


Spanning from the late 1970s throughout the 1980s, the music-based subculture known as post-punk was characterized by an antagonistic attitude towards mass media and pop culture. This resulted frequently in acts of appropriation and parody, conducted through a multidisciplinary set of visual and performative forms of artistic expression that were complementary to music, namely film, video, performance, fashion, design and marketing. Borrowing tactics from historical and post-war avant-gardes – from Futurism to Situationism – and in line with the postmodernist ethos of such movements as the Pictures Generation, one of post-punk’s recurring targets was television, blamed for its power to produce clichés with which viewers identified. While much has been written on American and British post-punk, little is known on peripheral scenes where this subculture assumed specific traits. This paper focuses on Italian post-punk and its unique ‘response’ to the epochal passage in Italy from state television to a privately owned, diversified, commercial mediascape. Although rooted in the 1977 counterculture, which harshly criticized mass media, Italian post-punk developed an ambiguous relationship with television, shifting from critique to complicity. For some, TV was the subject of sonic and visual parodies; for others, those who embraced the music video form, it became a useful medium. The paper reconstructs the cultural milieu of Italian post-punk in parallel with the diffusion of commercial television.



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Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy
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Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy
Francesco Spampinato, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di
Bologna




Abstract

   Spanning from the late 1970s throughout the 1980s, the music-based subculture
   known as post-punk was characterized by an antagonistic attitude towards mass
   media and pop culture. This resulted frequently in acts of appropriation and
   parody, conducted through a multidisciplinary set of visual and performative
   forms of artistic expression that were complementary to music, namely film,
   video, performance, fashion, design and marketing. Borrowing tactics from
   historical and post-war avant-gardes – from Futurism to Situationism – and in
   line with the postmodernist ethos of such movements as the Pictures Generation,
   one of post-punk’s recurring targets was television, blamed for its power to
   produce clichés with which viewers identified. While much has been written
   on American and British post-punk, little is known on peripheral scenes where
   this subculture assumed specific traits. This paper focuses on Italian post-punk
   and its unique ‘response’ to the epochal passage in Italy from state television
   to a privately owned, diversified, commercial mediascape. Although rooted in
   the 1977 counterculture, which harshly criticized mass media, Italian post-punk
   developed an ambiguous relationship with television, shifting from critique
   to complicity. For some, TV was the subject of sonic and visual parodies; for
   others, those who embraced the music video form, it became a useful medium.
   The paper reconstructs the cultural milieu of Italian post-punk in parallel with
   the diffusion of commercial television.


The Post-punk Gesamtkunstwerk and The Early Case of Krisma

   Whereas the punk movement that arose in the late 1970s was characterized by
a spontaneous, fiery and rude attitude against authority and the status quo, post-
punk, which developed right after punk and throughout the 1980s, distinguished
itself for its avant-garde sensibility based on a self-conscious, at times even
programmatic attempt to reimagine the codes of individual expression and social
behaviour. Centred on music, the post-punk subculture included also a diverse
and multidisciplinary array of visual and performative forms of artistic expression,
notably moving images, hybrid types of performance, visual communication and

                                                  Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 33, Fall 2019
                                    Francesco Spampinato


fashion design. Articulated in various subgenres (e.g. new wave, no wave, mutant
disco, punk-funk, cold wave, goth, industrial, EBM, synthpop, minimal synth,
new romantics etc.), post-punk sound and lyrics were evidently unable, alone, to
fulfil the need for self-expression felt by the generation that came of age at that
time, during an era marked by the rise of neoliberalism and the early proliferation
of affordable, electronic technology.
   Borrowing tactics and signs from both historical and post-war avant-gardes –
Dadaism, Futurism, Situationism and Fluxus immediately come to mind – and in
line with the postmodernist ethos of coeval art movements such as the Pictures
Generation, the post-punk artists, filmmakers, performers and designers took
advantage of music to develop forms of Gesamtkunstwerk that offered youth
new perspectives from which to face reality. Music critic Simon Reynolds has
highlighted the conceptual dimension of post-punk in his seminal book on the
movement, as when he asserted:

     On a mission and fully in the now, post-punk created a thrilling sense of urgency. The
     new records came thick and fast, classic after classic. Even the incomplete experiments
     and interesting failures carried a powerful utopian charge and contributed to an
     exhilarating collective conversation. Certain groups existed more on the level of
     an idea than a fully realized proposition, but nonetheless made a difference just by
     existing and talking a good game in the press.1

   In 1987, when post-punk was coming to an end, two books, curiously published
by the same English publisher, Methuen, acknowledged the major influence that
the art school education played on many rock musicians from the 1960s: Simon
Frith and Howard Horne’s Art into Pop and John Walker’s Cross-Overs: Art into
Pop/Pop into Art. ‘Art-school trained musicians took ingredients from the avant-
garde but changed the recipe’, wrote Frith and Horne, and ‘stirred Pop art ideas
too – what we got was not art vs. commerce, but commerce as art, as the canvas for
the musician’s creativity, individuality, style’.2 The history of rock is certainly also a
history of image but ‘art rock’, the term these authors employed, is a much more
hybrid phenomenon. By applying to music and its marketing, processes based
on originality, experimentation and critical thinking learned in art schools, art
rockers broke down, once and for all, the ideological dichotomy between high and
low culture on which modernism relied. If in the modernist era the avant-garde
defined itself in opposition to popular culture, now pop culture was embraced
unapologetically, as an arena in which to develop metalinguistic discourses.
   The conceptual nature of post-punk emerges clearly from its deconstructionist
approach to mass media codes and clichés. Television, in particular, was often
the target of acts of appropriation and parody, blamed for its subliminal


1
  Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984 (New York: Penguin Books,
2005), pp. 10 –11.
2
  Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 65.

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                   Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy


power to elicit political consensus and induce consumerism. The multimedia
production of bands such as Devo and Talking Heads in US, and Cabaret
Voltaire and Psychic TV in the UK, is representative of post-punk’s alignment
with postmodernist thinking, which for what regards television is epitomized in
Jean Baudrillard’s idea of ‘hyperreality’, according to which television replaced
reality with its simulacrum, not merely a copy of the real but a truth in its own
right. While much has been written on American and British post-punk, little is
known on peripheral scenes. A case in point is that of Italy, where the post-punk
subculture developed a unique ‘response’ to the passage, that was epochal for the
country, from the monopoly of state television Rai to a diversified, commercial
mediascape. This allowed Silvio Berlusconi to establish his own media empire,
Fininvest, and turn Italian television into a duopoly that, with some variations,
still persists today.
   Italian post-punk’s relationship with television, which this article aims to map
and explore, has been ambiguous, shifting over time from critique to complicity
to autonomy. As a recurring subject of sonic and visual appropriations and
parodies, for those who embraced the music video form, television also became
the medium through which they developed metalinguistic forms of reflection.
A quintessential case was that of Krisma – a duo composed of Maurizio Arcieri
and Christina Moser, formerly known as Chrisma – who referred recurrently to
TV in their lyrics, visual identity and music videos, but also made countless TV
appearances, collaborated on TV programs and at some point even ran a TV
channel. Their early thoughts on TV are summed up in the title-track of their
1980 album Cathode Mamma, whose lyrics state: ‘I like television sets because
they have voices for when you are alone […]. Cathode mamma kiss me, in my
cable paradise […]. I like television sets. They fill my empty rooms with electronic
stone […]. They never go to sleep but glitter through the night [….] They always
stay at home and keep my bed so warm’.3
   Krisma’s song describes the TV set as a maternal presence in the home, able to
keep company to the lonely viewer as if it was a real person. The 7-inch record
cover, conceived by visionary art director Mario Convertino, shows seven flows
of TV sets, each broadcasting an image of Christina, dropping down from the
letters that form the band’s name and disappearing into a dark void (fig. 1a).
Portraits of the musicians taken from a TV screen appear on the cover of the
album and the popular single Many Kisses (fig. 1b, 1c). The duo had already
played with similar issues in 1979, via the 16mm promo for the song Aurora B. –
when they still went by the name of Chrisma – directed by Sergio Attardo, which
in fact could be considered one of the earliest ‘music videos’ ever produced in
Italy. Scenes of the two in erotic moments that end with Maurizio’s attempted
suicide alternate with scenes of Christina in a dark room, singing behind TV
sets that transmit her live image, while another one broadcasts the footage of a

3
 Krisma, Cathode Mamma, Polydor 1980, lyrics of the song retrieved from http://krisma.
mayancaper.net/records/lyrics_cathode.html [accessed 12 December 2019].

                                                                                   41
                                   Francesco Spampinato




 Fig. 1a, 1b, 1c: Krisma, record covers. From left: Cathode Mamma (7”); Cathode Mamma (LP);
                   Many Kisses (7”). Polydor, 1980. Design: Mario Convertino.




                    Fig. 2: Chrisma, Aurora B., 1979, 16 mm, 4’52”, Color.
                         Producer: Polydor. Director: Sergio Attardo.


Formula 1 incident, before setting on the Rai test pattern that appeared on the
screen when no programming was broadcast, usually at night (fig. 2).


Post-1977 Bologna: Gaznevada, Grabinsky and the Stupid Set

   Television was a major issue for various bands that emerged from Bologna,
where Italian post-punk was literally born from the ashes of the movement of
1977, made of students and left-wing extra-parliamentary groups who demanded
direct action. The reference points that allowed the birth of post-punk in
Bologna were: the experimental university major in DAMS (Disciplines of Art,
Music and Spectacle), the yearly Performance Week festival, the creative squat
42
                     Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy




                Fig. 3: Gaznevada, Telepornovisione, 1980, video, 7’35”, b/w.
           Producer: Italian Records. Director: Grabinsky. Courtesy: Oderso Rubini.


Traumfabrik, the pirate radio station Radio Alice, the music venue Punkreas,
the record store Disco d’Oro, and Oderso Rubini’s record label Harpo’s Music,
which later became Italian Records. Many people who gravitated around this
network had been involved in the 1977 riots, culminating in the ‘Conference
Against Repression’. The event featured a performance by Bolognese punk band
Centro d’Urlo Metropolitano (the ‘Center for Metropolitan Screams’), whose
song Mamma Dammi la Benza (‘Mom Gimme Fuel’), with its indomitable pace
and allusion to the Molotov bomb, became a late anthem of the uprising.
   Rechristened Gaznevada, the group’s earliest commentary on television was
Teleporno T.V. (1979), a noise composition in line with the style of industrial
music built around the still punk refrain: ‘posso fare il guardone con la mia
telepornovisione’ (‘I can be a voyeur with my telepornovision’). The song referred
to those TV channels that used to broadcast pornographic content, but also the
diffusion of CCTV in public spaces, as emerges in the music video directed by
Grabinsky (Emanuele Angiuli, Renato De Maria and Walter Mameli), a group
of videomakers also from Bologna. This shows a guy who tunes a TV set to the
live images of a couple in intimate moments (fig. 3). Austrian scholar Klemens
Gruber has noted that a trope for the 1977 intelligentsia was ‘the relationship
between the artistic avant-garde and mass media: two snakes who devour each
other. The importance of media for a cultural transformation and the actuality of
the historical avant-garde, submitted to the conditions of the information society,
become determinant fields for their explorations’.4
   As police repression, that resulted in the murder of student Francesco Lorusso,
and some rioters’ sympathies for the terrorist group the Red Brigades brought
the movement to an end, the 1980 deadly bomb attack on the Bologna train
station and the diffusion of heroin signalled the beginning of a new phase of
cultural opposition to the dominant order. Unlike Radio Alice, a model of media
autonomy at the core of the 1977 movement, which is the focus of Gruber’s
study, Gaznevada and Grabinsky developed a critical commentary on mass
media from within a culture of commodities, namely the record industry, albeit

4
 Klemens Gruber, L’Avanguardia Inaudita: Comunicazione e Strategie nei Movimenti degli Anni
Settanta (1989), trans. by Elfi Reiter (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1997), p. 16 (my translation).

                                                                                         43
                                       Francesco Spampinato


one that was extremely ‘DIY’. Gaznevada referred to TV again on the cover of
the single Nevadagaz (1980), the first of Italian Records’ releases, designed by
Anna Persiani after inputs from the band’s members, showing fading portraits
taken off a TV screen (fig. 4), and the B-side song Blue TV Set. TV screens
broadcasting musicians are the leitmotiv of the covers of their 1985 album Back
to the Jungle and single Living in the Jungle, but at that point the band had already
shifted towards a cheesy Italo disco style, a move that was harshly criticized by
their early punk and post-punk aficionados (fig. 5).




      Fig. 4: Gaznevada, record cover (front and back): Nevadagaz (7”), Italian Records, 1980.
                         Design: Anna Persiani. Courtesy: Oderso Rubini.




     Fig. 5: Gaznevada, record covers. From left: Back to the Jungle (LP); Back to the Jungle (7”).
                          Both EMI, 1985. Illustration (LP): Kenji Sumura.

44
                     Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy


   Meanwhile, two of Gaznevada’s original members, Giampiero Huber and
Giorgio Lavagna, had formed the band and multimedia project Stupid Set. In
the hilarious music video of Hello, I Love You (1981), a cover of a famous song by
the Doors, directed by Grabinksy, the musicians are filmed as they perform the
song inside an empty room, with TV sets in the place of their heads, broadcasting
static and their zoomed in mouths (fig. 6). For the Stupid Set, Grabinsky realized
also the Tape Show (1980), a wall of twenty TV sets, sponsored by Philips,


Fig. 6: Stupid Set, Hello,
I Love You, 1981, video,
3’10”, Color.
Producer: Italian Records.
Director: Grabinsky.
Courtesy: Oderso Rubini.




                                                Fig. 7: Stupid Set and Grabinksy, Tape Show,
                                                                    collage for the flyer, 1980.
                                                      Design: Giampiero Huber and Giorgio
                                                           Lavagna. Courtesy: Oderso Rubini.




                                                                                             45
                              Francesco Spampinato




         Fig. 8: Stupid Set and Grabinksy, Tape Show, performance and set,
                 IV International Performance Week, Bologna, 1980.
     Producer: Italian Records. Performance: Stupid Set. Set Design: Grabinsky.
                              Courtesy: Oderso Rubini.




                                                         Fig. 9: Stupid Set and Grabinksy,
                                                      Tape Show, performance and set, IV
                                                        International Performance Week,
                                                                            Bologna, 1980.
                                                                 Producer: Italian Records.
                                                     Performance: Stupid Set. Set Design:
                                                     Grabinsky. Courtesy: Oderso Rubini.

46
                      Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy




                       Fig. 10: Grabinsky, Tape Show, 1980, video, b/w.
                    Producer: Italian Records. Courtesy: Emanuele Angiuli.


broadcasting cut-up footage from popular TV series such as Hulk and Columbo,
used as a backdrop of a live show by the band in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore
(figg. 7, 8, 9). The Tape Show was also featured in the city’s fourth edition of the
‘Performance Week’, when the group added toy instruments to their equipment.
With a montage based on abrupt juxtapositions and obsessive loops, the Tape
Show echoes the allegorical procedures of some American visual artists associated
to the Pictures Generation, such as Jack Goldstein and Dara Birnbaum, and
notably the latter’s video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978)
(fig. 10). Employing TV sets on stage became a kind of trend at that time; other
Italian post-punk bands that did so were Pale TV (who also referred to TV with
their own name and in their 1981 song B/W Television Shock-Show) from Parma
and Scortilla from Genoa.
   The Stupid Set invoked television again in the song Basset, the B-side of the 12-
inch Soft Parade (Mmmh Records, 1981), based on a text recited over the audio of
an episode of the TV series Hunter. The group’s ultimate project on TV was Soul
of Trade, recorded in 1980–1981 but released only in 2015 by Spittle Records: a
series of sound compositions that were supposed to be performed within another
multimedia installation. Equally inspired by the Residents’ deconstructionist
parodies of muzak and William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique, as it emerges
from his seminal book The Electronic Revolution (Berlin: Expanded Media
Editions, 1970), the project was based on ‘the use of video/audio recordings of
commercials and newscasts’, to be employed ‘as harmonic material for some pop
songs’.5 For the live show, the group had envisioned a performance from behind
a Venetian blind onto which TV footage and slides would be projected, while a
CCTV system would transmit the live images of the performers on two TV sets
in the apron.
   The Stupid Set’s interest in the subliminal nature of mass media and the
automation implied in ‘video/audio recordings’ and editing techniques is also at
the centre of their last project, which was presented at the 1982 ‘Contaminazioni’
festival in Bologna. Psychodisco consists in a series of cut-up compositions

5
 The Stupid Set, ‘The Silent Generation (nota privata)’, undated text appearing in the liner notes
of the vinyl release of Soul of Trade (Milan: Spittle Records, 2015), unpaged.

                                                                                               47
                              Francesco Spampinato


based on appropriated samples (recorded in 1982 but this one too released
only in 2015 by Opilec Music), paired with a video directed by band’s member
Umberto Lazzari. Less a music video than a video art project in its own right, the
34-minute amalgam contains: illustrations of Maya gods; pixelated animations
(i.e. a deserted landscape with a cactus and a buffalo skull, a skyline, and a guy
watching TV at home) made with a Commodore 64 computer by Francesco
Chiarini; and footage recorded by Lazzari from Dutch and Italian television:
mostly commercials featuring children smiling, eyes blinking, a choreography
of women on a beach, and fragments typical of the iconography of ads for
household products (fig. 11).


The Rise of Music Videos: The Peculiar Case of Mister Fantasy

   The music video is usually intended as a short promo film for TV that
integrates a song with imagery, whose birth could be situated around the mid
1970s. According to the writer Pier Vittorio Tondelli – who has acknowledged
the innovative impact of Italian post-punk culture in many of his writings – this
peculiar type of media genre soon evolved ‘from a simple means of distribution
and promotion of an album to a product […] that recalls the avant-gardes’ old
dream of total art: cinema, music, theatre, poetry, computer art that interact in

                                                                 Fig. 11: Stupid Set,
                                                                  Pyschodisco, 1982,
                                                                   video, 34’, Color.
                                                                 Director: Umberto
                                                                  Lazzari. Courtesy:
                                                                     Oderso Rubini.




48
                        Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy




             Fig. 12: Carlo Massarini in the TV studio of Mister Fantasy, Rai 1, 1981.
                                   Design: Mario Convertino.


the space of a few minutes’.6 As this was evident for Grabinsky’s production and
Lazzari’s video of Psychodisco, which circulated in art circles and clearly aligned
with that of contemporary experimental filmmakers and visual artists working
with video, performance and installation, it was less immediate for Attardo’s film
for Chrisma’s Aurora B. (1979), because this was made expressly for TV, which
is rarely considered a context in which artistic forms of critical thinking are
experimented. This preconception changed with the arrival of Mister Fantasy on
Rai 1, the first Italian TV program to be exclusively dedicated to music videos,
which debuted on May 1981, three months before the launch of MTV in the U.S.
   Conceived by TV producer Paolo Giaccio and hosted by Carlo Massarini,
the program developed a distinct postmodernist style based on effects of
fragmentation and pastiche thanks to the space-age studio, Convertino’s
videographics, and the music videos directed by a roster of emerging practitioners
(fig. 12). Massarini defined Mister Fantasy’s studio without audience a ‘hyperspace
[…] empty, aseptic, out of time and space’.7 Strictly related to Baudrillard’s idea
of ‘hyperreality’, the concept of ‘hyperspace’ was theorized by Fredric Jameson,

6
  Pier Vittorio Tondelli, ‘Videosexy’, Alter Alter, 6 (June 1984), p. 28 [repr. in Pier Vittorio Tondelli,
Un Weekend Postmoderno. Cronache dagli anni Ottanta (Milan: Bompiani, 1990)], pp. 218–219).
7
  Carlo Massarini, ‘Il Fantasy Lessico. L’Iperspazio è Abitato da Creature della Notte’, Segnocinema,
8 (May 1983), p. 26 [reprinted in MTV. Il Nuovo Mondo della Televisione, ed. by Domenico Baldini
(Rome: Castelvecchi, 2000), p. 174].

                                                                                                       49
                                      Francesco Spampinato


another key postmodernist thinker, as a space that transcends ‘the capacities of
the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surrounding
perceptually’, and that for this reason is a symbol of ‘the incapacity of our
minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred
communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual
subjects’.8 As a hyperspace, Mister Fantasy epitomized the process of media
integration that television entailed and its alienating and disorienting effects.
   Active until 1984, in its 100 episodes the program featured also 80 original
music videos produced in-house, alongside music videos mainly from the US and
the UK. Although these were mostly made for Italian pop singers and songwriters,
and a handful of post-punk acts, Mister Fantasy was not only responsible for
bringing the post-punk aesthetics to TV: inspired by the post-punk milieu, it also
manufactured a postmodernist Gesamtkunstwerk in the form of a commercial
product. This, however, had a double effect: while challenging the language of
TV, it also helped to reinforce its persuasive power. Indeed, on the one hand
Mister Fantasy broke with traditional notions of media entertainment and turned
mainstream television into a context for artistic expression and experimental
communication. On the other, the program exemplified what Umberto Eco
called ‘Neo-Television’, a new type of television that emerged in the 1980s, which
was self-referential, based on an obsessive audiovisual flow, the juxtaposition of
different layers of communications and, precisely, the convergence of various
media.9
   At the core of Neo-TV, as media scholar Gianni Sibilla argues, the music
video is based on a kaleidoscopic merging of various elements and ‘is aware of its
role, its position within the music and audiovisual context and does not miss the
opportunity to expose its proper communication modes’.10 Interestingly enough,
some music videos produced by Mister Fantasy adopted self-referentiality as
a deconstructionist tactic as in the case of the 1982 video trilogy realized for
Krisma’s songs, by a team that included the video directors Piccio Raffanini
and Attardo, the photographer Edo Bertoglio, and the art director Convertino.
Filmed in Bali, the trilogy opens with the Miami video, based on a scene with
Maurizio wondering on a paradise beach, armed and threatening, intercut
with flashes of a TV set tuned to the new-born channel Rete 4 broadcasting
the Vietnam War movie The Soldier’s Story (Ian McLeod, 1981) (fig. 13). The
anti-war ethos, based on the dichotomy beauty/cruelty, persists in the videos of
Water and Samora Club, where Christina’s glamour clashes with the shadows of



8
   Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), p. 44.
9
   Umberto Eco, ‘TV: Transparency Lost’ (1983) in Telegen: Art and Television, trans. and ed. by
Dieter Daniels and Stephan Berg (Munich: Himer Verlag GmbH, 2015), pp. 207-218.
10
   Gianni Sibilla, Musica da Vedere. Il Videoclip nella Televisione Italiana (Rome: RAI – ERI, 1999),
p. 43 (my translation).

50
                     Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy


a submarine in the first, and of Maurizio in military attire and anxious to use his
knife in the latter (figg. 14, 15).
   Along with this explicit anti-war reading, another interpretation emerges: in
manufacturing a hyperreality based on criteria of entertainment and advertising,
television desensitizes its audience regarding the world’s real problems such
as war, notably the Cold War that was ongoing at that time, while producing




                      Fig. 13: Krisma, Miami, 1982, video, 3’57”, Color.
 Producer: Mister Fantasy, Rai 1. Directors: Piccio Raffanini and Sergio Attardo. Photography:
                       Edo Bertoglio. Art Director: Mario Convertino.




                      Fig. 14: Krisma, Water, 1982, video, 4’25”, Color.
 Producer: Mister Fantasy, Rai 1. Directors: Piccio Raffanini and Sergio Attardo. Photography:
                       Edo Bertoglio. Art Director: Mario Convertino.

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                                   Francesco Spampinato




                   Fig. 15: Krisma, Samora Club, 1982, video, 3’25”, Color.
 Producer: Mister Fantasy, Rai 1. Directors: Piccio Raffanini and Sergio Attardo. Photography:
                       Edo Bertoglio. Art Director: Mario Convertino.


subtle forms of propaganda. By juxtaposing original scenes with TV footage and
Convertino’s infographics, exposing elements of the backstage (e.g. a backdrop)
and playing on the ambiguity between reality and its double (e.g. the shadows),
this trilogy elicits a metalinguistic reflection on the media’s power to manipulate
reality. Mister Fantasy produced also the video for Krisma’s I’m Not in Love
(1984), directed by Giancarlo Bocchi, although this was less concerned with
television per se than the propaganda of totalitarian regimes at large. Along
with Krisma, the only other ‘proper’ post-punk act featured in the program was
Garbo. Out of the three music videos produced for him by Mister Fantasy, the
one for Radioclima (1984), directed by Raffanini, is characterized by the presence
of radios and TV sets, alluded to as media able to produce stereotypes with
which the audience unwillingly identifies.
   Less post-punk than pop, but similarly interested in facing issues of media
representation and influence through visuals and performance, is the video for
Matia Bazar’s Il Video Sono Io (I Am the Video, 1983), this one too directed
by Raffanini. In line with the geometrical set designed by postmodernist design
group Alchimia co-founded by Alessandro Mendini, the musicians perform a
theatrical choreography based on mechanical moves. The highlight is the presence
of six totems, each made of four piled TV sets, which alternate the face with the
fractured full-length figure of the glamorous singer Antonella Ruggiero (fig. 16).
Loosely labelled ‘videosculpture’, this peculiar mode of display was employed at
that time by artists such as Friederike Pezold and Studio Azzurro to allegorize
how media can fragment the viewer’s subjectivity. Andy Warhol’s film Outer and
Inner Space (1966) also comes to mind, but unlike Edie Sedgwick, who tries to

52
                    Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy


                                                                        Fig. 16: Matia Bazar,
                                                                     Il Video Sono Io, 1983,
                                                                         video, 2’40”, Color.
                                                                           Producer: Mister
                                                                              Fantasy, Rai 1.
                                                                             Director: Piccio
                                                                      Raffanini. Set Design:
                                                                                   Alchimia.




get hold of her media duplicate, Antonella, like Christina in Chrisma’s Aurora B.,
seems disinterested in interacting with her double; self-confident and in control,
their media image coincides with their own selves.


The Italian Post-punk Music Video

   Examples such as these prove that the music video could not only challenge
the modernist dogma, according to which art is defined by the fact of being
displayed in an artistic context and in opposition to popular culture, but that
they could also trigger an even more radical deconstructionist effect than art,
because it criticizes the media from within. This was not always the case of
course. Indeed, most music videos have neither the ability nor the intention of
challenging media and, as Dick Hebdige has written, they could ‘be seen as a
further congealment/commodification of “authentic” culture into “inauthentic”
(packaged) product in a process which leads to the primacy of the televisual: the
simulacrum’.11 Interestingly, visual and performative forms of critical thinking


11
  Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London and New York: Routledge,
1998), p. 237.

                                                                                          53
                               Francesco Spampinato


in line with the visual arts are more often developed by people associated
with the loosely-defined ‘alternative’ music genres, that is genres whose very
existence is legitimated by being oppositional to the status quo. In this sense,
being coincidental with the rise of music television, post-punk had a major
responsibility in bringing procedures rooted in critical thinking from the arts to
pop culture via the music video form.
   Italy has always been at the forefront of the evolution of forms of convergence
between music and moving images. As popular music was so ingrained in Italian
culture, from its launch in 1954, Rai produced several programs in which music,
visuals and performance converged, notably the live broadcast of the Sanremo
music festival, as well as dozens of variety shows and short films. In the late
1950s the Società Internazionale Fonovisione produced the Cinebox, a coin-
operated 16 mm film projector jukebox, which was sold worldwide and installed
in public places like cafes, following in the footsteps of the Scopitone, its French
precursor. The idea of pairing songs with a movie expanded into a film genre
called ‘musicarello’, a type of musical movie that became highly popular in
the 1960s. Italian music video scholars Domenico Baldini, Bruno Di Marino
and Domenico Liggeri all dedicate considerable space to the evolution of the
music video in Italy in their publications. However, aside for Mister Fantasy and
Krisma, they fully ignore Grabinsky as well as the rest of the Italian post-punk
videography.
   Examples of post-punk music videos produced in Italy in the 1980s that
deserve to be rediscovered and re-contextualized, within both the evolution
of media and the arts, are: Tony Verità’s video for Litfiba’s Dea del Fujiama
(1981); Toni Occhiello’s for Doris Norton’s Psychoraptus (1982); Corso Salani’s
for Litfiba’s Der Krieg (Guerra, 1982); Giancarlo Onorato’s for Underground
Life’s La Tempesta (1983); Alessandro Furlan’s for Jo Squillo’s Bizarre (1984);
Paul Allman’s for Ruins’ Fire! (1984); Carlo Isola’s for Neon’s Isolation (1986);
Metamorphosi’s for Maurizio Marsico’s Mefisto Funk and Lovely Racers (both
1986); Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici’s for their own Et Maintenant (1986)
and for Alexander Robotnik’s C’est la Vie (1987); and Massimo Gasparini’s for
Plasticoast’s Canzone Dada (1988). The Italian Records videos for Gaznevada’s
Antistatico Shock (1982), Hi-Fi Bros’ The Line (1983), and N.O.I.A.’s Do You
Wanna Dance (1984) are still uncredited. The same is true of those for KKD’s
I Need Help (1981), Frigidaire Tango’s Recall and Vanity Fair (both 1983),
Diaframma’s Siberia (1984), and HAKKAH’s No Way Out (1986). This is just a
handful of music videos that returned to public attention thanks to the internet,
uploaded by their directors, the bands or their fans, but hopefully more obscure
examples are on the way.
   Other music videos still offer commentaries on television and its subliminal
power. Luca Setti and Marina Spada’s video for Maurizio Marsico’s Frisk the
Frog (1982), at the crossroads of new wave, rap and Italo disco, whose lyrics have
been written by comic artist Massimo Mattioli, alternates an Intellivision frog
videogame with the soap-opera-styled scenes of a couple singing. The broken

54
                   Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy




            Fig. 17: Maurizio Marsico, Frisk the Frog, 1982, video, 5’13”, Color.
          Directors: Luca Setti and Marina Spada. Photography: Toni Meneguzzo.




                  Fig. 18: Diaframma, Altrove, 1983, video, 5’22”, Color.
                   Producer: Contempo Records. Director: Tony Verità.


narrative is punctuated by a TV set broadcasting images of a breakdancer in an
empty room who, among other moves, mimes to push the TV screen from the
inside as if trying to escape from a prison (fig. 17). Not so much hilarious as it
is conceptual, Tony Verità’s video for Diaframma’s Altrove (1983) depicts the
four band’s members sitting motionless in a dark room, looking severely into the
camera (fig. 18). In the background a TV set broadcasts an unidentified erotic

                                                                                    55
                                   Francesco Spampinato




      Fig. 19: GMM feat. Alexander Robotnik, Don’t Ask Me Why, 1985, video, 3’15”, Color.
     Producer: Materiali Sonori. Directors: Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici (GMM) and Studio
                                             Azzurro.


movie, illuminating the environment with its typical bluish luminescence. The
four’s impassive stillness is clearly an act of resistance to television and the very
nature of the pop music video, which is traditionally based on lip-synching.
   One more post-punk music video that refers to TV is that by multimedia
collective Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici (GMM), directed in collaboration
with the likeminded group Studio Azzurro, for Don’t Ask Me Why (1985): a
hybrid new wave/Italo disco track made by GMM with their associate Alexander
Robotnik (fig. 19). The video juxtaposes the performance of the singer Irene
N’Jie, images of the electronic alter egos of the three GMM – the notorious
protagonists of various computer comics and video works – and of the three
artists in trendy clothing and black sunglasses as they dance and struggle with
finding the perfect pose in an empty room, a scene that is also broadcast by a
TV set. The frenetic multiplication of these two types of images, media persona
and electronic duplicates, ironizes on the effects of media’s fragmentation of
subjectivity. With its emphasis on collaboration and through references to media
and the personal computer, the video tackle issues of depersonalization and
anonymity in relation with media and information technologies, at the core of
both GMM and Studio Azzurro’s practice.


The Representation of Post-punk in Italian TV: A Search for Autonomy

  During the 1980s the programs that featured music videos multiplied on both
public and private TV channels in Italy, another highly popular one being Deejay
Television (1983–1990) on Canale 5; like Mister Fantasy, this also produced in-
56
                      Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy


house music videos, mostly for Italo disco acts. Shortly after Mister Fantasy ended
its transmissions, in the wake of MTV in the US, a proper music channel was
launched. Videomusic (1984–1996) transmitted music videos, documentaries,
live concerts, interviews all day long, with 8 minutes per hour of commercials.
According to Baldini, only 200 music videos were produced in the whole decade
of the 1980s by Italian record labels, while in US this was the number for one
month.12 It is not clear what are the sources Baldini uses for this data, nor how
authoritative they are, but it is certainly true that this number does not include
the post-punk music videos, which had an extremely low visibility on TV and
sometimes, as in the case of Grabinsky, circulated only in art or experimental
film and video festivals.
   More than music videos, Italian post-punk became visible on TV through live
performances. In 1982 Gaznevada put their reputation on the line by competing,
unsuccessfully, in the selections for the populist Sanremo music festival on the
family-oriented variety show Domenica In. Only the most pop-oriented post-
punk acts performed in the media event of Sanremo: Garbo (1984) and Denovo
(1988). Diaframma, Litfiba, Neon and Underground Life all performed at
L’Orecchiocchio (1982–1986) on Rai 3, maintaining intact their credibility, like
those featured in the Mister Fantasy documentaries on the scenes of Bologna and
Pordenone or on Videomusic. Krisma and CCCP – Fedeli alla Linea performed
on several generalist TV programs, injecting them with the threatening as much
as appealing deviancy proper of the outsiders. A truthful, backstage image of
Italian post-punk emerges from the documentary L’Ultimo Concerto (1984)
directed by Piergiorgio Gay on Frigidaire Tango for Rai 1, which, as band
member Carlo Casale has recounted, ‘told the problems of an independent band,
on the edge between the need to express their art and the conditional integration
into a society that was becoming that monster thirsty for money, arrogance and
power that distinguished the 1980s’.13
   A quintessential representation of Italian post-punk identity can be found in
Pirata! Cult Movie (1984), a low-budget film directed by Paolo Ciaffi Ricagno,
featuring post-punk acts Art Fleury, Jo Squillo, Gaznevada and the Great
Complotto (fig. 20). Set in a dystopian future, it tells the story of a ‘pirate’ on
roller skates arising against the totalitarian regime of the ‘Sognatore Supremo’
(Supreme Dreamer), who enacts his power through television and a violent
armed force. In the name of the ‘video-negativi’ (video-negatives), an obscure
movement of resistance, the pirate steals the ‘cappello dei sogni’ (hat of the
dreams) from the dictator; then is chased through Turin’s foggy streets and
nightlife venues by guards and his own mother. He eventually infiltrates the TV
station from where whoever owns the hat can divulgate the dreams that keep
the population under control. But as he tries to disrupt the system, he remains


 Domenico Baldini, MTV. Il Nuovo Mondo della Televisione (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2000), p. 167.
12
13
  Carlo Casale, ‘Il Tango era nel Congelatore’ in Gli Altri Ottanta. Racconti dalla Galassia Post-
Punk Italiana, ed. by Livia Satriano (Milan: Agenzia X, 2015), p. 40.

                                                                                               57
                                    Francesco Spampinato


                                                                            Fig. 20: Pirata! Cult
                                                                            Movie, 1984, 35
                                                                            mm, 95’, Color.
                                                                            Director: Paolo
                                                                            Ricagno.




embedded within it and his image broadcast. The most successful achievement
of the film, which media scholar Rossella Catanese has defined ‘an interesting
model of cinematic remediation of comic book and video culture’,14 is its ability
not only to represent media technologies but to accelerate their alienating effects,
exposing the mechanism of fictionalization enacted by media.
   Around the mid 1980s, post-punk bands faced the ethical choice of either
compromising with the mainstream or disbanding. Those who compromised
tried to maintain as much autonomy as possible. CCCP – Fedeli alla Linea, for
example, which self-defined as a ‘filo-Soviet punk’ band, staged performances
at the crossroads of political forums and vaudeville shows, glorifying left-wing
values while parodying mass culture with their aesthetics and lyrics. Their blurring
of political faith and parody reached a point of no return in 1989, the year they
performed in Moscow, which was also the year of the fall of Communism and
of the Berlin Wall. For the release of their album Canzoni Preghiere Danze del


 Rossella Catanese, ‘Pirates: The Punk and Post-Punk Scene in Italy’, Bianco e Nero. Rivista
14

Quadrimestrale del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 585 (November 2016), 51–59 (pp. 52–53).

58
                   Cathode Mamma: Post-punk and Television in Italy




       Fig. 21: CCCP – Fedeli alla Linea, TV commercials for the release of the album
              Canzoni Preghiere Danze del II Millennio – Sezione Europa, 1989.
                                 Producer: Virgin Records.


II Millennio – Sezione Europa (Virgin 1989), their label produced four sarcastic
TV commercials for Videomusic, in which each of the band’s members offers a
hilarious parody of a promotional video, filmed in a studio that recalls that of a
real TV newscast, merging a propaganda agenda with the style and language of
TV news and shopping channels (fig. 21).
   Although made in the late 1990s, way beyond the timespan discussed,
two late projects by Krisma provide the ultimate examples of post-punk’s
deconstructionist approach to television. One was their nightly TV program
Sat Sat (1995–1996) for Rai 3, made of chaotic cut-ups of various TV channels
from across world. The other was the satellite channel Krisma TV (1998–2002),
produced by Eutelsat Communications, made of live footage from the Cocoricò
club in Riccione (where the duo worked as DJs) and disorienting loops of
samples from a variety of sources, distorted through fisheye and other lysergic
editing techniques, on a hypnotic techno soundtrack. After almost two decades,
Krisma were finally able to establish their own Cathode Mamma. Interestingly
enough, during the same timeframe a ‘Supreme Dreamer’ named Berlusconi
expanded from the small TV channel Telemilano 58, which he had bought in
1978, to the three-channel empire Fininvest (later Mediaset) comprising Canale
5, Italia 1, and Rete 4. Through TV, Berlusconi developed impressive strategies
of consensus-building, which he then applied to political marketing, forming the
centre-right political party Forza Italia and eventually becoming Prime Minister
for nine years between 1994 and 2011.
   Berlusconi became a target for artistic and political resistance only in the
1990s. In retrospect, however, it is interesting to note how Italian post-punk’s
deconstructionist approach to television prophesized the risks implied in the
                                                                                        59
                                   Francesco Spampinato


manipulation of mass media under neoliberalism. To this extent, Mark Fisher’s
considerations on Manchester band Joy Division, a quintessential incarnation
of the post-punk ethos, are illuminating: ‘Listen to JD now, and you have the
inescapable impression that the group were catatonically challenging our present,
their future. […] It has become increasingly clear that 1979-1980, the years with
which the group will always be identified, was a threshold moment – the time
when a whole world (social, democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete,
and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to
show themselves’.15 The same is true, albeit with some variations, for Italian post-
punk, whose schizophrenic relationship with television is symptomatic of how
artistic forms of critical thinking were no longer exclusive domain of the visual
arts but could be employed to dismantle mass media from within.




     Fig. 22: Krisma, Krisma TV, 1998–2002. Stills from the satellite TV channel Krisma TV
                            produced by Eutelsat Communications.




15
  Mark Fisher, Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (London:
John Hunt Publishing, 2014), p. 50.

60
