Italian Cinemaʼs Missing Children (1992–2005)
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ITALIAN CINEMAʼS MISSING CHILDREN (1992–2005) Submitted by Roger Graham Pitt to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian, January 2012. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has been previously submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. .......................................... Roger Graham Pitt 2 THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank the University of Exeter and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for generously supporting this doctoral research project. I am grateful, too, to the staff of the Cineteca di Bologna and the Videoteca Pasinetti in Venice, for their unfailing assistance during an extended period of profitable archival research. Within the field of Italian Cultural Studies (and Film/Cinema) Studies, inspiring and thought-provoking studies by the following scholars proved indispensible to the intellectual development of this project as a whole: Emma Wilson, Áine OʼHealy, Danielle Hipkins, Catherine OʼRawe, Derek Duncan, Alan OʼLeary, Fiona Handyside and Karen Lury. Thank you for thinking so beautifully and for pushing me to think harder, even when I really didnʼt want to. Likewise, working on the cinema of Gianni Amelio, Mario Martone and Antonio Capuano, in particular, has been a great privilege. All of the films I discuss here, are close to my heart, and always will be. I am also grateful for the numerous gestures of kindness and encouragement by those friends, new and old, who at different points along the way, really helped to keep this show on the road. In particular, I would like to thank: Tom Knowles, Mark Hughes, Rachel Trevallion, Alice Barnaby and Clara Bradbury-Rance, Alexander Cattell, Alwyn Harrison, Colin Dart, Ihrene Broden-Miller, Silvia Vázquez Fernández, Antonella Liuzzo-Scorpo, Christine Walters, Barbara Langley, Fiona Handyside, Sally Penna-Bray, Neel Sood, Duncan and Annie Chave, Jenni Lehtinen, Jennifer Barnes, Chloe Bardolf-Smith, Steph and Jeremy, Emilie Grand-Clement, Lewis Ward, Rupa Chilvers, Jenny Ramell, Julie Bladon, Kevin Jefferies and other musical brothers and sisters, Valentina Polcini, my cousin, Chris Hughes, and everyone at BTP. Last but not least, I would like to extend heartfelt thanks to Sally Turner for her love and incredible kindness during the final, though, no less crucial (or challenging) moments of this journey. I will get my weekends back soon, I promise! I also owe a debt of gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, Dr Danielle Hipkins. Your care, diligence and patience, never ceases to amaze me. Thank you for being a truly incredible supervisor, mentor and friend. I most certainly could not have done this without you. Namaste. This PhD is dedicated to my wonderful and inspiring mother, Lesley Pitt, my great friend and grandfather, Graham White, and to the memory of my cherished grandmother, Elsie White. You were by my side every step of the way and you continued to believe in me even when the chips were well and truly down. For this, I cannot thank you enough. 3 ABSTRACT The aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse the range of resonances surrounding the lost or endangered child (or adolescent) in six Italian films made between 1992 and 2005. By drawing on and expanding Emma Wilsonʼs proposed understanding of the term ʻmissing childʼ in Cinemaʼs Missing Children (a transnational, cinema-based study published in 2003), this thesis will seek to open out new ways of exploring both contemporary Italian cinema and the ʻmissing childʼ paradigm. To this end, the following research questions are pivotal to the discursive trajectory of this thesis as a whole: What does it mean to ground contemporary Italian works which broadly correspond to the term ʻmissing childʼ (as proposed in Cinemaʼs Missing Children) within the specific context of Italian culture and society? How would recourse to a range of specifically Italian filmmaking, socio-cultural, or historical phenomena shape (or reshape) our understanding of this topos? In order to fully engage these concerns, this thesis will begin by establishing a rigorous interdisciplinary methodology. In Chapter One, I will address questions of critical reception with particular emphasis on the possible pitfalls of conventional recourse to neorealism as a means of reading the missing child in contemporary cinema. In Chapter Two, I will extend this necessary emphasis on critical reception and related notions of possible distortion and oversimplification, to include the dialogic relation between Italian cinematic articulations of (missing) children, childhoods and the experience of (biological and non-biological) parenthood, and clusters of cultural and political concerns and anxieties. In chapters Three, Four, and Five, I will bring this interdisciplinary methodology to bear on three sets of primary sources. Whilst this close textual analysis will contend with the missing male child (in a range of guises), it will also bring to the fore new ways of thinking with and about the critically neglected female child. By moving away from more normative critical frameworks (including neorealism) this thesis will not only attempt to reset and refresh understandings of important works of the last two decades, but will also work towards a recuperation of the critically disavowed gender identity (and concomitant role and status) of ʻmissingʼ female children. 4 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . 6 1 ʻAGAINST NEOREALISMʼ? READING (AND RE-READING) THE MISSING CHILD IN ITALIAN CINEMA . .24 2 THE CHILD IN TIME: THE MISSING CHILD OR ʻBAMBINO NEGATOʼ IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY . 58 3 È DIFFICILE DIVENTARE GRANDI IN ITALIA!: THE TRIALS OF BEING AND THE TRAUMAS OF BECOMING IN MARCO TULLIO GIORDANAʼS QUANDO SEI NATO NON PUOI PIÙ NASCONDERTI AND NANNI MORETTIʼS LA STANZA DEL FIGLIO . 99 4 ʻBAMBINI DIFFICILI?ʼ: THE AESTHETICS OF ABUSE AND THE POLITICS OF ENTRUSTMENT IN GIANNI AMELIOʼS IL LADRO DI BAMBINI AND ANTONIO CAPUANOʼS LA GUERRA DI MARIO . .142 5 BURYING THE DEAD: THE RETURN OF THE MISSING CHILD IN MARIO MARTONEʼS LʼAMORE MOLESTO AND CRISTINA COMENCINIʼS LA BESTIA NEL CUORE . 181 CONCLUSION . 253 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 261 FILMOGRAPHY . 276 5 INTRODUCTION IN SEARCH OF THE MISSING CHILD Everything before had been fantasy, a routine and frenetic mimicry of sorrow. Just before dawn he began to cry, and it was from this moment in the semi-darkness that he was able 1 to date his time of mourning. Marco Tullio Giordanaʼs 2005 film, Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (hereafter, Quando sei nato), is about a missing child. Sandro (Matteo Gadola), the child in question, goes missing after falling into the Mediterranean Sea during a sailing holiday with his father, Bruno (Alessio Boni), and family friend, Popi (Rodolfo Corsato). The childʼs parents believe that he is dead, swallowed by the unforgiving nighttime swell of the ocean, lost under a wave. In the aftermath of the boyʼs disappearance, the film begins to sketch the contours of parental mourning; the wearying grief that spills from the site of loss, the crippling guilt, which accompanies this bitter tear in the fabric of family life and experience. At one point, the action returns to the family home. As the cameraʼs gaze lingers on kitchen work surfaces, our attention is drawn to discarded food and an abandoned coffee pot. These jilted items are the tangible residues of parental pain, the physical remnants of suffering. In the wake of the childʼs erasure from the fold of family existence, its rites and rituals have been suspended, frozen in time. Moving to another room, we see the boyʼs mother, Lucia (Michela Cescon). Unable to respond in spoken language to the disappearance of her only child, she plays Handycam footage filmed during the calamitous maritime trip. Its images appear on a large television screen. It is to these images that her unbroken gaze is sutured. Bruno, the unwitting agent of the childʼs (apparent) demise, looks on, his eyes tearing, as several seconds of footage are obsessively played and replayed, over and over. The missing child appears, only to disappear, locked in an unbroken cycle of repetition. Against this visual backdrop, 1 Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (London: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 23. 6 the boyʼs voice, captured on the audio track of the footage, resounds throughout this newly vapid living space. As Quando sei natoʼs narrative moves towards the other stream of its action, (involving the childʼs undisclosed rescue and return journey on a battered trawler loaded with illegal migrants, or so-called ʻclandestiniʼ) our attention is drawn to the other missing child of Giordanaʼs film: Alina (Ester Hazan), a pre-teenage Romanian girl whom Sandro befriends on the journey home. It was Alinaʼs ʻbrotherʼ, Radu (Vlad Alexandru Toma), who spotted the child bobbing in the moonlit ocean, or heard his cries. It was Radu who came to his rescue, and saved him from certain drowning. Despite striking similarities in facial structure and skin tone, Radu and Alina are not siblings. Radu is a human trafficker and pimp; he is transporting Alina to Italy to work in the sex trade. The childʼs grim destiny is confirmed in the filmʼs denouement. In this closing sequence, Sandro re-discovers his traveling companion in a disused compound in Milanʼs industrial hinterland. It is here, surrounded by pedophilic filmmaking paraphernalia that the female child has been ritually abused and exploited. As Giordanaʼs