the director of the local film commission of the Campania region, which since 2005 has been dedicated to attracting and facilitating the work of film and television productions.
At the time, Gemma said, there were 10 or 12 projects shooting in the area. Today, “we make nearly 150 projects a year,” he said, including major TV shows like HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend,” based on the best-selling Elena Ferrante novels.
“Our greatest satisfaction is that within these important titles is the work of many professionals in our region,” said Gemma. But then, he added, ‘we’ve always had a tendency towards show business, culture; it’s part of our history, it’s in our DNA.”
Naples is a city of contrasts, of ornate Baroque palazzos next to dilapidated housing, of relentless and unruly traffic and an official unemployment rate of 21.5 percent, twice the national average. But it’s also a city of culture, both highbrow and popular, and the birthplace of songs like “O sole mio” and “Santa Lucia.”
The shabby grandeur, narrow alleys and sweeping views of the Bay of Naples with Mount Vesuvius as a backdrop make the city a natural open-air movie set.
In recent years, production sets have moved to the outskirts of Naples, and the less salubrious underbelly. The bleak 2009 film “Gomorrah” by Matteo Garrone, who is Roman, and the hit TV series of the same name brought these desolate areas to a wider international audience.
Director Antonio Capuano, who has a prominent role in ‘The Hand of God’, said during a recent screening of his 1998 film ‘Polvere di Napoli’ – which he co-wrote with Sorrentino – that ‘Gomorrah’ was a ‘postcard of Naples’. had become, and this is terrible.”
Pasquale Iaccio, the author of several books on Neapolitan cinema, said that “Gomorrah” was just an “aspect of Naples among many other” clichés about the city that still held court.
As proof, he offered an anecdote from the Neapolitan shooting for the film “Eat Pray Love”, where producers paid the residents of an alley in the center of Naples to hang clothes and sheets in their windows, because an alley without them “Naples just wouldn’t be for the American script,” he said.
The cinematic appeal of Naples keeps the city busy. “Let’s just say there’s a lot to do,” says Gea Vaccaro, a city official in Naples who oversees the office that helps manufacturing companies navigate city bureaucracy and permits. “Naples is a complex city,” she said.
One of the ways the city helps visiting productions is by providing them with office space and reserving rooms in a huge palazzo in the city center — Sorrentino’s team for “The Hand of God” occupied an airy room with ceiling frescoes.
Mayor Gaetano Manfredi, who was elected in October, said in an interview that the prolific filming season “strengthened Naples’ international brand”, enabling the sizable diaspora of Neapolitans living abroad to maintain a bond with their city.
“The economic angle should not be discounted either,” Manfredi said.
According to Tina Bianchi, the secretary general of the Italian Film Commissions, the umbrella group for regional cinema commissions.
According to Francesco Nardella, the deputy director of the branch of the Italian national broadcaster that co-produces “Un Posto al Sole”, (“A Place in the Sun”), the rapid growth of the industry has been in the works for some time. Italian weeknight drama set in Naples as well as other series here.
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Celebrated 25 years on the air last October, “Un Posto al Sole” was — and still is — “a fundamental engine” for filmmaking in Naples, Nardella said.
“Educating” new generations of actors and technicians “is the key word,” he said. “And the seeds have grown.”
In addition to shows like ‘Un Posto al Sole’ and ‘La Squadra’, another series from Naples that ended in 2010 with a run of 10 seasons, film directors like Antonio Capuano, Pappi Corsicato, Stefano Incerti and Mario Martone took Naples to the big screen.
“We are drawing on a reservoir filled with the most extraordinary actors that exist in Italy,” Martone said in an interview this week. His latest film, “Qui Rido Io,” (“The King of Laughter”) stars Toni Servillo, best known to American audiences as the lead actor in Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty.” Servillo was born in Afragola, a Neapolitan suburb, and performed on stage in the city for many years.
“Naples has returned to the capital of Italian cinema, as it was in its origins,” says Martone, opening “Qui Rido Io” with images of the city taken in 1898 by the Lumière brothers.
In the early years of cinema, Naples rivaled Turin as the center of Italian film production, and according to Alex Marlow-Mann, a professor at the University of Kent in England, more than 350 films were made during the silent era. written a book about Neapolitan cinema.
That came to an end in the 1920s, when the local film industry came to a standstill during the fascist regime. Not only did Benito Mussolini centralize industry in Rome by founding Cinecittà Film Studios in 1937, but he also objected to the Neapolitan penchant for melodramas, often spoken in a working-class environment and in dialect. “That was not the image of Italy that Mussolini wanted to promote, so censorship kicked in,” Marlow-Mann said.
Movies continued to be made after World War II, Marlow-Mann said, but they were mostly formula genre films that did not please critics, with the exception of films that followed in the long tradition of Neapolitan comedy, and the was not until the In the 1990s, Neapolitan cinema began to gain a foothold again.
At the end of “The Hand of God” the character based on a young Sorrentino leaves Naples for Rome. In fact, Sorrentino did not leave Naples for good until he was 37 and lived in his parental home until then, he said in a recent interview with an Italian newspaper.
In the film, Capuano (Ciro Capano) reprimands the young man for wanting to leave his hometown.
“No one comes out of this town,” the director tells him. “Do you know how many stories there are in this city. Look!” he says, gazing out at a sweeping view of the Bay of Naples as dusk sets.