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Foodie Cinema | Piemonte: Pioneers of Film, Partisans of Taste

(by Andrea Gropplero - Cinecittario: Archivio Luce)

Cinema may have begun short, silent and monochrome, but it would become arthouse narrative and feature-length with Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) in Turin. Written with Gabriele D’Annunzio and shot in the studios on the Doria Riparia rivershore, it was Italy’s first and most expensive feature-length blockbuster. This pioneering role in cinema has continued with the establishment in recent years of the Film Commission Torino-Piemonte, one of the first in Italy to structure support for productions and set up a regional Fund for cinema and audiovisual productions. The country’s first Museum of Cinema, one of the world’s most important, was also created in Turin, housed in the city’s symbol, the Mole Antonelliana, since 2000.

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The locations

Cuneo
Region: Piemonte Type: Città Territory: centro storico, pianura
Mole Antonelliana – National Museum of Cinema
Region: Piemonte Type: Torre Territory: città, pianura
Saluzzo
Region: Piemonte Type: Paese Territory: borgo, centro storico, collina, paese
Torino
Region: Piemonte Type: Città Territory: città, collina

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Turin: the working class goes to culture

In Lulu The Tool (1971), Elio Petri told a story set in a working-class Turin that gravitates around the automobile industry. It is the setting for the factory labourer that was particularly prominent in the Italian economic and political upheavals of the time. Massa is also, no coincidence, the surname of the leading character (played by Gian Maria Volontè) who interprets the anxieties, struggles and frustrations of the factory workers in those years. Following the subsequent closure and downsizing of the Fiat factories which today employ only 18,000 workers in Turin, the city has managed to absorb approx. 40,000 people into employment, inserting them, with different roles and skills, into the culture industry.
The Lingotto factories, once the crown jewels of the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino, since restructured by Renzo Piano, have become a cultural paradise over the past two decades, hosting events such as: the Salone del Libro, Salone del Gusto, Salone del Vino, Salone dell’Automobile, Terra Madre and showcases for many other industries.



 
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A Private Affair (2017) – © FC Torino Piemonte

Johnny the Partisan, A Private Affair

Two of the novels that best describe resistance to Nazi-Fascism are set in Piedmont, more precisely between the Langhe and the Roero: Beppe Fenoglio’s Johnny the Partisan and A Private Affair. Both became films, the former directed by Guido Chiesa (2000) the latter by Paolo Taviani (2017) in the last film he wrote with his brother Vittorio. Both films faithfully follow the novels, focussing their gaze on the private side of the liberation struggle, as if to say that radical political choices either intimately affect the deepest feelings of those who make these choices or they are nothing, they are not choices, least of all Partisan choices. «And he thought that perhaps a partisan would have been like him, standing firm on the last hill, watching the city and thinking the same of him and his news, on the evening of the day of his death. And there’s the important point: that he would always be a partisan» (Johnny the Partisan, Einaudi, p. 392).



 
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Slow Food Story (2013) - © Tico Film

Carlin the partisan and the Slow Food philosophy

The Langhe and the Roero are also the areas where the Slow Food movement was born, which Stefano Sardo recounts with great passion in his film Slow Food Story (2013). It is the story of an unfolding revolution, that of Slow Food, the international movement founded by Carlin Petrini that has been on the march for over 25 years, a gastronomic movement now present in over 150 countries. The film recounts its establishment in Bra, its roots in Carlin Petrini’s political militancy and the foundation of ArciGola in 1986, the association which would produce the Slow Food Project three years later.
The International Movement for the Defence of and the Right to Pleasure was announced on 10 December 1989 at the Opera-Comique in Paris with the following manifesto:
«Born and nurtured under the sign of Industrialization, this century first invented the machine and then modelled its lifestyle after it.
Speed became our shackles. We fell prey to the same virus: 'the fast life' that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest “fast- food”.
Homo sapiens must regain its wisdom and liberate itself from the 'velocity' that is propelling it on the road to extinction.
Let us defend ourselves against the universal madness of 'the fast life' with tranquil material pleasure.
Against those – or, rather, the vast majority – who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment.
Appropriately, we will start in the kitchen, with Slow Food. To escape the tediousness of "fast-food", let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines.
In the name of productivity, the 'fast life' has changed our lifestyle and now threatens our environment and our land (and city) scapes. Slow Food is the alternative, the avant-garde’s riposte.
Real culture is to be found here. First of all, we can begin by cultivating taste, rather than impoverishing it, by stimulating progress, by encouraging international exchange programs, by endorsing worthwhile projects, by advocating historical food culture and by defending old-fashioned food traditions. Slow Food assures us of a better-quality lifestyle and future.
With a snail purposely chosen as its patron and symbol, it is an idea and a way of life that needs much sure but steady support».
This is a sort of anti-Futurist manifesto that balances Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism with the idea of a long-unfolding slowness that links to the future through the sustainable development of ancient knowledge traditions of farming and food. Carlin Petrini’s movement has a partisan lexicon, using terminology from the workers struggles and peasant farming tradition in its battles. And so, words such as “Terra Madre”, “condotte”, “presidio” have entered the vocabularies of millions of people. The condotte are the territorial groups of Slow Food, the presidi the autochthonous territorial products in need of protection from massification, intense over-farming, pesticide use, the abuse of underpaid manual labour and, above all, to preserve their biodiversity. For over 25 years, Slow Food has worked to promote biodiversity, the right of peoples to food sovereignty and as a defence against mass farming, genetic modification and the standardisation of knowledge and flavours. If, today, awareness that the principles governing food should be good clean fair has spread across the dining areas of many citizens in the world, this is above all thanks to Slow Food and the partisan Carlin Petrini.



 
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Bitter Rice (1949) - © Cristaldi FIlm

Short history of Piedmontese cuisine

Piedmont is the region whose cuisine offers the greatest number of typical dishes. It is double-stranded tradition with high-end dishes like bollito mistofritto misto and chocolate developed at the Savoy court and a peasant farming cuisine with panissa and bagna cauda. The two strands share key ingredients: garlic and white truffle. While perhaps others such as peperoni quadrati d’Asti, butter, lard and eggs could be included, the previous two are those that best characterise Piedmont cuisine. “Ubi alium ibi Roma (where there is garlic, there is Rome)” said the Latins, and the main influence on this cooking is definitely Roman, after all what is bagna cauda if not a territorial version of a garum (the main condiment of ancient Rome)?
Other influences were brought by Arabs and Saracens in the Late Middle Ages, spices came from the Crusades and the Spanish attempted unsuccessfully to introduce rice to Naples and Sicily which would later flourish in Piedmont. The rice cultivated between Vercelli and Novara in the endless paddy fields that feature in Giuseppe De Santis’ masterpiece Bitter Rice (1949) occupies a place of honour in the regions’ dining halls. Then came the French influence in the 1800s and the spread of the anonymous treatise Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi. An influence that, among others, would see dishes like the finanziera brought to Piedmont from France, after being taken to the Paris court from Tuscany as part of Catherine de’ Medici’s dowry to Henri II.



 
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Bagna cauda

Bagna cauda

Bagna cauda (or caoda) is a dish eaten collectively from the same warm bowl positioned at the centre of the table. This conviviality is governed by strict etiquette that directs the diners not to dip their bread directly or double-dip their vegetables into the dian (earthenware bowl) nor to use their vegetables like a palot (spoon). In addition, tradition requires that everything left in the dian after the vegetables have been eaten should be scrambled with an egg and scattered with white truffle.
There are three versions of bagna cauda: the first includes milk, the second uses red wine instead of milk and the third, which we reproduce below, uses neither and is the recipe officially registered with UNESCO World Heritage.

INGREDIENTS for 12 people

  • 12 heads of garlic
  • 6 wine glasses of olive oil (extra virgin) plus, if possible, 1 glass of walnut oil
  • 600 g of Spanish red anchovies

METHOD

Slice the garlic and place in an earthenware pan, add a glass of oil and sweat slowly over a very low heat, stirring with a wooden spoon, making sure the garlic does not burn or change colour; add the rinsed, scaled anchovies, previously washed in red wine and dried, and stir gently. Cover with the rest of the oil and cook at a low heat for half an hour, making sure that nothing fries. At the end of cooking time, a knob of fresh butter can be added if a softer taste is required. Pour the mixture into the dian and place it on the fujot (bowl warmer) with the following vegetables, both raw: cardo gobbo from Nizza Monferrato (a variety of chard), Jerusalem artichokes, white cabbage hearts, endive, escarole, fresh and bottled bell peppers, quartered raw shallots in Barbera wine; and cooked: beetroot, boiled potatoes, roast onions, fried pumpkin and roast peppers.
Tradition requires that an egg should be scrambled in the “spesso della bagna” the mixture that remains on the bottom of the pan.



 
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A Private Affair (2017) – © FC Torino Piemonte

Recipe to make your own trailer on food and film in Piedmont

This game is for anyone who wants to make a homemade trailer to promote Pioneers of film, Partisans of taste. We’re providing the time codes for the film clips. Any edit program will work for this. Input the following data into the timeline and you’ll have your trailer in minutes.

  • Download the film titles for Bitter Rice
  • attach to sequence from 39.42 to 41.47
  • attach to sequence from 53.57 to 59.59
  • download the film titles for Johnny the Partisan
  • attach to sequence from 04.26 to 04.34
  • attach to sequence from 07.49 to 08.36
  • attach to sequence from 19.40 to 20.00
  • attach to sequence from 43.05 to 43.26
  • attach to sequence from 01h.11.32 to 01h.13.35
  • attach to sequence from 01h.33.38 to 01h.37.12
  • download the film titles for A Private Affair
  • attach to sequence from 35.26 to 35.50
  • attach to sequence from 47.30 to 49.28
  • attach to sequence from 52.31 to 53.50
  • add the end title card “End”
  • enjoy it in company and, if you haven’t yet seen the films, watch them.


 
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