Co-written with Alan O’Leary, “Violence and the Wretched: The Cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo”, The Italianist, 29(2), 2009, 249-264. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Violence and the wretched: The Cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo
THE ITALIANIST (FILM ISSUE), 2009
The multimodal and dialogic resources of cinema make it a privileged means of experiencing the complex modalities of violent conflict in the modern world. In this sense we can say that the cinema of the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo offers an invaluable resource: the central role of mediatic depiction in the process of defining political action as legitimate or illegitimate insists we pay close attention to the work of a filmmaker who evinces a consistent and evolving concern with the nature and representation of political violence. (I'm embarrassed about this article now: the auteurist approach seems to me unreflective, and the piece recycles some cliches and errors, since pointed out by other more attentive scholars. But it represents a stage in thinking that achieved better results in my 2019 monograph on the film.)
This piece gives a short overview of the body of Italian films that deal with the terrorism of the 'anni di piombo', the period from roughly late 1969 to the early 1980s. The article considers the films from the point of view of theme, approach (direct, displaced, allegorical etc.), and especially period (different decades). Note that several important films have been distributed since the writing of this piece, so it's rather dated, and some of my conclusions now seem to me reductive.
La production cinématographique italienne s’est nettement emparée, depuis la fin des années 1990, de la période dite des ‘années de plomb’, avec des ambitions et dans des registres divers, du film noir à la fresque historique, en passant par le drame intimiste. L’objet de cet article est d’examiner spécifiquement, et en particulier dans les œuvres les plus récentes, comment une parole singulière, celle du terroriste, peut être portée à l’écran, et ainsi s’articuler avec les aspects historiques, psychologiques et narratifs du récit. Aussi, de la rhétorique de la confession à l’ambiguïté du repentir (La Meglio Gioventù, 2003, Arrivederci amore, ciao, 2006), le cinéma peut-il apparaître comme une manière paradoxale de verbaliser les crises politiques, de mettre en mots, par le biais de la mise en images. En donnant par exemple la parole à des héros, d’ailleurs le plus souvent des anti-héros, qui commentent leur propre chute dans la violence ou la contestation armée (Prima linea, 2009), c’est en effet bien un discours que l’on construit, sur les formes légitimes ou illégitimes de la contestation, sur le sens et la portée de l’action individuelle dans une conjoncture politique, mais aussi et surtout sur la signification d’une histoire politique encore douloureuse. Que le cinéma puisse ainsi permettre de dire, ou de faire dire, doit toutefois nous conduire à interroger les finalités de ce didactisme, parfois explicite (Mio fratello è figlio unico, 2007 ; Una storia italiana, 2010). Car si l’on attend du terroriste une parole de repentir, c’est d’emblée qu’on lui ôte la dimension d’un témoignage historique, ou d’un choix politique : le cinéma renoue ici avec ces racines tragiques, puisqu’il se fait alors mise en scène de la faute, et de son expiation.
Review of Christian Uva (ed.), Schermi di piombo: il terrorismo nel cinema italiano
Cinema has played a prominent role in articulating the impact of the so-called ‘anni di piombo’ and in defining the ways in which Italians assimilate and remember the events of the long 1970s. Each passing year sees the release of one or more films addressing the traumas of the period and the terrorism that is its best remembered feature. Christian Uva’s Schermi di piombo was the first published volume to be devoted to a theme that has attracted increasing attention because of the reception of films like La meglio gioventù (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003), Buongiorno, notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003), Romanzo criminale (Michele Placido, 2005), and Il divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008), all of which feature terrorism as a key element in their ‘tainted heritage’ version of modern Italian history.
The "Betrayed Resistance" in Valentino Orsini’s Corbari (1970) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976)
Italian public discourse over national memory and identity often turns on the issue of ‘divided memories.’ Here I focus on a subset of this problematic issue, the contestation over the legacy of the Resistance in the 1970s. Within this context, the films Corbari (Valentino Orsini, 1970) and 1900 (Novecento, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976) offer differing responses to challenges posed to the Resistance myth by the post-1968 social movements. Comparison of these two films highlights some of the difficulties facing filmmakers and the left in general in the 1970s in addressing the Resistance’s achievements, or limited outcomes. Some of the topics dealt with in this article include antifascism as a figure of national identity (reflected in the attempt of these filmmakers to provide popular epics of the partisan war) and the troubled connections between the memory of the Resistance and terrorism in the 1970s. Making use of recent work on Italian cinema and terrorism, as well as public memory and antifascism, I consider how these films address the problematic status of Resistance memory in their own time, as well as what they reveal for longerterm commemoration or memory of the partisan war.
Introduction: Terrorism, Italian Style
"The legacy of Italy’s experience of political violence and terrorism in the period known as the anni di piombo [years of lead], c. 1969-83, continues to exercise the Italian imagination and that of its filmmakers to an extraordinary degree. The resurgence of terrorist activity on the national as well as the global stage during the first decade of the new millennium contributed to a political and cultural return to the widespread, enduring political violence that culminated in two emblematic events: on the left, in the kidnapping and murder by the Brigate Rosse (BR) of Democrazia Cristiana (DC) president, Aldo Moro, in 1978; on the right, in the devastating bombing of the Bologna train station by a neo-fascist group in 1980. In the cultural arena, cinema has played a particularly prominent role in articulating the ongoing impact of the anni di piombo and in defining the ways in which Italians remember and work through the events of the 1970s. Each year sees the release of one or more films addressing the atrocities and traumas of those years. The persistence of the cinematic return and the strength of feeling surrounding the reception of recent films addressing the events and legacy of political violence bear witness to the degree to which the anni di piombo are deemed to impact on present-day conditions, and to the contentious nature of the representation of political violence."
The Italianist, 2023
This article studies the cultural function of the representation of violence in Italian polizieschi of the 1970s within the historical context of the anni di piombo. Focusing especially on the representation of victims in the filone, the article claims that polizieschi presented for the first time a particular aesthetics of victimhood that I call ‘aesthetics of random violence’. I retrace the experiential core of this aesthetics in the filone’s recurring representation of imperilled, wounded, or dead children. The pervasive presence of this representation has so far remained practically unregistered in Italian studies scholarship. I therefore propose a novel periodisation of the filone based on the evolution of the aesthetics here described. Finally, I argue that through this aesthetics polizieschi allowed viewers a communal catharsis that reinforced the bonds between them as a united social body against the violence produced by terrorism and organized crime. SOMMARIO Questo articolo analizza la funzione culturale della rappresentazione della violenza nei film polizieschi italiani degli anni ’70 all’interno del contesto storico degli anni di piombo. L’articolo si concentra nello specifico sulla rappresentazione delle vittime nel filone e sull’emergere di una particolare “estetica della violenza casuale” che la caratterizzava e che viene qui presentata come categoria critica. Si individua il nucleo esperienziale di questa estetica nella presenza ricorrente di bambini in pericolo, feriti o morti nel genere, aspetto finora trascurato nella ricerca accademica sul filone. Viene quindi proposta una nuova periodizzazione del genere basata sull’evoluzione dell’estetica della violenza casuale qui analizzata. Infine, l’articolo dimostra come, attraverso questa estetica, i film polizieschi consentissero agli spettatori di raggiungere una catarsi collettiva che rafforzava i legami tra di loro come corpo sociale unito contro la violenza prodotta dal terrorismo e dalla criminalità organizzata.