A high-def version of the recently-posted “Cinema Italiano”/Nine music video appeared today. Nobody will be free to say anything about the film until mid-December, but I can at least mention that Nine offers a three-second shot of Positano (also in the trailer from the 10 to 12 second mark), and that this gave me a pleasant jolt, sending me back to my brief visit there in late May 2007.
I completely understand and agree with the view of Italian sophistos that Positano has been degraded by the tour buses and hee-haw Americans who keep the local economy going. I remember being in a Positano internet cafe and overhearing a guy with some kind of Kentucky or Tennessee accent using the international land line and speaking or bellowing too loudly (“Great Italian fewd!”), and immediately flinching and saying to myself, “Uh-oh…the Cancun crowd is here.”
But it’s such a beautiful place anyway. The feeling of being cut off from the world is so special and serene. The magnificent Moorish architecture, the 45 or 50 degree incline, the view from a cheap hilltop restaurant that Jett and I visited during magic hour, etc. I’d go there again in a heartbeat.
I took this video myself with my old silver Canon with the fish-eye lens:
