Excitement. Enthusiasm. Determination. Doubt. Disappointment. You'll see none of these emotions on the static porcelain-like masks of those elaborately gowned and be-flounced mimes that have become synonymous with contemporary Carnevale in Venice, but you will see them on the faces of the scores and scores of people who photograph them. And for this reason--for the human drama of it all, and the pleasure of seeing the diverse beauty and expressiveness of the human face--it's the unmasked and mostly plain-clothed people with cameras I find myself fascinated by during Carnevale instead of those concealed in full costumes whose whole reason for being there is to be looked at. Perhaps I'm simply being contrary, but I hope these pictures will provide at least a hint of what I mean.
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| An angry mime abruptly storms off after a long day of posing: I'm not sure what happened, but it made for a dramatic scene. |
Are these masked, costumed people paid performers (or non-performers)?
ReplyDeleteThat's a very good question, and something I wonder about myself. I asked a woman who is very involved in civic and political life in Venice about it and she basically told me she tried to pay as little attention as possible to Carnevale, which reflects a common attitude of many adult Venetians. Having (oddly enough) myself been paid (a little) by the City of Venice to wear a 15th-century costume they provided (I posted about it on June 16, 2011), I suspect that some of the more elaboratedly-costumed people may also be hired by the city to pose. But certainly not all of them, and some of the most elaborately & creatively costumed come from outside the city, as well as the more casually costumed.
DeleteIt all seems like an exercise in achieving the highest degree of predictability. And there is almost not a face that is relaxed and content, no one seems to enjoy the happening, every person is preoccupied with the thought-numbing task of making a 1 000 001st photo of a Venice Carnival figure.
ReplyDeleteI don't take such a dark view of the photographers, Sasha, as I think in almost every case their expressions suggest (to me, at least) concentration--and I don't know many people who smile in the act of concentrating on something they're looking at & trying to photograph. Of course none of us can help but take the 1,000,001st photo of whatever it is we photograph in Venice--there's no avoiding it--but the fact that it's been done before (and often!) doesn't necessarily diminish people's pleasure in doing it themselves. In fact, I've noticed that some (or many) people enjoy duplicating on their own the very images of the city they've seen dozens and dozens of times. I think entire books have been written about why that might be the case, but regardless of whatever snide (and not exactly original) thoughts Susan Sontag famously wrote about tourists and their need to take pictures, who can really tell another person how they should divert themselves or experience things? Having known Sontag herself as a regular customer in a bookstore I managed, I'm quite happy that not everyone goes about things the way she did.
DeleteThe problem is that these people trade the possibilities for having vital and immediate experiences for consuming the overexploited clichés. But that’s how the mass consciousness works, and it won’t change.
DeleteThere is a photo site called 500px.com which is flooded every minute with thousands of pictures but no matter when you want to see Top 100 this top will be dominated by photos that seem to sit there for years. Formally they are not these pictures that were voted the best by millions of the site users a week ago but…yes, they are exactly the same: there’ll be several views of water cascades smoothed over by long shutter (people will never tire of that trick), a couple sunrises over Tuscan hills, a dozen of blown up images of insects sitting on a leaf, some Algerian silversmith and Buddhist monks.
If you can find someone to pay you can win millions betting on the content of the next week’s Top 100, the pattern never changes.
So beauty and wonder lie only within the sharply defined borders. And…Life Is Elsewhere. Photo-tours take aspiring photographers to Tuscany, Africa or Venice where they are supposed to stand in line before the sights that are certified as worthy of reproducing again and again – and make the exposures that were made a million times already.
Such experiences are a substitute, they rob a person of an acute awareness of an infinite multitude of beautiful things.
The photographers at the Molo are concentrating, yes. But why? On what? What is the big deal?
Right behind them is one of the quirkiest sights in Venice which fills me with glee every time I pass by – in the city of respectfully displayed lions a man looking not unlike St.Mark tears apart the maw of a lion. Of course it’s Samson mauling the beast but in Venice this sight has an unexpected angle.
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/1953/gq0c.jpg
It’s right there but the pre-programmed visitors are not able to really see it even if Samson stares them in the eye. They are here to add another inch to the layers of mental and sensual inertia that grows on them, thickening with every photo-tour.
As for Susan Sontag…Have you seen her Venetian film, Unguided Tour?
The predictability of it’s style, the inevitability of a Jewish bisexual intellectual filming something exactly like this has the same level of dullness as mass shooting of costumed mimes during Carnivale.
It's a strange paradox, Sasha, that as the possibility of sharing images and information explodes beyond measure, the parameters of what may be considered most worth sharing for the mainstream--or publishing for the mainstream--seem to narrow.
DeleteI will have to check out your lion and Samson in person; I've never noticed it myself.
And you remind me that I still need to watch that Sontag video, which I believe is on Youtube, though you wouldn't seem to be encouraging me to waste the time doing so.
I find the whole thing rather ridiculous, but I am very bitter about the carneval in Venice.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your post though, I am like you, more entertained by the other side.
Yes, Laura, I know Carnevale has not been a happy topic with most natives or residents of Venice for many years now. I won't let myself get started on the fact that they now run commercials all day long on the giant screens on either side of the big stage in the Piazza, or that even when the screens are being used to telecast live what is going on onstage at least 1/6 of each screen is constantly filled with the logo of one sponsor after another! When it comes to selling the city, the motto seems to be "Aim Low, Sell Cheap, and You Can't Be Tacky Enough."
DeleteYou'd think at a certain point they'd realize how much they've cheapened the "brand" of Venice. (Because cities aren't cities anymore they are "brands", like good old NYC.)
And yet, certainly by late afternoon when I took these pics, it didn't seem like a "mordi and fuggi" crowd, or the destructive (and drunk) sort the city sometimes succeeds in luring in by the 120,000 or so, but the type of visitors the city might actually be able to survive with.
You totally got it!
DeleteYou are right, the crowd you depicted seems very decent. I remember the early years of the carnival, in the 80's, it was a mad house. They had a disco under the mercato del pesce building one year, I was horrified. I was almost hit by a drunk's bottle once, and I risked being thrown over a bridge another time. I was in my early 20's and I never found any of it entertaining. It made me become very bitter, every time I see one of the cheap masks I cringe. They have been selling venice to the masses for years. Venezia la cortigiana e i politici i suoi ruffiani, too bad they aim very low, like you wrote.
I suppose you wouldn't have been surprised then, Laura, by a recent local headline just after the last day of Carnevale saying that someone's ear had been bitten off on grasso martedì during a fight at the night-time show they had at Arsenale this year. A teen friend, however, said the paper got it wrong and that the ear-biting actually happened in Campo Manin: she'd gone to school with the assailant. I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse. But either way, it's not my idea of fun.
DeleteI have put my two pen'orth in to agree - your photos are fine but confirm my desire to always avoid Venice during the Carnevale.
ReplyDeleteI think there's a good deal of wisdom in that choice, Jeff, though I have to admit I do see visitors who really seem to enjoy the time--and I think young kids have a good time at the peripheral events that are more locally-oriented. I prefer a little less of a crush, though.
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