A NEW ITALIAN POLITICAL CINEMA?
LONDON WORKSHOP ABSTRACTS
Introduction: William Hope (University of Salford): A New Italian Political Cinema? Global Perspectives
This introductory presentation discusses the problems surrounding political cinema in Italy today, and will explore a number of other key themes including the global perspectives that have emerged in the recent work of Italian film-makers, and how these contrast with the work of their predecessors.
Session One: Filmic Representations of Racial and Economic Marginalization
Introductory remarks: Michele Rizzi (Partito di Alternativa Comunista)
Shelleen Greene (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee): Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa - Towards a New History of Migration and Modernity: Haile Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory and Isaac Julien's Western Union: Small Boats
This presentation examines Gerima's 1999 documentary on the 1896 Italo-Abyssinian War and Julien's 2007 experimental meditation on contemporary African migration to Europe via Sicily. By enacting experimental formal strategies that undermine the linear narrativization used to construct "official" histories of Italian unification, colonialism and migration, the works of Gerima and Julien offer a re-articulation of Italian-African relations in the postcolonial era that challenge the boundaries of the Italian nation-state and their apparent contestation through what is perceived as the new influx of African migrants within the last three decades. Through their dialogue with Italian national cinema, Gerima and Julien re-contextualize and expand our understanding of Italian colonial and migration histories by illustrating continuities between Italy and Africa excluded from official histories and contemporary immigration debates. Ultimately, the work of Gerima and Julien posits Italy as a significant center of the African diaspora and a site upon which larger contemporary debates regarding immigration and the "boundaries of Europe" must take place.
Mafunda Lucia Ndongala (University of Salford): The New Italians; Questions of Identity and Marginalization: Cristina Comencini’s Bianco e nero
The case of the children of immigrants born and/or raised in Italy is one of the many aspects of the complex phenomenon of immigration that tends to be ignored or underestimated by Italian society. With Bianco e nero, Cristina Comencini tackles the question of integration in Italy through a love story. The question is whether the final result reflects the reality of the Italians of African origins. This presentation draws on research that I have conducted into the problematic integration of Italians of Sub-Saharan African origin in Turin, and it compares the results of this research with the image of race relations depicted in Cristina Comencini’s comedy. The outcome of the analysis shows that while the director portrays white characters plausibly, representations of black characters such as the protagonist Nadine are rather atypical. While Comencini’s film does not fully represent the complex phenomenon of Italy’s migrant communities, it introduces an emerging yet underestimated reality of young men and women who are born and/or raised in Italy to African parents.
Dom Holdaway (University of Warwick): Observations on the Rhetoric of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra
Francesco Rosi’s widely cited statement that his political films were not documentaries, rather ‘documented films on certain realities of life’, set the tone for an Italian political cinema which trod carefully the line between fact and fiction. In light of Stella Bruzzi’s pivotal work on documentary, it is possible to shift definitions of such recent cinema back onto ‘performative documentaries’, which play on their claims to truth. Gomorra, in light of its own history and of the shocking overlaps between the cast and the reality of the Camorra, is a striking example here. This presentation addresses the film’s representation of criminal power in this regard, arguing that it is a performed rhetoric built predominantly around notions of marginalization: economic, predominantly, but also of gender and age. The claim to truth adds great weight to this rhetoric, providing a political message which is undoubtedly relevant in wider spheres of society.
Session Two: The Creation, Diffusion and Reception of Italian Political Cinema
Introductory remarks: Mary Wood (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Filippo Ticozzi: Political Cinema in Italy
This presentation will explore the roles and responsibilities of directors, writers and viewers in the creation and reception of political cinema. The different approaches to be found in the movies of film-makers such as Gualtiero Jacopetti, Werner Herzog and also in the work of several modern day Italian directors will be discussed.
Lanfranco Aceti (Sabanci University, Istanbul) and Mick Grierson (Goldsmiths, University of London): Interactive Italian Political Cinema: Algorythmic Cinema and Participatory Narrative
The concept of interactive cinema is problematic in its basic constructs related to modalities of consumption of the narrative as viewers’ choice between alternative pre-structured narrative modules. This is also the case when interactive cinema stretches its boundaries to include a concept of interaction that is based on a substitution of single authorship for a participatory and shared authorship that generates the narrative by accretion. When Jeffrey Bardzell, in a paper titled Interaction Criticism and Aesthetics, explained that “imagining interaction design artifacts as separate from users, and vice-versa, is certainly possible, but in HCI, we try to blur the distinction and have done so for a long time” (2361, 2009), he structured the problem of algorithmic and participatory cinema around the issue of authorship and the blurring caused by the new forms of media participation and interaction.
This paper, through an online algorithmic cinema project that focuses on political censorship and online behaviors in the contemporary Italian socio-political landscape, presents a new algorithmic cinematic project as alternative to structured forms of interaction that are politically limited and culturally imbued in ‘old media behaviors’. The project titled Maximum Common Denominator, from a concept by Lanfranco Aceti and developed in collaboration with Mick Grierson, is a participatory structure within which the development of the narrative and the modalities of interaction are left to the viewer and user. The approach to this cinematic narrative treated as artwork, documentation and documentary brings the responsibility of social action back to the modalities of production and away from the screen as a process of documentation and revelation. The project becomes an insight into the audience participation as user and creator first and lastly as viewer.
Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds): Political fandom: the audience as constituency
I come at the question of politics not in terms of the content of ‘political’ film, but in terms of the construction of an audience, and then in terms of that audience’s consumption and recirculation of films. I am interested in how a ‘political’ film and its audience form part of a circuit of address, expectation, reception and cultural recirculation which constructs the audience as a constituency — that is, a group with a defined political identity. In effect, this is a form of politicized fandom (and the club includes academics). For example, the presence in the wider culture of many battute from the films of Nanni Moretti suggests that a ‘political’ film may be valuable less for the analysis or critique it provides than for its provision of a reference point that allows the members of a constituency to recognize each other.
Session Three: Italy’s Socio-Political Past Revisited on Screen
Introductory remarks: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Queen Mary, University of London)
The return to prominence in Italian cinema of the (not unconnected) themes of Fascism and political terrorism draws attention to the fact that it is often much harder for film-makers to address the very recent past than either the present or parts of the past that can be viewed with a degree of historical distance. Just as it took twenty-five years before the Italian cinema could look back on Fascism and the resistance with any sense of historical detachment, so the parallel phenomena of left and right terrorism in the 1970s have also had to wait a long time before they could be put in place historically. This introduction to the first afternoon session will ask why this is the case and why is it more so in cinema than in literature.
Elena Caoduro (University of Southampton): The canonisation of an inconvenient memory: Representations of the anni di piombo in La meglio gioventù (Marco Tullio Giordana) and Mio fratello è figlio unico (Daniele Lucchetti)
My presentation seeks to explore the dynamics of cultural memory of the 'anni di piombo' drawing on studies of trauma, recollection and forgetting by authors such as Aleida and Jan Assmann. Cultural memory works actively in the preservation and storage of a narrow selection of sacred events, artefacts and documents. The concepts of canon and archive developed by Aleida Assmann [1] in relation to classical texts and paintings are useful here to comprehend the success of certain depoliticised versions of the past, which flourished in 2000s offering a sanitised and shareable memory of those tragic years. The process of 'sanctification' of these films, supported by the active component of forgetting: intentional acts such as censorship of countermemories or a lack of financial aid for more radical works, contributes to the construction of a cultural capital and a new collective identity. In this sense, canons and archives provide important tools for political power.
Kyle Hall (Harvard University): Visible Ironies and Invisible Writing in Sorrentino’s Il divo
This work examines the contrast that exists in Sorrentino’s biopic of Giulio Andreotti between spoken and written language. Spoken language is the most accessible of the two, both for the viewer and for the film’s characters, yet it is a spoken language that aims at a complete concealment. Andreotti’s ironic detachment serves to prevent others from reaching any semblance of reality through his words. On the other hand, throughout the film there is a promise that Andreotti’s personal writings will reveal what his spoken words never have. But written language exists only as a promise, wholly concealed from all. Thus the battuta serves to conceal, while the archivio promises to reveal: yet both of these linguistic forms exist only as fleeting chimera. This paper delves into the relationship between these linguistic mediums in an effort to reveal the mechanisms that support our present viewpoints on Italy’s political past.
Catherine O’Rawe (University of Bristol): La prima linea (De Maria), Il grande sogno (Placido) and Romanzo criminale (Placido): a poetics of middlebrow impegno
This presentation will examine the ways in which contemporary Italian middlebrow cinema has revisited the recent political past, and in particular the terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s. It will examine three particular devices: the use of flashback, the use of musical montage sequences, and the use of original archive footage, to attempt to identify a poetics of memory in films such as La prima linea (De Maria, 2009), Il grande sogno (Placido, 2009), Mio fratello è figlio unico (Luchetti, 2007), Romanzo criminale (Placido, 2005) and Buongiorno, notte (Bellocchio, 2004). Further, it will argue that these devices work to establish a poetics of what I will call 'middlebrow impegno', a designation that chimes with the recent call by Antonello and Mussgnug (2009) for a 'resemanticization of impegno'.
Erminia Passannanti (Brunel University): Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere: Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. Two Competing Forms of Dictatorship
My paper will analyze the representation of the liaison between Church and State and the cult of their charismatic leaders in Marco Bellocchio's 2009 film, Vincere, in the light of the ongoing crisis in Italian democracy and the role of Ratzinger’s papacy. The prizewinning filmmaker - also author of L'ora di religione, a film which contains a strong critique of institutionalized Catholicism - has showed how, in the early 1920s, Mussolini's fascism, which at its onset was fiercely anti-capitalistic and anti-clerical, underwent a transformation from being a palingenetic, populist form of nationalism, to becoming a secular cult aiming at acquiring a charismatic leadership more influential on the masses than religion itself. Bellocchio is skilled in conveying how Mussolini's megalomania gradually led to delusional plans to achieve a revolutionary national rebirth, a plan which, although conceived from a lay perspective, was not dissimilar from Pius XI's project in the encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio (1922), advocating a Christian restoration of society against the evils of materialism and secularism.
Mariana Liz (King’s College, London): Nostalgia, Memory and History in Buongiorno, Notte by Marco Bellocchio
My doctoral project, "European Identity in Contemporary Cinema", looks at the representation of the idea of Europe, particularly in historical films and what Hill (1999) has defined as "state-of-the-nation" films. Buongiorno, Notte offers a particularly interesting case-study of how European filmmakers have used key political past events to question the history of their countries. By asking "what if" (Aldo Moro had been released) this film proposes an alternative Italy, at the same time questioning its current political scene. In my presentation, I will briefly allude to the film's distribution context (particularly, the polemics of its presentation at the Venice Film Festival), and then analyse a key sequence where the topics of nostalgia, memory, and history are re-presented.
Session Four: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Italian Cinema
Introductory remarks: Luciana d’Arcangeli (Flinders University, Adelaide)
Matteo Garrone’s representations of two very different women – the victim and the femme fatale – in his films L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer, 2002) and Primo amore (First Love, 2004) yield an idea of how the extremes of gender and sexuality are represented in Italian cinema today. This is a cinema that is coherent with where Italy currently stands, especially when viewed from the marginalized socio-economic positions created by mainstream cultural and consumer homogeneity.
Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter): Dirty Pretty Things: ‘Velinocrazia’ and female address with reference to Virzì’s Tutta la vita davanti
Self-consciously political film-making, whether dealing with immigration or precariatà, often tends to create an alternative abject in the form of femininity (O’Healy, 2009). This coincides with a tendency in contemporary left-wing Italian culture to pin political blame on (young) women’s bodies. Using Tutta la vita davanti (Paolo Virzì, 2008) as a case study, I will ask whether the good girl-bad girl mechanism set in train by this paternalistic tradition in Italian film-making is actually circumvented in other forms of cinema, aimed at different audiences. Do, for example, depictions of female self-realization in teen movies, such as Prieto’s Ho voglia di te (Prieto, 2007) engage a more positive idea of teen female subjectivity, in which sexual display is validated as one form of self-expression? How do theories of postfeminism help us to read these kinds of representation? Do they help us to find political cinema where we might least expect it?
Mattia Marino (University of Bangor): Gender, sexuality and others in La sconosciuta (Giuseppe Tornatore) and Saturno contro (Ferzan Ozpetek)
From a Nietzsche-Foucauldian philosophical perspective, identity results from the cultural relations between the historical discourse and the subject. As theorised by the sociologist Kimberley Crenshaw, identities involve the subject’s intersections of discursive differences, such as language, class, sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, citizenship, health, and age. Texts constitute the sites of cultural memory, where identities are represented in the relationships between textual images and cultural context. Critical theory, post-structuralism, postmodern thought, weak thought, and cultural analysis enable the discussion of texts in relation to political ideologies, normative discourses, hegemonic hierarchies, foundational principles, and linear narratives, in the identification of the dichotomous valuations represented. Intercultural, intertextual, intersectional, and interdisciplinary socio-historic-philosophical analysis enables discussion of global-local identity and memory. The two cinematic texts of La sconosciuta and Saturno contro deploy genre conventions in the intersectional representation of local and global cultural patterns in such Italian political issues as immigration and same-sex partnerships.
Patrizia Muscogiuri (University of Salford): Alterity, gender and subalternity in Emanuele Crialese's Respiro and Alessandro D’Alatri’s Sul mare
This presentation will explore the tensions and/or negotiations between gender, alterity and subalternity emerging in two recent Italian films. The attention given by both D’Alatri (Sul mare, 2010) and Crialese (in Respiro, 2002, as well as Terraferma, 2011 – in production) to small offshore islands
treated, at the same time, as peripheral socio-economic microcosms and uncanny mirrors of mainland Italy offers insights on how gender relations and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion (also beyond gender) are shaped by the interconnection (or clash) of socio-cultural discourses and economic realities. Whether in Respiro subalternity is chiefly related to alterity and produced by phallogocentric politics which implicitly underpin the island economy, Sul mare re-creates the subalternity of lavoro nero (undeclared work) and morti bianche (workplace fatalities) and its bearing on family as well as gender relations. I shall seek to evaluate whether and to what extent these directors’ (and, in particular, D’Alatri’s) treatment of these issues may be perceived as problematic, or whether it points to alternative politics as the only viable solution, in contemporary Italy, to its many complex problems.
Rebecca Bauman (Columbia University): Maria Sole Tognazzi’s L’uomo che ama; the inetto in domestic melodrama.
In "Beyond the Latin Lover" Jacqueline Reich speaks of the inetto as a recurring masculine figure in Italian cinema; one who embodies Italy’s uneasy relationship with feminism and the passing of traditional notions of Mediterranean masculinity. Recently this figure has reappeared in contemporary Italian film, this time it is not in the inetto’s traditional context of the commedia all’italiana, but within the tragic discourse of the domestic melodrama. This trend, in which male protagonists are the passive yet central force within a melodramatic narrative, would seem to affirm a gender reversal in Italian culture. My reading, however, is that this centrality of the male figure within a traditionally feminized generic form suggests a continued ambivalence with femininity and female subjectivity in Italy today, and speaks to a complex relationship to third-wave feminism and post-feminism for Italian directors.