Portraying the Black Pope: Style and Politics in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo

The present article argues that the debate on the politics and aesthetics of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo would benefit from the introduction of the categories of such constructivist film theorists as Eisenstein and Chion. A close analysis of Sorrentino’s stylized use of film form will suggest that a constructivist reading of the film – that is, a reading based on a paradigm in film theory for which the problems generated by the existence of a reality outside the film are of limited importance – will be able to provide an account of the aesthetics of Sorrentino’s film that is simpler, but not less cogent, than those based on the concepts of realism, post-realism and post-modernism. In my closing remarks, I argue that such ‘constructivist’ use of film form allows Sorrentino to mould his story into a universal allegory of power and its contradictions, where Andreotti is ultimately portrayed as the embodiment of Carl Schmitt’s katechon.