A NEW ITALIAN POLITICAL CINEMA?
CREMONA WORKSHOP ABSTRACTS
AMANDA MINERVINI, Fulbright Scholar, PhD student, Brown University, Providence, USA, and activist in the Popolo Viola protest movement. 
Uccidete la democrazia. Mathematical Obscenities and Statistical Resistance in Post-Constitutional Italy
On December 5th 2009, millions of Italians protested against Berlusconi’s custom-tailored use of politics, mobilized to demonstrate by a Facebook call, and many initiatives by the Popolo Viola (a protest movement focused on protecting the Italian constitution and demanding Berlusconi’s resignation) have subsequently been co-ordinated on line. On March 25th 2010, the ‘Raiperunanotte’ media initiative by Michele Santoro and other journalists achieved a record as the most followed internet event in Italy. Cyberspace has changed the way we participate in politics and share information but it has also modified the way in which votes are counted during elections, a process about which grave concerns were raised in the 2006 documentary Uccidete la democrazia, by Enrico Deaglio e Beppe Cremagnani. This presentation will examine the legal action faced by the film and the issues that it raised, notably its use of statistics to suggest the possible disappearance and manipulation of ballot papers during the 2006 Italian national elections. Italy’s political practices have widely diverged from the written prescriptions of its constitutional charter that some right-wing politicians describe as ‘outdated’ and in need of ‘revision’. As Slavoj Žižek (2009) has observed, Italy already finds itself in a ‘post-constitutional era’, and while the country has not normally been considered ‘at risk’ in terms of the preservation of its political democracy, the Popolo Viola movement has been highly critical of what it perceives as erosions of democracy. This paper will examine the nature and implications of the dangerous concentration of political and media power in the hands of Berlusconi, and will analyse the effectiveness of the approach used by Deaglio and Cremagnani in their documentary, contextualizing the issues raised by the film with those that have also been articulated by the Popolo Viola.
DR. CLODAGH BROOK, Senior Lecturer, the University of Birmingham
Impegno, Protest, and the Catholic Church in Italy
While much research has recently been carried out on politics and society in contemporary Italian cinema, one of Italy’s most significant socio-political players, the Catholic Church, one that places Italy in such a unique position internationally, has received almost no recent attention in the context of Italian cinema. This position is at odds with the growing interest, especially in the US, in the relationship between cinema and religion (Johnson 2000, Deacy 2001, Wright 2007) and the ongoing interest on the part of sociologists in Italian Catholicism (Pollard 2008, Cipriani 2003, Diotallevi 2002). This presentation aims to readdress this imbalance. In particular, I will critically assess recent anti-Catholic impegno through an exploration of the work of films which have criticised or attacked the Church. Is Catholicism opposed? By whom and how? Has there been a softening of attitudes towards the institutional church since the 1950s or a hardening? What are the institutional structures and distribution channels by which anti-Catholic impegno circulates? What are the links, and the discrepancies, between protest culture against institutional politics in Italy and that against the institutional Church? The presentation’s focus is on a number of recent films which appear to be critical of the Church, especially Olmi’s Centochiodi, Bellocchio’s L’ora di religione, and Venturi’s Nazareno.
FEDERICO GIORDANO, PhD student, the University of Perugia.
From the ‘Shroud’ to the ‘Caimano’. The Somatic Polymorphism of Silvio Berlusconi in Italian Cinema.
In 21st century Italian cinema, the figure of Silvio Berlusconi is a recurring presence. It constitutes a metaphor for Italy’s national identity, through a process eliciting an acceptance or a rejection of what Berlusconi represents. The figure of Berlusconi is present in various forms. It occurs directly through archive and television news images which are used in documentaries and fiction films that try to reconstruct ‘realistic’ portraits of him that go beyond the media depictions of his profile that are authorized by Berlusconi himself. This paper will compare these representations of Berlusconi with other depictions of him that are present in new millennium Italian cinema through portrayals by actors who assume his appearance (in films such as Shooting Silvio, Ho ammazzato Berlusconi, Viva Zapatero!, Bye Bye Berlusconi, Il caimano), exaggerating or faithfully reproducing certain aspects of his character. The figure of Berlusconi is also traceable in Italian cinema through characters who indirectly represent his values. They reproduce some of his traits and echo certain biographical elements without copying his appearance or being presented as direct representations of him(e.g. characters in films such as N. in Io e Napoleone, Nanni Moretti in Il caimano, ‘il Presidente’ in Il divo) or they are subjects that become ‘extensions’ of Berlusconi's body, absorbing his essence (e.g. Lele Mora and Fabrizio Corona in the film Videocracy).
MAURO SASSI, PhD student, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo - A Counterhegemonic Documentary
Realism, as an epistemological category, has been questioned in recent years in many ways: from post-structuralist and deconstructionist perspectives in the humanities, from Kuhnian relativism and subjectivism in sciences, from the multitude of successful stories and characters focused on the virtual and the immaterial, introduced by the videogame and Hollywood industry at the popular culture level. In this paper, I will defend realism as a theoretical framework allowing for a phenomenological epistemology of the moving images, while opposing the usual definitions of realism in film studies, generally adopted to label formal techniques aiming at the indexical reproduction of reality. I will test this theory against an Italian documentary, Francesca Comencini’s Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo (2002), depicting the huge rallies against the G8 summit in Genoa, between 19 and 22 July 2001, which resulted in clashes between protesters and police and in the death of Carlo Giuliani, one of the marchers. The realist theory that I outlined in the first part of the paper will sustain a methodology based on a revised version of Habermas’s concept of ‘public sphere’. I will use Nancy Fraser’s idea (1992) that there is not a single public sphere, but there are many ‘subaltern counterpublics’, and Gramsci’s theory of the cultural battle, in order to analyze how Comencini’s documentary depicts and acts as a spokesperson for a subaltern and counterhegemonic stance.
PAULINE SMALL, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen Mary, University of London.
Italian Cinema: Political or Post-Political?
The meaning of the label ‘political cinema’ requires scrutiny; this presentation will argue that in Italian cinema it is a term so widely applied as to become at times meaningless as a critical tool to analyse an individual film or group of films. It appears that ‘political cinema’ has come to be applied to any film that includes representations of clearly defined political events, and thus productions as diverse as Le mani sulla città (Rosi, 1963) and Mio fratello è figlio unico (Luchetti, 2007) are categorised under the same label. Several points require further exploration and what might be invoked is the history of political cinema within the traditions of Italian cinema: from the socially-aware underpinning of neorealist productions, to the work of Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri in the 1970s. From these filmmakers we may identify certain characteristics that sharpen the definition of ‘political cinema’. In particular, Rosi’s work shows not only the consequences of political events within the individual and collective social experience: he also incorporates references to the concomitant political class on whose conduct such events are predicated, the so-called terzo livello central also to the 1970s writings of Leonardo Sciascia. The tenor of filmmaking that followed this era of 1970s filmmaking is more difficult to classify, but in a review of Gianni Amelio’s film Colpire al cuore (1983) the term ‘post-political cinema’ was used; this prefigures more recent arguments suggesting that, for example, Sorrentino’s Il divo (2008) may be understood as an example of post-impegno cinema, that is, a cinema that negotiates political issues, but without the dimension of impegno or commitment that characterised the work of earlier filmmakers. In this presentation I will consider what we might understand by the terms ‘political’ and ‘post-political’ with reference to the work of Steve Neale on genre. Neale contends that a genre form must be understood and analysed in relation to the circumstances of production and reception relevant to its original issue. The extent to which filmmakers and audiences perceive contemporary political subject matter as comparable to the committed cinema of an earlier era – and thus meriting an equivalent labelling – is the issue to be examined in this presentation.
DR. FLAVIA BRIZIO-SKOV, Professor of Italian, University of Tennessee.
A New Italian Political Cinema: Is There One?
Criticism has recently been levelled at the supposed depolitization of Italian cinema in the third millennium, however, contrary to this opinion, this presentation will argue that recent films such as Daniele Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico / My Brother is an Only Child (2007) present political issues in a different way from the one in which these problems were addressed in the filmic production of the other century. The so-called film engagé, the Marxist-Gramscian stance typical of great political films such as Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962) in which the imaginary of a nation or at least the political imaginary of part of a nation, the leftist part, could mirror itself, are a wonderful legacy of the past. But nowadays, after the decline of the two major subcultures, the communist and the catholic ones, after the end of the First Republic and the onset of the Berlusconian regime, in the context of a pervasive media-governed pro-capitalist ideology, the old model of engagement is no longer possible. To penetrate this world, directors have developed new strategies to explore socio-economic problems in their films. My presentation will demonstrate that Luchetti’s film is a political film of a new type because it pushes the viewer to accept the necessity of political actions that go beyond the traditional categorizations of definite party lines and ideological lines. Jacques Rancière and Martin O’Shaughnessy recently argued that contemporary political cinema can no longer be conceived in the same terms as classical political cinema. The dramaturgy of explicit political struggle that characterized early Italian political films should no longer be considered a valid paradigmatic model of cultural ideology. The previous focus on the oppression of already formed social groups should shift to the discussion of individual stories; the representation of the loud organized protests against oppression should give way to the amplification of the marginalized voices that are waiting to be made audible. My presentation will analyze the narrative strategies in contemporary Italian cinema that cannot simply be read as socio-realist inspired frescoes, but whose political dimension is to be found in the aesthetic of the fragment, in the more microscopic branches of film.
DR. ILARIA SERRA, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies, Florida Atlantic University, USA.
Cinema and polis in the films of Dennis Dellai
This presentation analyses how local identity, historical reflection and present involvement with the community intersect in the work of Dennis Dellai. Dellai is a journalist and filmmaker who lives in Thiene (Vicenza). He is an emerging figure in the independent cinematic landscape of Italy, with a high-quality first movie, Terre rosse, and a second film that is now under production, Oscar. His movies rediscover episodes deeply buried in the collective memory, when the micro-history of Vicenza province crossed macro-history: the partisan wars of the Resistance (Terre rosse) and the rescue of a Jewish refugee in Fascist Italy (Oscar). Dellai’s works are ‘political’ in the purest sense of the word, deriving from the Greek idea of polis. His work tells local history through local memories and local people. He gives voice to the community in which he works and lives, and helps it redesign the symbolic boundaries of its polis. His films not only dig into his town’s past but he is able to stir the entire community and involve it in the production of his movies. From actor to agens: the actors are the direct descendants of the historical protagonists and retrace their steps to give a new meaning to their town, under the sign of the past. Their same land (‘terre rosse’) becomes coloured with symbolic meaning and characterized by a new network of relations, thus reawakening its genius loci. Dellai perhaps incarnates a new figure of organic intellectual for his people: a journalist (for Il Giornale di Vicenza) and a promoter of political identity through cinema.
PATRIZIA CAMMARATA (Central Committee member of the Partito di Alternativa Comunista and activist in the trade union organization RdB CUB)
The Migrant Experience in Contemporary Italy
This presentation will draw on interviews with Wagne Moustapha and Tahar Sellami, the general secretary and the vice president of the immigrant welfare group, the Coordinamento Migranti di Verona, in presenting an overview of the conditions facing migrants who have arrived in Italy from other countries. The presentation will discuss the situation of migrant workers, many of whom, whether employed legally or clandestinely in jobs ranging from construction work to those of carers for the elderly, play a key role in supporting Italy’s economy and welfare state. Many clandestine workers recently sought to regularize their position by responding to a government ‘amnesty’ aimed at illegal migrants living in Italy but now find themselves under risk of expulsion from the country; matters came to a head when a group of migrant workers organized a protest from the top of a crane at a building site in Brescia in October 2010 to ask for their position to be legalized. The presentation will examine other aspects of the ‘migrant experience’ in Italy, ranging from the ordeal faced by those who are placed in detention centres, the notorious ‘Centri di Identificazione ed Espulsione’ on arrival, to the everyday discrimination faced by those who do manage obtain a work permit; comparisons will be made between these real-life experiences and cinematic depictions of such situations in films such as Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (2005) and Carlo Mazzacurati’s La giusta distanza (2007).
DR. SABINE SCHRADER, Lecturer in Italian, the University of Innsbruck.
‘Heimat’ and Migration: The End of Bucolic Dreams: Il vento fa il suo giro (2005, Giorgio Diritti)
Since the early nineties, mass immigration has prompted Italy to re-think its identity, because until then it had primarily been a country of emigration. Narratives of legal and clandestine immigration therefore constitute particularly fascinating phenomena in contemporary Italian cinema. On the one hand I will analyze the dominant narratives and figurations of migration in Italian cinema, sketching the transnational parameters of own/other, region/globalization, identity/alterity, modernization/tradition, nature/culture, and on the other this presentation will also explore the trilingual film (Occitan, Italian, French) E l’aura fai son vir / Il vento fa il suo giro (2005). It features unconventional production and distribution arrangements, and its setting and plot could also be categorized in this way. The (beautifully shot) nature of the Occitan Alps is no longer a bucolic place – even if it attracts a French ex-teacher, now a shepherd, and his young family to move there. Older people have remained in the village; others have migrated to France or to the nearby cities. The elderly try to preserve their language and culture and perceive every stranger as the vanguard of the extracomunitari, or non-EU migrants. The ‘sense of loss’ (Ezra/Rowden 2006) which is so typical of transnational cinema, is, in this film, not centred on the migrants but on the village as a focal point for Occitan language and culture which is spread across three countries but which is threatened with extinction.
YASMINA KHAMAL, PhD student and lecturer, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
Alex Infascelli’s Almost Blue : The noir metropolis, marginal identities and socially committed cinema
The prolific publication of crime novels in Italy over the last twenty years, often gravitating around the city of Bologna, has aroused considerable interest among literary critics. Despite the frequent accusation of ‘dietrologia’, an obsessive, conspiratorial vision of events, the represented investigations focus on the mysteries and unsolved crimes in Italy’s recent past or explore the dark areas of contemporary Italian society, highlighting corruption, marginalization, discrimination and social distress. One of the leading and most eclectic Italian authors of crime novels is Carlo Lucarelli. Besides several essays on Italian criminal history, he has written metropolitan noir novels and historical crime fiction. Lucarelli’s crime novels often represent investigating characters in conflict with the interests of State institutions, and the aim of this presentation is to analyse the implications of this conflict and also the representation of Italian society that emerges in Alex Infascelli’s film adaptation of Lucarelli’s noir novel Almost blue, the noir genre being used to highlight a form of social commitment and denunciation. Linguistic pragmatic approaches, narratology and cultural studies will provide theoretical tools to investigate Infascelli’s visual representation of the literary text.
DR. SALLY HILL, Senior Lecturer in Italian, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Representing Disability in 21st Century Italian Cinema
How does contemporary Italian cinema represent disability? Do cinematic images of disability tend to reflect or perpetuate societal devaluing, exclusion, oppression and ‘othering’, or are there signs that negative or well-intentioned but patronizing stereotypes are being overcome and a newly politicised image of disability is appearing? This presentation analyses the representation of mental or physical disability/illness in a number of Italian films of the past decade (e.g. Gianni Amelio, Le chiavi di casa (2004); Giulio Manfredonia, Si può fare (2008), Mirko Locatelli, Come prima (2004)), focusing in particular on the theme of social inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on theoretical work in disability and film studies (e.g. Smit, Shakespeare, Darke, Mitchell and Snyder), and the politics of representation of marginalised groups in contemporary Italy (e.g. Parati, Forgacs), it looks at the ways in which these films do or do not reflect contemporary disability politics in Italy.
FABIANA STEFANONI, Central Committee member of the Partito di Alternativa Comunista. 
Workers, Trade Unions and Capital in 21st Century Italy
This presentation will examine the gradual erosion of workers’ rights that has occurred in Italy over the past twenty years, together with a concomitant weakening of the influence of trade unions. It will also present an overview of trade unionism in Italy today, examining the compliance of unions such as CISL and UIL with the interests of capital, the declining influence of the CGIL union as a consequence of the tactics of its leaders, and the emergence of the radical USB (Unione Sindacale di Base) as a focal point for the defence of workers’ rights, and it will feature interviews with USB activists in several Italian cities. The plight of Italian workers has been characterized by key recent episodes such as the recent ballot of FIAT workers in Turin, who narrowly voted to accept stringent pay and productivity conditions after the company threatened to close the factory and restart production abroad, and such episodes typify the deteriorating conditions experienced by Italian workers today. Other notorious problems include call centres that close without paying employees their final month’s salary, the increasing number of deaths in the workplace because of poor health and safety measures, and the ongoing problem of the ‘flexible’, low-paid, short-term job contracts that many younger workers have little option but to accept. The presentation will also compare cinematic depictions of workers in the workplace, such as Paolo Virzì’s Tutta la vita davanti (2008) and Massimo Venier’s Generazione 1000 euro (2009) with the reality of working practices in Italy.
DR. PAOLO CHIRUMBOLO, Assistant Professor and Head of Italian, Louisiana State University, USA.
Ascanio Celestini’s Parole sante – the Call Centre Workers of Atesia
In my presentation I will analyze Parole sante, Ascanio Celestini’s documentary on the workers of Atesia, the biggest call centre in Italy. Parole sante narrates the story of the workers’ struggle to obtain better work conditions. One of the most articulate narratorsof contemporary Italian culture, Celestini also proved to have great cinematic sensibility. His documentary, mainly based on interviews with several phone operators involved in the political struggle, intentionally underscores the human aspect of the fight. The passion and frustration of these lavoratori precari, whose only desire was to get a stable and legal contract, is represented by Celestini in an effective but understated fashion. In the view of this essay, Parole sante is a manifesto of a politica dal volto umano (politics with a human face) that refuses any use of facile and preconceived political rhetoric, and aims at establishing significant values such as social justice, and solidarity. The presentation will also make reference to Lotta di classe, Celestini’s literary rendition of the Atesia struggle.
MARIA ELENA D’AMELIO, PhD Student – SUNY Stony Brook, USA.
The comedy of ‘precarious’ lifestyles in Paolo Virzì’s Tutta la vita davanti, (2008)
My presentation focuses on Paolo Virzi’s movie Tutta la vita davanti, which is one of the first Italian films to examine the phenomenon of precariato giovanile, an Italian expression that means the exploitation of young graduates in the job market and in the workplace through ‘precarious’ short-term, low-paid contracts. With this film Virzi pays tribute to the period of Italian-style comedies earlier in the 20th century, but he also wants to reflect on the significance of attempting to do comedy and satire in Italy today. Tutta la vita davanti is a dark comedy told from the viewpoint of Martha, a brilliant young philosophy graduate who ends up working in a call centre. The film is based on the book by the blogger Michela Murgia, The World Must Know, that recounts the author’s experiences in a call centre. Exploitation in the workplace and the lack of opportunities that Italian youngsters face in the job market is a controversial issue in Italy, especially in recent years. The critical eye of Virzi analyzes the inability of trade unions to manage this new form of exploitation, and the absence of class consciousness in the newly exploited; the chronic lack of jobs for new graduates; the role of humanistic culture versus the omnipresence of television programmes in Italian society, especially reality shows. However, Virzi’s movie focuses also on other crucial issues related to precariato: the instability of feelings, values and culture. It does so by using an Italian-style comedy framework, a genre that in the 50s and 60s depicted Italy reshaping itself through social changes by using bitter irony and a disenchanted perspective on Italian society.
DR. MARCO PAOLI, Lecturer in Italian, The University of Liverpool, UK.
Paolo Virzì’s Baci e abbracci: Class Conflict and Illusionary Happiness
Several of Paolo Virzì’s films depict the difficult career prospects of Italians in a politico-industrial context where job security has been eroded, and Baci e abbracci (1999) relates the attempts of a group of ex-steelworkers to start a new business by opening an ostrich farm. This essay will examine Virzì’s depiction of the political-socio-economic problems faced by the aspiring entrepreneurs in Baci e abbracci, and the contrasting (and contradictory) attitudinal perspectives traceable in the different social classes of Italian represented in the film. While the film manifestly depicts the unbalanced relationship – in terms of power and influence – between social classes in its examination of the notions of authority (through characters such as the regional councillor) and submission (in terms of the three entrepreneurs who are socially more vulnerable), there is a degree of ambivalence in the attitudes of the ‘working class heroes’ with whom the film’s viewers are closely aligned. Virzì seems to emphasize the aspirations of these characters to attain some degree of power in order to be placed in a position of superiority, and the essay will discuss the implications of this view of the proletarian psyche. In terms of genre and regional culture, the political implications of Virzì’s depiction of society through the filter of comedy will be considered and the concept of livornesità (the film is set in the Livorno region of Tuscany) will be analysed. The essay will also focus on the contrast between reality and the individual’s need of an illusion/illusionary happiness.
DR FLAVIA LAVIOSA, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, Wellesley College, USA.
Pietro Balla and Monica Repetto’s ThyssenKrupp Blues (2008)
My presentation will discuss Pietro Balla and Monica Repetto’s film ThyssenKrupp Blues (2008), which combines newsreel footage, journalistic reportage, and television sequences. It uses realism as a cinematic strategy and adopts a first-person narrative while deploying new aesthetic devices and pushing the boundaries of canonical documentary making. ThyssenKrupp Blues is the expression of cinema in the workplace which restructures the discourse of realism in a cinema engaged in political and class struggles. The film can be considered the ultimate cinematic eyewitness account of the unfolding of capitalist history in contemporary Italy. The directors represent a dramaturgy of the real starting on May 1, 2007, when they interview workers about their irregular contractual conditions, neglect in health and safety measures, and long shifts in the German factory ThyssenKrupp in Turin. As Balla and Repetto follow the workers’ social struggle for months, they are unexpectedly faced with a ground zero experience – the tragic events of the night between December 5-6, 2007, when seven men died in an explosion in the factory. This film is a historical document of death in the workplace and depicts the socio-ethical mourning of a nation in disarray. With the worker Carlo Marrapodi’s personal experience as the centre of political and economic class struggle, the film is a two-part human testimony of the ThyssenKrupp story, before and after the tragedy. The stark editing, marked by time and space reversals, implies Marrapodi’s irreconcilable emotional misplacement both as an accidental survivor of the tragedy and a jobless emigrant. This narrative form gives an unsettling trajectory to the events, leading to a sense of defeat for a discarded class of workers, in an abandoned and death-ridden Turin.
DR ANDREA RIGHI, Assistant Professor of Italian and Humanities, University of Puerto Rico, MAYAGUEZ
Filming Capitalist Accumulation in Italy. In fabbrica (2007)and I Like to Work (Mobbing) (2004) by Francesca Comencini.
My presentation explores the ways in which Francesca Comencini’s documentary In fabbrica (2007) and her movie I Like to Work (Mobbing) (2004) represent key points in capital’s accumulation in twentieth and twenty-first century Italian society. Through a skillful and complex assembling of documentary footage, In fabbrica sketches the downfall trajectory of Italian Fordism and the expropriation of the rights and spaces of freedom that workers gained through their struggles. I Like to Work (Mobbing), on the other hand, concludes this movement using cinematic fiction to investigate how the present post-Fordist regime of accumulation designates women and their bodies as a new territory for the extraction of surplus-value.