TESTA C Italian political cinema: Surveying ... (original) (raw)

Italian political cinema: Surveying a once glorious genre in times of anguish

The 2005 Cornell Entralogos Conference has provided me with the welcome opportunity to develop some theoretical reflections on the ways in which, on the one hand, literature, and more in general arts and the humanities, contribute to shaping the world - but, also on the other hand, on how different “worlds” (different historical and cultural realities, that is) bring about a correspondingly diverse gamut of artistic creations.

This paper of mine, then, arises within the context of an overarching theoretical exploration inspired by the theme of the Conference: “Art Makes a Difference / Difference Makes Art.” In my intention, the symmetry of this proposition aims not for a selfreferential form of witticism but for an almost mimetic reproduction of the endless circulation - in some sense, indeed, the circularity - of the exchanges that obtain between culture and society. Which of the two comes first? Neither, it goes without saying. Which of the two comes second? Both, of course.

Because in the Entralogos context I will dwell in some detail on the theoretical issues underpinning my interest in literature and culture, in the present pages I shall focus instead on some specific historical aspects of the dialectics between Italian society and Italian cinema. In particular, I shall concentrate on what it has become customary to describe by the term “political cinema,” as well as some of its reverberations in a genre not normally associated with it: the “comedy Italian style.” The two sections on cinema politico and commedia all’italiana will thus constitute the two main articulations of my argument. However, since I cannot assume a specific familiarity with post-WWII Italy among the interdisciplinary community of my readers, I shall introduce those two mini-chapters by a prologue presenting, in broad strokes, the relevant socio-historical context of the peninsula.

At the end, I shall return to considerations of a more general cultural import about the challenges of the times in which we live.

Prologue in Italy

Time it was when Italian society was very different from what it is today. The Italy of the first generation following the end of WWII - let us say, from 1945 until approximately the time of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death in 1975 - was by and large a provincial country, struggling to make up for centuries of economic and cultural backwardness. Italy was an industrious but poor country, stifled by the lack of commerce and industry (in the modern sense); and, she was afflicted by enormous imbalances between different regions. These imbalances caused millions of people to migrate in search of a better life - abroad of course, and even more so, internally - but rarely allowed them to find la dolce vita at their intended destination: a film such as Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960) is a magisterial testimony to such a sad state of affairs.

Italy was then a country enjoying a limited sovereignty, hemmed in as she was, on the one hand, by the specific demands put on her political system by one foreign country - the Vatican - and, on the other, by the obligations she had assumed vis-à-vis the U.S. by accepting Marshall Plan aid in 1947 and by joining NATO in 1948. Later on, in 1957, came the Rome Treaty, with membership in the European Economic Community; and with it, the need to align her policies with the newly acquired, and noticeably more powerful, French and German partners. Italy was furthermore blighted by an ill-trained, ill-equipped civil service; by poor public infrastructures and services (roads, trains, kindergartens, schools, universities, hospitals, medical coverage); and by archaic laws and practices, particularly inimical to the protection (in fact, outright cruel and intolerant toward) the weak, the marginal, the minoritarian. In other words, the Italy of the immediate post-WWII years truly was what in Scritti corsari Pasolini called, by an almost untranslatable term, “l’Italietta”: the diminutive conveying, for him, the idea of something phoney and inadequate.

The political pillar of this impaired democracy, characterized, as Giorgio Galli was later to put it, by an “imperfect bipartitism,” was the dominant entity in the ruling center-right coalition: the Democrazia Cristiana, or DC. This was a motley interclassist cartel assembling, under the Catholic banner and the protection of Vatican hierarchy:

“L’Italietta” surely had some redeeming, indeed perfectly attractive features economic, political and cultural - and it would simply be unintelligent not to recognize this. What needs to be praised right away in these areas is that the newly born, post-Fascist Italy:

The problem, political as well as cultural, was that the nature of Italy’s geopolitical position guaranteed deadlock all the way into the foreseeable future: the Communist-led left-of-center bloc was simply never going to have the numbers necessary (let alone be allowed by Italy’s allies) to alternate in power with the conservative alliance led by the Christian Democrats - not least because a substantial part of the working class, i.e. its Catholic segment, was organized in the name and under the political hegemony of conservative assemblies (not only the DC but also Azione Cattolica and the ACLI, the DC’s cultural arms).

In the cultural arena, in particular, the cards were stacked in such a way that all sources of centralized policy were in the hands of the catholic party: so were schools, most newspapers and magazines, most publishing houses, and first and foremost, radio and television. Whenever the cultural industry deviated from the mandates emanating from such centers of power, as was for example the case with the early spread of neorealism in cinema, the system could - and did - respond with ruthless cultural attacks and vicious measures of politico-economic repression. (The Christian-Democrats Giulio Andreotti and Oscar Maria Scalfaro, destined to reap great political laurels in their subsequent careers, made in just this way what Balzac would have called their débuts dans la vie). While film producers and distributors were comparatively independent economic agents, and as such did not act as mere “stooges of the Vatican,” none of them could - or, for that matter, wished to stretch freedom to the point of ignoring the balance of power prevailing in Roman corridors

at any given time; and, until well into the 1970s, they knew that when push came to shove they had to fall back into the party’s line.

To summarize. On the economic plane, the “imperfect bipartitism” of the Italian Republic (or, should I argue more exactly, of the first Italian Republic, 1946-1993) - could be defined by the two complementary terms capitalism and assistentialism. On the other hand, in the cultural sphere the overarching historical principle of those years was that of paternalism: a paternalism attempting to mold the country (to paraphrase ironically an expression which was current at the time, only with reference to Communism) - in the image and likeness of a “Catholicism with a human face.” Increasingly so over the years, out was the inquisitorial or, at least, hierarchical perception of the Roman church, typical of the Counterreformation and the age of the industrial revolution; and, especially after the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council (1962-65), in was the view of Catholicism as a congregation of the “People of God,” assembled in tolerance and on a foot of equality with other confessions and religions.

Now, the media obviously played a decisive role in implementing fully the plan of Catholic cultural hegemony; and this explains why the DC held firmly in its hands the control of radio and TV, both exclusively State-owned until the second half of the 1970s. Only then did new technologies and behind-the-scenes politics begin to chip away at the monolith. (Thirty years later, the entire apparatus is no longer owned by a single political party, but - by a single politicized man; all of it legally, if not necessarily legitimately).

It has been convincingly argued by historians that, after the fall of Fascism, Italy got " a liberal Constitution, a Catholic government, and fascist laws." (The latter occurred because, the arrival of political democracy notwithstanding, legal codes were only marginally touched up in the transition). This broadly accurate assessment needs, it seems to me, to be complemented on the “fourth” side of the social arena by a similarly condensed formula: after 1945, in cultural matters Italy got a government policy of educational parochialism. And it could be of little comfort to Italians that at least part of the problem had originated, long before, in the deep-seated, provincial xenophobia typical of Fascism.

This is why, in Italy, the comparatively free and diversified galaxy of cinema became such a hugely important political conduit during the 30 to 35 years that followed the end of WWII.

Think of it this way. On the country’s polarized political horizon, not only were the rapporti di forza - the relative political weights - fixed, pretty much once and for all, in Parliament as outside it; to a large extent, so too were individual political opinions, which were not really subject to sudden reversals linked to contingent events. True, some allowance needs to be made for a number of Communist intellectuals who left the party at

the time of the invasion of Hungary in 1956; but these did not, in any case, convert to Catholicism for that reason. Parliament, newspapers (whether organs of parties or “independent” ones), schools … and TV programs least of all … provided no real debate; they simply supplied space for the assertion of general beliefs, stated against those of others. Grand philosophical systems faced one another without interacting.

In the Italy of those years, debate could only occur in a space removed from the mutually opposed propaganda systems: in the detail, on issues. And this is just what happened in cinema. This is why, firstly, for a full generation Italian cinema politico could flourish (all the more so after the watershed year of 1968). And, secondly, this is also why, as I shall proceed to argue, for a full generation much of the apparently non-committal Italian cinema could be - indeed, in some sense, had to be - of a political nature: there was simply no comparable, high-profile public forum (of nazional-popolare relevance, as Gramsci would have it) where one could seriously air out specific issues of any consequence.

As we undertake to examine the emblematic case of Italian post-WWII political cinema, both in its self-professed variant and in some more general and pervasive recurrences, we will be able to test in practice the hypothesis that, while indeed art can impact society and thus make it deeply different from what it could have been, no less certainly a different kind of society - a questioning, creative society, in need of new means of expression - will create questioning, creative, new art forms. My own position is admittedly not a neutral one on this matter: indeed, I would personally go as far as arguing that only a questioning, creative society, in search for new means of expression, can ensure the existence of art forms able to stamp the artistic and historic becoming for a long time into the future.

I

Italian political cinema:
The canon and its shortcomings

The first obviously political Italian filmmakers of the postwar period were the four great neorealist masters: Giuseppe De Santis, Vittorio De Sica (with the scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini), Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti - whose main works were produced from the second half of the 40s until the early 60s. Countless books have been written about them, and I will therefore refrain from illustrating once more the merits of the well-known four-plus-one “Founding Fathers” of neorealism. That said, in a moment I will have to

make an exception for De Santis, who (despite Antonio Vitti’s passionate scholarship) has been marginalized more than most in North America, and who in my opinion richly deserves a second discovery by our professional establishment.

About a decade later, starting from the mid-50s and well into the crisis-ridden 1980s, began the flourishing of a second wave of post-neorealist auteurs. Among these, the ones most current in this continent are probably Francesco Rosi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Gillo Pontecorvo, Elio Petri, and Lina Wertmüller. These are collectively scrutinized in an ambitious 1986 book by Michalczyk devoted to Italian cinema politico, and of course in a gigantic corpus of individual monographs beside that. I will thus - reluctantly - resist the temptation to address in any way these variously deserving Magnificent Seven, as their cases are not only well established in and of themselves but, more to the point, relatively well known to the North American public. I will limit myself to alluding here, in passing, to one particularly poignant critical item: an historical essay by Rosi which I was lucky enough to translate, and which was published in 1996 by Greenwood Praeger as an appendix to a collective book devoted to that director. To learn first-hand from a major protagonist about the relationship between those two generations, may I refer my readers to Rosi’s lucid and informative account.

At the most general level, it is obvious that Michalczyk’s book inevitably raises as many questions as it answers. First, the label “political filmmaking” is both too short and too long a blanket for the group of directors Michalczyk undertakes to analyze. It is too short, because it leaves out De Santis and a few other important filmmakers to whom I shall turn my attention shortly; and at the same time it is too long because it covers many films above all by Rossellini, Bertolucci and Wertmüller - whose intentions are not primarily political in the more restricted sense I just alluded to. And second … But I shall return later to the area where a purely phenomenological approach to the “political” business begins seriously to fray at the edges.

1.

If we examine carefully Michalczyk’s choice of individual auteurs, then four names should immediately be added as canonical to those admitted by him: Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Ettore Scola, and the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. All of these were (at least during the age of the Christian-Democrat regime) close to the positions of the Italian Communist Party, and as political as any filmmaker could wish to be - certainly on average more so than, say, Rossellini or Bertolucci.

Giuseppe De Santis was the fourth founder of neorealism, alongside Visconti, Rossellini and De Sica. Throughout his entire career he identified with the political and

artistic premises of that movement, and no survey of Italian cinema - much less of Italian political cinema - can exclude him. De Santis’s three most important films date from the years of the Cold War.

Tragic Hunt (Caccia tragica, 1947) re-visits the robbery-cum-chase genre, but innovatively, and significantly, identifies the aggrieved party with a co-op of revolutionary land laborers fighting against owners of large estates. Those were just the years when demonstrating landless peasants would routinely be shot at and killed by the Italian police.

In 1949, the melodramatic and, for the times, noticeably erotic Bitter Rice (Riso amaro) was a major triumph for De Santis, and the first one for Silvana Mangano - who would then, incidentally, proceed to a less than revolutionary lifestyle by marrying the producer Dino De Laurentiis. In Bitter Rice, impoverished rice-pickers from the Italian North-East, the Veneto, seek seasonal work in the rice fields of the Italian North-West, Lombardy and Piedmont, and get more than their fair share of exploitation in an unsurpassed classic of neorealist cinema.

No Peace Among the Olive Trees (Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, 1950) rehearses a sadly known narrative pattern in naturalistic story-telling: upon returning home from war, a downtrodden shepherd discovers that a better-connected neighbor has stolen his herd. Expecting no redress from the State, he proceeds to make his own justice. He is therefore jailed and thus becomes, from mere marginal, a criminal in name and in fact. That said, it is again innovative and significant that in De Santis the shepherd’s plight makes other shepherds aware of their intolerable condition, so that a new desire for political organization and self-defence is born among them.

Carlo Lizzani made his debut as a scriptwriter for Rossellini, De Santis and Lattuada. As a director, Lizzani is best known for a number of films re-created from politically engagé masterpieces of literary neorealism: Chronicles of Poor Lovers (Cronache di poveri amanti, 1954, from Vasco Pratolini); The Bitter Life (La vita agra, 1964, from Luciano Bianciardi); and Fontamara (1980, from Ignazio Silone’s novel by the same title).

Lizzani made two films on the dying days of Mussolini’s pro-Nazi republic, whose “capital” was in the Northern resort town of Salò. His most significant claim to fame, however, may well lie in a similarly oriented film - the self-explanatorily titled Achtung Banditen! (1951), his opus primum, which portrays the plight of the armed Resistenza in 1943-45. The Resistenza involved the thousands of Italians, old and young, women and men, who fought Fascism with weapons in their hands - and were, of course, labeled “bandits” by the invaders and their puppet supporters.

Ettore Scola is an auteur who has been active in many genres - costume films, recreations from literature, commedia all’italiana - but who deserves a substantial mention

in the area of explicit political commitment on the strength of what are perhaps his three most important films.

Trevico-Turin: A Voyage into Fiat-Nam (Trevico-Torino: viaggio nel Fiat-Nam, 1973), is a docudrama straddling autobiography and fiction, which narrates the trauma of Southern migrants upon their arrival in the northern assembly lines of Fiat in Turin. The self-evident allusion to a combat zone needed no elucidation for Italian viewers at a time when the VietNam war was most acutely raging - as were anti-war demonstrations across the world.

We Had All Loved Each Other (C’eravamo tanto amati, 1974) is that rare bird, a symbolic “comedy Italian style,” where the woman who is positioned at the center of the plot (played by Stefania Sandrelli), and who stands in for Italian democracy, is wooed by three men in sequence: a destitute intellectual, a Communist hospital worker, and a dishonest lawyer. Sadly, the three men were good friends in their youth, and all took part in the Resistenza; but the political and economic realities of postwar development ensure that the one among them who does well only succeeds in his social climbing by becoming complicit in all sorts of shady deals - from real estate speculation to tax evasion, to a Machiavellian callousness toward his bourgeois wife, and more in the same vein.

Lastly, The Terrace (La terrazza, 1979) is a remarkable feat in what could be considered an original - both ironic and bittersweet - subgenre in Italian cinema: that devoted to the dilemmas of Communist cadres, politicians, and in general, intellectuals in a context in which the adversary party has been in power since the dawn of democratic time (i.e., for about 30-35 years) - and, moreover, seems set to hang on there forever because of the deadlock created by the Cold War. For the good of the adepts, millennial regeneration must happen at some point; it cannot be indefinitely postponed - or else, a peculiar political disease will spread, which could well be called “the Comrade Godot syndrome”: one day Comrade Godot will arrive and revolutionize the world … but when? That is the problem. No surprise if, in the years when The Terrace was made, Andreotti was credited with having quipped (cynically, as is his wont): “Absolute power corrupts absolutely … those who do not hold it.”
(Among the germane films, those that most readily come to mind are: Florestano Vancini’s The Seasons of Our Love / Le stagioni del nostro amore, 1966; the Tavianis’ The Subversives / I sovversivi, 1967; Francesco Maselli’s Letter To an Evening Paper / Lettera a un giornale della sera, 1970; and of course, Nanni Moretti’s much later Palombella rossa, 1989. I will also mention the Tavianis’ comparable Saint Michael in a moment).

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani can perhaps best be characterized by a synthetic analogy with Visconti: as Visconti, they too are intellectuals, astoundingly well read in literature and

history, who cherish music, and melodrama more in particular. Their filmmaking has been inspired by twentieth-century Italian literature (Pirandello above all), by the history of the Italian labor movement, the nationalist age of Risorgimento in the 1800s, and the Resistenza; they have re-created films from authors such as Homer, Goethe (twice), and their all-time favorite, Tolstoy (three times).

The Tavianis’ must-see film in our present context is Saint Michael Had a Rooster (San Michele aveva un gallo, 1971). This is the story of the fictional nineteenth-century revolutionist Giulio Manieri. Manieri, who hails from an affluent family, abandons the comforts of his stand and opts instead for a humble lifestyle as an ice-cream vendor. Having in vain attempted to foment a revolt in central Italy, Manieri is captured and undergoes a mock execution in front of a firing squad. At the last moment, capital punishment is commuted into a life term; but, thanks to his extraordinary, visionary willpower, Manieri successfully manages to withstand protracted isolation. Eventually, during a transfer by boat from one jail to another in the Venice lagoon, Manieri has a chance to meet the younger revolutionists about whom he has long fantasized during the years of his enforced solitude. However, this coincidental encounter proves shocking: Manieri suddenly realizes that the political line he clings to is outdated and incompatible with that of the upcoming generation. Without uttering so much as a word, he leaps to his death from the launch that is transporting him.

Saint Michael was highly topical when it appeared: in 1971, it could seem that the later, “scientific” revolutionary world-view had definitely replaced Manieri’s voluntaristic, “romantic” one based on propaganda by the act (i.e., terrorism). Little did Italians suspect that, shortly after the release of the film, the 1970s saw an ominous comeback of a certain terrorist tradition, which culminated, at the end of that decade, in the abduction and killing of the centrist politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades.
2.

De Santis, Lizzani, Scola and the Tavianis must definitely be added to the list of the “household” names generally associated, in the minds of the North American public and critics, with politically committed filmmaking. Having done this, however, we are still short of exhaustiveness: even by applying the term cinema politico in its narrowest possible sense, it is still unfair not to dwell adequately on directors such as, for example:

Francesco Maselli, author of Breaking Ranks (Gli sbandati, 1955); Heirs Apparent (I delfini, 1960); Open Letter to an Evening Paper (already alluded to, 1970); and The Suspect (Il sospetto, 1975);

Giuliano Montaldo, who made Gott mit uns (1970); Sacco and Vanzetti (1971, to be shown at the Entralogos 2005 conference); Giordano Bruno (1973); Agnese Is Going to Die (L’Agnese va a morire, 1977); and The Golden Eyeglasses (Gli occhiali d’oro, 1987);

Valentino Orsini, who directed A Man to Be Burned (Un uomo da bruciare, 1962); The Outlaws of Marriage (I fuorilegge del matrimonio, 1963) (both in cooperation with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani); and The Wretched of the Earth (I dannati della terra, 1968, inspired by Franz Fanon’s homonymous book);

Antonio Pietrangeli, who directed Adua and Her Workmates (Adua e le compagne, 1960); The Woman from Parma (La parmigiana, 1963); and I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene, 1965);
and alphabetically last but artistically not least, Florestano Vancini, author of The Long Night of 1943 (La lunga notte del '43, 1960); The Seasons of Our Love, already mentioned (1966); Bronte: Chronicle of a Slaughter Forgotten by History Books (Bronte. Cronaca di un massacro che i libri di storia hanno dimenticato, 1972); and The Matteotti Murder (Il delitto Matteotti, 1973).
3.

For the record, I should warn my readers that I am not even attempting to touch upon the Italian political filmmakers still active at this time. This latest wave is smaller in size than the preceding ones, though perhaps even more remarkable, in our day and age, for its civic (and, on occasion, … financial) courage. Among these auteurs, one must count above all:

Marco Tullio Giordana, best known for Curse You, I’ll Love You (Maledetti vi amerò, 1980); The Fall of the Rebel Angels (La caduta degli angeli ribelli, 1981); Pasolini: An Italian Crime (Pasolini, un delitto italiano, 1995); One Hundred Steps (I cento passi, 2000); and The Best of Youth (La meglio gioventù, 2002);

Giuseppe Ferrara, who made Spy Face (FacCIA di spia, 1975); Panagulis Lives (Panagulis vive, 1981); One Hundred Days in Palermo (Cento giorni a Palermo, 1984); The Moro Case (Il caso Moro, 1986); Giovanni Falcone (1993); State Secret (Segreto di Stato, 1995); and God’s Bankers (I banchieri di Dio, 2002; the film is currently under judicial seizure pending a libel suit);
and easily the best known in today’s lot, Nanni Moretti, to whom we owe I am an Autarkist (Io sono un autarchico, 1976); Ecce Bombo (1978); Mass is Over (La messa è finita, 1985); Palombella rossa (1989); and April (Aprile, 1998).

II

The political dimension of the commedia all’italiana

Political cinema? That is a pretty obvious label - but, in some respects at least, perhaps not even the most revealing one. Everything is political, and the 1960s and 70s, in particular, knew this very well: “The personal is political,” affirmed one slogan then much in favor at political rallies. Only, everything is political in different ways. The difference of Italy, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, could make art - could make cinema - in ways that were so diverse and ever-present as to make it virtually impossible to constrict that “politicization” within a single category.

What follows, thus, is but a brief attempt on my part to show that in the Italian cinema of the First Republic the cinema politico term, used as a keyword to identify face-value political storylines, is a search engine destined to miss out on a great bounty of exquisitely political issues that, for the reasons already alluded to, could not find adequate articulation inside a univocal conceptual box. As a consequence, such issues were instead broached at the border with, or well inside the territory of, a genre that (at least in North America, and for reasons too complex to be dealt with here) is usually considered an unlikely neighbor to political cinema. I am alluding to the political dimension of the commedia all’italiana.

To understand better what kind of political art the difference of Italian society was able to make, let us now turn to a few - inevitably very few - of what I suggest we call the “shadow-debate” films produced during the Christian-Democrat era. To prioritize the analysis of their political subtext, I shall arrange them by political rubric / heading, rather than by director; in this manner, the logic of their often not-so-subconscious political positions will stand out.

1.

Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy from 1900 to 1946, left Italian troops without orders on September 8th, 1943, when the armistice with the Allies was announced. Each unit in the Italian armed forces then had to make, within a matter of minutes, an autonomous decision as to whether a) ditch their uniforms, beg civilians for clothes, and passively take to hiding in barns and basements until the Allies would win the war; b) surrender to the Nazis, the new enemies, be disarmed by them, and be sent into forced labor camps in Germany; c) fight a much superior Wehrmacht and be exterminated; or d) cut the chain of command, withdraw to the hilltops, and from there begin an active guerrilla warfare against the occupying Nazi-Fascists. (Those who chose this last option formed the early nucleus of the armed Resistenza).

In view of the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of pointless deaths that this tragic and absurd situation caused, should Victor Emmanuel III (who, on the fatal day, proceeded to put himself and his family under the protection of Allied forces in Brindisi) be considered a mere incompetent fool, or a coward, or a war criminal? This is the curiosity that arises in the viewers’ minds as they amuse themselves over the picaresque misadventures - interspersed with plenty of tragedy and death - suffered by the ragged protagonists of Luigi Comencini’s Everyone Go Home (Tutti a casa, 1960).

Those who have seen this film won’t easily forget the scene where Lt. Innocenzi, played by Alberto Sordi, having been cut off from headquarters, must go to a street side cafe to phone his superiors. “Commander, Commander, this morning the Germans have gone nuts! They’ve allied themselves with the Americans, and they’ve started to bomb us!”
2.

How seriously should soldiers fight a war that they do not understand, much less believe in? Most of the many commedie all’italiana treating the commercially profitable genre of the “WWII movie” (about the regular army, not the Resistenza, that is), in one way or another treat this philosophically fundamental theme.

Ironically, their prototype - both chronologically and in artistic dignity - can be found in an exemplary tragicomedy about World War One: Mario Monicelli’s The Great War (La grande guerra, 1959).
3.

Has the Italian Republic been able to live up to the hopes and promises that came with the 1945 Liberation? That is to say: for the working class, has the Republic’s coming not merely amounted to replacing military service in Fascist armies with emigration and hard toil in mines and factories of foreign regions? For intellectuals, has the transition been anything more than the replacement of subservience to the National Fascist Party to servility toward some low-ranking bureaucrat or well-connected industrialist?

In other words, just how “democratic” has this democracy really been for average Italians?

These are the questions quite explicitly raised in Dino Risi’s A Difficult Life (Una vita difficile, 1961), which portrays the moral titubations of Silvio Magnozzi, a young man who comes of age at the end of the war. For the rest of his life Magnozzi wavers between, on the one hand, honesty and poverty cum economic failure, and on the other, financial rewards in his service as the buffoon of industrialists, politicians and prelates.

What is the true impact of the recent miracolo economico on the moral fiber of the populace? A thoroughly repulsive, monstrous one - as arm’s-length viewers tend to conclude when they watch the hilariously funny sketches contained in comedies such as Dino Risi’s The Widower (Il vedovo, 1959), Life in the Fast Lane (Il sorpasso, 1962), The Monsters (I mostri, 1963), and De Sica’s The Economic Boom (Il boom, 1963).
5.

How well are the laws of the new Republic living up to the wrenching changes wrought upon public mores by the social transformations intervened since the fall of Fascism? Italy’s family law, for one, certainly reflects a cruelly archaic state of affairs, unworthy of a nation claiming to be civilized: this is the obvious inference one arrives at, as one bitterly laughs through the stunts of Pietro Germi’s two Sicilian masterpieces Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana, 1961) and Seduced and Abandoned (Sedotta e abbandonata, 1964).
(The law has been changed since).
6.

Some Italians claim that the times are changing too fast … that under Him, the Duce, trains used to arrive on time - because railways were militarized and strikes were forbidden. Is it in fact true that, as a frequently heard claim would have it, “today’s Italian labor unions strike too much”?

For the entire national community, the beginnings of a sensible answer are offered by Mario Monicelli’s quasi-historical comedy The Organizer (I compagni, 1963), set in a factory in Turin and devoted to the early days of the Italian labor movement.
7.

Finally, will one of the countless coups which are being plotted by neo-Fascist Italian military, and which the press keeps denouncing, eventually succeed - if only by happenstance, if only by a tragicomic mistake on the part of the democratic Republic that is supposed to fight them off? This is just the issue facetiously raised by Mario Monicelli’s We Want the Colonels (Vogliamo i colonnelli, 1973), in an obvious allusion to the “regime of the colonels” that in 1968 deposed King Constantin of Greece and replaced him by a military dictatorship.

On this especially tragic subject matter, it is necessary to add that not just one but many investigations have been conducted, and books written, about the trame nere, the “threats to democracy” coming from extreme right-wing military and paramilitary forces, often linked

to the secret services and/or the powerful Italian Masonic lodge P2. Monicelli’s film peculiarly raised the specter of a spaghetti golpe in early 1973: this was one last time the subject could be discussed on the facetious mode, before the horrific news about political repression in Latin America - in Chile, then Argentina - made the issue simply too sensitive for treatment in a fiction film.
(Only a long time after the events would Italian cinema be able to show traces of such wounds in its own body. Among the very few films that had the courage to do so we can count Franco Bernini’s The Strong Hands / Le mani forti, 1997, on the murderous 1974 bombing of a labor union rally in Brescia, and Marco Bechis’s Garage Olimpo, 2002, on the plight of the Argentinian desaparecidos).

The films I just mentioned - and many other ones with similar traits, which our time limits and the limits of my own memory have prevented me from including in our discussion mobilize conceptual boundaries in such a way as to render problematic, to say the least, some conceptualizations in cinematic genres that we have been used to accepting as given once and for all.

III

“Politics” in a diffuse sense

The conclusion I draw from our all-too-brief incursion into the history of Italian cinema is that, in a certain period of its cultural history, Italian society was able to produce a large number of artifacts whose inscription in a political category was not due to their creators’ abstract decision to impose, from the outside, a political goal to their efforts. It was not an aa priori, idealist choice of theirs to opt for a “different” goal than that of mainstream commercial filmmaking (the standard fare presented in Mastroianni-Loren comedies, for example).

Far from that, from the present survey of the relevant cinema of that age it stands out clearly that democratic post-WWII Italy produced within herself such a strong current of internal political differentiation, and attendant cultural counterdiscourse, that this had to and did - spill over in all manners of artistic forms. The fact that, despite all manners of political pressure, such a wealth of cinema politico was then produced (and watched!) is an obvious first sign of this; but the fact that, well beyond the boundaries of a specific genre, an important segment of the commedia all’italiana, too, became political in a more diffuse

sense, is the ultimate proof of the power of cultural irradiation emanating from societies that are able to include a strong identification with a certain set of social and/or moral principles.

Outlook.

Art in times of anguish:
Counterdiscourse vs. “propa-tainment”

I would like to conclude with a final reflection related to both the explicitly political and the “shadow-debate” component of Italian cinema I have been discussing. In society, surely art does make a difference; and conversely, difference does make art. But therein a piece of potential harsh news lurks. By the same token, equally clearly it takes difference to make art; and when counterdiscursive political realities wilt, art does likewise.

A sad illustration of this state of affairs is offered by the shallow vistas generally available to observers of contemporary Italian cinema. Today, Berlusconi’s competitors are (literally) out of the picture: Cecchi Gori, for example, for commercial reasons, and RAI, because Berlusconi now runs that outfit himself. As a consequence, rare and tentative are the films that dare break out of the tritest intimismo, individualismo, atomismo, qualunquismo (“who-cares-ism”). Is Italian cinema becoming conformist because Italian filmmakers are no longer able to perform original and powerful quantum leaps? More likely, I fear, the reverse is true: such films are now rarely made because Italian society, by now largely (mis)shaped by the “propa-tainment” of Berlusconi’s own private TVs, does not generate within itself the counterdiscourse that alone makes long-lasting art possible. What kind of discernible, communal cultural heritage characterizes, marks and unites today’s mainstream anti-fascist artists - or intellectuals, or politicians - to set them apart from the rightwingers who put Mussolini and the Resistenza on the same ethical plane?

If we fail to develop a strong critical discourse on culture, we only have a blurring of identities; no potential for art, only amnesia; no communication, only noise. What should art attempt to do in such times of anguish? That is a dilemma I will attempt to explore for the Entralogos public in a more general context. Thank you, meanwhile, for joining me thus far.

(An asterisk * designates films released in North America with English subtitles, as of this writing)

BECHIS, Marco
Garage Olimpo (2002)
BERNINI, Franco
The Strong Hands (Le mani forti, 1997)
COMENCINI, Luigi
Everyone Go Home (Tutti a casa, 1960)
DE SANTIS, Giuseppe
Tragic Hunt (Caccia tragica, 1947)
Bitter Rice (Riso amaro, 1949) *
No Peace Among the Olive Trees (Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, 1950)
DE SICA, Vittorio
The Economic Boom (Il boom, 1963)
FERRARA, Giuseppe
Spy Face (FacCIA di spia, 1975)
Panagulis Lives (Panagulis vive, 1981)
One Hundred Days in Palermo (Cento giorni a Palermo, 1984)
The Moro Case (Il caso Moro, 1986)
Giovanni Falcone (1993)
State Secret (Segreto di Stato, 1995)
God’s Bankers (I banchieri di Dio, 2002)
GERMI, Pietro
Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana, 1961) *
Seduced and Abandoned (Sedotta e abbandonata, 1964) *
GIORDANA, Marco Tullio
Curse You, I’ll Love You (Maledetti vi amerò, 1980)
The Fall of the Rebel Angels (La caduta degli angeli ribelli, 1981)
Pasolini: An Italian Crime (Pasolini, un delitto italiano, 1995) *
One Hundred Steps (I cento passi, 2000)
The Best of Youth (La meglio gioventù, 2002)
LIZZANI, Carlo
Achtung banditi! (1951)
Chronicles of Poor Lovers (Cronache di poveri amanti, 1954)
The Bitter Life (La vita agra, 1964)
Fontamara (1980)
MASELLI, Francesco
Breaking Ranks (Gli sbandati, 1955)
Heirs Apparent (I delfini, 1960)
Letter To an Evening Paper (Lettera a un giornale della sera, 1970)
The Suspect (Il sospetto, 1975)

MONICELLI, Mario

The Great War (La grande guerra, 1959)
The Organizer (I compagni, 1963) *
We Want the Colonels (Vogliamo i colonnelli, 1973)
MONTALDO, Giuliano
Gott mit uns (1970)
Sacco and Vanzetti (1971) *
Giordano Bruno (1973)
Agnese Is Going to Die (L’Agnese va a morire, 1977)
The Golden Eyeglasses (Gli occhiali d’oro, 1987) *

MORETTI, Nanni

I am an Autarkist (Io sono un autarchico, 1976)
Ecce Bombo (1978)
Mass is Over (La messa è finita, 1985)
Palombella rossa (1989) *
April (Aprile, 1998) *

ORSINI, Valentino

A Man to Be Burned (Un uomo da bruciare, 1962; with P. and V. Taviani)
The Outlaws of Marriage (I fuorilegge del matrimonio, 1963; with P. and V. Taviani)
The Wretched of the Earth (I dannati della terra, 1968)
PIETRANGELI, Antonio
Adua and Her Workmates (Adua e le compagne, 1960)
The Woman from Parma (La parmigiana, 1963)
I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene, 1965)
RISI, Dino
A Difficult Life (Una vita difficile, 1961)
The Widower (Il vedovo, 1959)
Life in the Fast Lane (Il sorpasso, 1962)
The Monsters (I mostri, 1963)

SCOLA, Ettore

Trevico-Turin: A Voyage into Fiat-Nam (Trevico-Torino: viaggio nel Fiat-Nam, 1973)
We Had All Loved Each Other (C’eravamo tanto amati, 1974) *
The Terrace (La terrazza, 1979)
TAVIANI, Paolo and Vittorio
The Subversives (I sovversivi, 1967)
Saint Michael Had a Rooster (San Michele aveva un gallo, 1971) *

VANCINI, Florestano

The Long Night of 1943 (La lunga notte del '43, 1960)
The Seasons of Our Love (Le stagioni del nostro amore, 1966)
Bronte: Chronicle of a Slaughter Forgotten by History Books (Bronte. Cronaca di un massacro che i libri di storia hanno dimenticato, 1972)
The Matteotti Murder (Il delitto Matteotti, 1973)
VISCONTI, Luchino
Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960) *