Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014

This article analyses a strand of the Italian police thriller (poliziottesco) whose plots invest heavily in notions of official cover-up and high-level coup d’état conspiracy, in the cultural, political and historical coordinates of the ‘anni di piombo’/‘years of lead’. Prevailing scholarly discourses on the cinema of and about this era tend to identify a desire to seek explanation for the violent traumas and to see through the opaque webs of intrigue that characterize the national memory of the 1970s. By taking La polizia ringrazia/Execution Squad (Steno, 1972), Milano trema – la polizia vuole giustizia/Violent Professionals (Martino, 1973) and La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide/Silent Action (Martino, 1975) as key examples, this article seeks to demonstrate that such films in fact occupy a divergent register of political address: one that seeks, not to explain or ‘make sense’ of the era’s intrigues, but instead to enact a ritual recognition of innate suspicion, pervasive corruption and assumed distrust. These films are appraised for their immediacy rather than their coherence, as documents of confusion rather than of investigative rigour. They thus enable a reading of ‘political cinema’ as being one that chronicles the range of political registers through which events were being represented to sections of the Italian public.

In the 2000s RAI television drama makes a temporal turn that coincides with Second Republic’s revisionism of the divided memory of crucial episodes in post-Unification Italian history. This article examines two historical mini-series on Italian migration in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Il Grande Torino/The Great Torino (2005) and Marcinelle/Inferno Below (2003). In both narratives the microhistory of migration lived and performed by ordinary people is coupled with the macrohistory of disaster: respectively the 1949 Superga airplane crash, which brought an end to the Grande Torino football team, and the Marcinelle coalmine fire of 8 August 1956, which killed 136 Italian workers. These historical narratives work within transmedial constellations of cultural memory and interact with institutionalized collective memory. In both cases the model image of the Italian migrant worker as a redemptive figure of Italy’s post-war regeneration in television documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s is replaced by a contemporary ambivalent representation of the paradoxes of migration, and redemption is activated instead by the story of disaster and as a specific quality of Italian character. Both episodes can be seen as a homage to the sacrifice of labour of the Italian worker with the difference that the main character of Il Grande Torino/The Great Torino sacrifices his individual migrant story to the memory of the Superga disaster, while Marcinelle’s hero becomes the redemptive figure of the Italian migrant worker thanks to the exceptional circumstances created by the mine catastrophe.

The increasing production of biographical films dealing with power and its figures raises interesting questions about the nature and the aims of political cinema. What are the strategies used to represent people whose public image has completely overlapped to their identity? This matter concerns not only thematic aspects of the biopic genre, but more in depth it discloses fundamental issues at the basis of any theory of cinema. From this point of view, some Italian instances propose original solutions, creating a coherent framework in continuity with a long tradition that has marked the history of Italian thought. This article aims at making a survey of these inputs through the analysis of contemporary relevant texts – above all Il Caimano/The Caiman (Moretti, 2006), Il Divo: La spettacolare vita di Giulio Andreotti/Il Divo (Sorrentino, 2008), Vincere/To Win (Bellocchio, 2009) – in the attempt of defining the space of effectiveness of this new line of development within the huge field of political cinema.

In this article I contend that Ghirri’s photography can fruitfully be read through Benjamin’ thought, in particular through his key notions of experience, montage, aura, beauty, mystery and dialectical image, and at the same time I seek to redress a common misreading of Benjamin’s work in some art theory. This approach allows me to illuminate from a new angle Ghirri’s aesthetics and the change it underwent between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and to demonstrate that his work effectively draws on Benjaminian dialectics to achieve a ‘magical balance of opposites’. Through a close analysis of selected Ghirri’s photographs from two of his main series from the 1970 – Kodachrome (1970–1978) and Still life (1975–1979) – and from two series from the 1980s – Il profilo delle nuvole/The Outline of Clouds (1980–1989) and Atelier Morandi (1989–1990) – I show that Ghirri’s photography moves from an early effort to deconstruct the assemblage of images that compose reality to an attempt to re-create an aura of places that are felt to be on the brink of disappearing. In so doing he both expressed a postmodern sense of loss of experience and history and challenged this by presenting photography as a means of achieving knowledge and experience of the world, before the onset of the digital age.

Carmelo Bene’s films (1968–1973) were traumatic event in the history of Italian cinema. As a ‘visual philosopher’ he developed a counter-hegemonic discourse on the Self, being ‘within and against’ a complex transmedia environment that mixes practice with theory, writing with showing, performing with directing. In this article I will analyse Bene’s visual work through a methodology inspired by Consciousness Studies. I argue that Bene’s transmedia approach of giving up the unity and the wholeness of Self may be framed into a whole philosophical philum that relates to phenomenology, post-structuralism, cognitive science and Image Theory. In the first section I will illustrate the theory of consciousness of the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, going back to those thinkers with whom I have found similarities (Nietzsche, Sartre, Deleuze, Žižek), and integrating the discussion with Bene’s visual–theoretical suggestions taken from his television programmes and performances. In the second part I will analyse four Bene’s films Nostra signora dei turchi/Our Lady of the Turks (1968), Capricci/Caprices (1969), Don Giovanni/Don Juan (1970) and Salomé (1972) through the theories so far discussed, in order to blur the distinction between authorship and spectatorship, in favour of a distributed experience and hermeneutics of Self through mind, body and (imaginary-situated) environment.

My article focuses on a particular cycle of the adventure films produced in Italy between 1957 and 1965 that has come to be known as the peplum. These Italian peplum films centred on heroes drawn from classical antiquity played by American bodybuilders, in particular Steve Reeves, who won the titles of Mr America and Mr Universe in the late 1940s. The purpose of the article is to investigate the use of Steve Reeves’ star persona in the peplum genre, focusing on the significance of his white muscularity as a cultural intertext between America and Italy during the Hollywood on the Tiber era.

This article investigates the image of Naples depicted by three American film-makers: Terry Gilliam with The Wholly Family (2011), John Turturro with Passione (2010) and Jonathan Demme with Enzo Avitabile Music Life (2012). In these movies Naples is perceived through a translocal perspective, an intersection of different cultures and places, where the role of memory is strongly emphasized. The common denominator of these different productions is the topic of the roots, highlighted with a cinematic sightseeing of the city. Turturro, Demme and Gilliam move the camera in tourist places, but behind the typical postcard view they give rise to a reconfiguration of the city’s soul. The article focuses on the way in which these films reject the stereotyped image of Naples built by Hollywood, providing an opportunity to rethink the complex notion of porosity proposed by Walter Benjamin.

I ‘pori’ di Napoli. IL Cinema di Mario Martone, Antonio Capuano e Pappi Corsicato, Roberta Tabanelli (2011) Ravenna: Longo Editore, 190 pp., ISBN: 9788880636632, p/bk, €18 (£15)

Viaggio al termine dell’Italia. Fellini politico, Andrea Minuz (2012) Rome: Rubbettino Editore, 242 pp., ISBN: 9788849832778, p/bk, €13.60

Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (eds) (2012) New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 336 pp., ISBN: 9781137281456, h/bk, £54.79

Roberto Rossellini documentarista. Una cultura della realtà, Luca Caminati (2012) Roma: CSC/Carocci editore, 148 pp., ISBN: 9788843066124, p/bk, €17

L’Italia e i mass media, Marco Gargiulo (ed.) (2012) Rome: Aracne, 460 pp., ISBN: 9788854853454, p/bk, €25.00

Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema, Austin Fisher (2013) London: I. B. Tauris, 304 pp., ISBN: 9781780767116, p/bk, £17.99

Splendor. Storia (inconsueta) del cinema italiano, Steve Della Casa (2013) Rome: Editori Laterza, 140 pp., ISBN: 9788858108352, p/bk, €14

Unosguardo a Sud. Vent’anni di movimenti, storie, conflitti e trasformazioninellacittà di Napoli 1990–2010, Patrizia La Trecchia (2013) Naples: LiguoriEditore, 297 pp., ISBN-13: 9788820750985, €25.99