Venice Screens the Machinery of Power

The Venice Film Festival opened this week with two portraits of the machinery of influence. Danny Boyle's 'Ink' traces the rise of a British tabloid empire, while Maggie Gyllenhaal, chairing the jury, pointed to a 'systemic problem' in an industry where only two of the competing films are directed by women. Seen from our pages, the juxtaposition is not accidental. Both stories concern who gets to shape a public narrative — and who is left out of it.

Italy has a long acquaintance with the power of the press baron and the politics of the image. The world's coverage of this country often arrives through the same filters the festival critiques: the tabloid instinct for scandal, the reduction of complex societies to a few marketable frames. When foreign journalists write of Italian political instability or the latest migration standoff, they are engaged in the same act of selection that Boyle dramatises — choosing which details deserve the front page.

Gyllenhaal's observation about the scarcity of female directors in competition is a reminder that the stories we see are not a neutral record. The same could be said of international reporting on Italy, which tends to favour the dramatic over the structural: the collapsing government rather than the slow demographic decline, the migrant boat rather than the ageing village. Neither is untrue; both are incomplete.

What the festival offers, in its best moments, is a corrective to the shorthand. A film can hold a contradiction for two hours in a way a headline cannot. The question for our own trade is whether journalism can do the same — whether we can report the scandal without losing the system that produces it, and name the problem without reducing the people who live within it to statistics.

Venice, as ever, is a stage for the world to examine its own reflection. This year the reflection shows an industry — and by extension a press — struggling with its own exclusions. We would do well to watch with the same honesty we demand of others.