Giordana’s I cento passi: renegotiating the Mafia codes

The ‘codes’ to which the title of this article refers are the narrative and visual codes of a particular genre model, the Mafia film. The article traces the tradition of Mafia film-making with the purpose of establishing how it gives meaning to Marco Tullio Giordana’s film I cento passi, which is shown to be one of a crop of contemporary Italian films that addresses the Mafia question from a new perspective - through humour (Roberto Benigni, Robert Torre) or through emphasis on a little-known protagonist (Scimeca, Giordana). Giordana’s film is shown to renegotiate, through intertextual citation, the cinematic codes of Hollywood (Coppola’s The Godfather) and of the European tradition (the films of Francesco Rosi). The article concludes by demonstrating that the impetus behind the current films is found in the climate of anti-Mafia opinion that predominated in Sicily, following the Mafia murders of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.