Modernizing Italian Migration Cinema: Film Auteurs and the Economic Boom

MODERNIZING ITALIAN MIGRATION CINEMA: FILM AUTEURS AND THE ECONOMIC BOOM

ALBERTO ZAMBENEDETTI

At the cusp of the economic boom that restructured Italian economy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a handful of Italian directors, who were recog- nized by critics and audiences alike at some point in their careers as auteurs, made films concerning Italians emigrating or migrating internally. Thanks to the status that was granted to these directors, their films received a host of critical attention in monographic volumes and histories of Italian cinema, but rarely have they been considered together, as a result of a general preoccupation that captured the imagination of new filmmakers and veterans alike. This chapter will analyze four films that inve- stigate the relationship between mobility and modernization in the wake of the relatively abrupt transition from post-war to the economic boom: I magliari (The Magliari Francesco Rosi, 1959), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers Luchino Visconti, 1960), La ragazza in vetrina (Girl in the Window Luciano Emmer, 1961), and I fidanzati (The Fiances Ermanno Olmi, 1963). In the mid 1950s, a new understanding of film art came to the fore, famously spearheaded by a group of intellectuals gravitating around the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. They called it la politique des auteurs, or auteur theory, as Andrew Sarris dubbed it for the English- speaking world in his canonical article “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” The main tenet of auteur theory was the re-evaluation of the figure of the director, who these critics argued could be elevated from craftsman to author status. As a consequence, the films of a certain auteur could be studied not only individually, in relation to their genre, or the canon, but also as part of an artist’s oeuvre, as one brushstroke on the larger canvas of their career. Before André Bazin and the Cahiers critics he inspired engaged with their work, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vitto-

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright rio De Sica already enjoyed the status of founding fathers of neorealism and that of film artists all around. The next generation of filmmakers, including Francesco Rosi and Ermanno Olmi, achieved such status after auteur theory became a consolidated approach in film scholarship in the

Schrader, Sabine, and Daniel Winkler. The Cinemas of Italian Migration, edited by Sabine Schrader, and Daniel Winkler, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, . Created from uwm on 2017-02-23 09:15:52. 108 Modernizing Italian Migration Cinema

early 1960s. While not discarding the apparent vale of auteur theory, this chapter will also engage with the larger structures that inform the four films in question, such as national film history, genre conventions, and political climate. This approach stems from a belief that when reflecting on a specific kind of film, such as a film about migration, it is fundamental to take into account not only the individual choices made by screenwriters and directors in presenting the material, but it is also crucial to understand the artistic and socioeconomic climate in Italian history. Film critic Francesco Bolzoni writes that

il 1959 è, per il cinema italiano, l’anno del revival dei “grandi temi”: la resistenza e la seconda guerra mondiale. […] Rosi, da parte sua, non guarda indietro. Vuole vedere chiaro in una situazione difficile: l’emigrazione.1 (Bolzoni 1986, 54)

Bolzoni rightly identifies a trend that involved many filmmakers who felt that comedy and pepla had strayed too far away from neorealism’s lesson, which understood Italian film primarily as a socially and politically engaged cinema. Francesco Rosi’s I magliari certainly is about the present and, more specifically, about the state of Italian migration to Northern European countries in 1959. However, it is also a reflection on the past, as it capitalizes on the figure of the emigrant as it is constructed in films such as Il cammino della speranza (The Road to Hope Pietro Germi, 1950) and Napoletani a Milano (Neapolitans in Milan Eduardo De Filippo, 1953) as well as a forecast of Italians’ future mobility, which will take them to increasingly exotic destinations and faraway lands. Almost every story about migration is a story of individuals on the margins of society. However, the most common narrative trajectory is one that depicts the efforts undertaken by the characters in order to move from the margins to the centre, to assimilate, to climb the social ladder, or to gain wealth and respectability. I magliari focuses on characters that, because of the illegal nature of their activities, must remain on the fringes of society, even if their financial gains accumulate. The film tells the story of Mario (Renato Salvatori), an Italian worker in Germany who gets involved with a group of scam artists. Their chieftain, Totonno (Alberto Sordi), is the epitome of this marginality: as film historian Sandro Zam- betti puts it, “Totonno è […] lo stare ai margini della legalità senza rispet- tarla e ai margini dell’illegalità senza rischiare troppo”2 (Zambetti 1976, Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright 26). The magliari’s relative affluence is not an unproblematic narrative of success nor is it the fruit of hard and honest labour and national solidarity. Rather, it is predicated on the accentuation of the negative qualities attrib-

Alberto Zambenedetti 109

uted to the Neapolitans in Napoletani a Milano; it is arte d’arrangiarsi mixed with international criminal activities. The originality of Rosi’s approach to the material stems from this point: In I magliari, he combined what is essentially a social issue (emigration and the sense of bereavement felt by the unemployed worker abroad) with a story of organized crime. What makes this melange possible is the encounter of the naive protagonist Mario and the cunning Totonno; these characters are imbued with different values and, as Alberto Cattini notes, different genre conventions are attached to them. Mario is associated with melodrama and populismo,3 whereas Totonno’s scenes alternate between comedy and gangster motifs (Cecchi D’Amico, Patroni Griffi, and Rosi 2001, 8). I magliari is focalized through Mario. It begins with a nod to the sentimentalism that characterizes him; before the opening credits we see Mario’s feet as he walks over a work of public art that maps out Hanover’s distance to other major European cities. When his feet reach Rome (“Rom,” which is 1200 kilometers away), he kneels down and caresses the silver letters inlayed in the pavement. Mario’s nostalgia for the motherland is quickly reinforced by his choice of food: disgusted by the smell of sausages sold at a food stand, he enters La Bella Napoli, an Italian restaurant, where he is welcomed with hostility by the staff. Totonno intervenes and invites Mario to his table, where he is enjoying spaghetti and wine in the company of other Italian men. The film clarifies that this is not a narrative of the Southern Question. When Mario tells his dinner companions that he is from Grosseto, Vincenzo (Nino Vingelli), shoulders toward the camera, remarks “Qui c’è tutta l’Italia rappresentata. O’ toscano, o’ rumano, e o’ napuletano!”4 From this moment on, I magliari’s narration proceeds by juxtaposing two discourses: Mario’s innocence versus Totonno’s cunning, the honest migrant versus the fraudster expa- triate, legality versus illegality, melodrama versus dark comedy, populismo versus crime brutality. However, this initial dichotomy is progress- ively complicated: Mario starts off as a defeated man of solid principles, but the more he mingles with the magliari, the more he abandons his lofty ideals. Only the grand gesture of quitting the gang and the woman he loves—the boss’ wife, played by Belinda Lee—can ultimately redeem him. Mario’s worldview is informed by ideas of lawfulness and morality that are geographically bound: if Italy represents illegality and swindling,

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright Germany must represent legality and honest work. Realizing that Totonno’s activity is a fraudulent one throws a wrench in his dichotomous system: the magliaro casts a dark shadow on Mario’s idea that migrating to Germany represents the opportunity for him to earn his living without

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having to step out of the legal bounds of society. Before meeting Totonno, Mario had already failed in his project of moving from the margin to the centre of society: a righteous worker who lost his job, Mario is about to leave Germany and return home, accepting defeat. From a storytelling point of view, Totonno hijacks Mario’s character arc. Totonno does not allow him to be sanctimonious and to write, for himself, a narrative of martyrdom, according to which he left Italy and endured terrible suffering and deprivation in order to make an honest living. Totonno, unlike Mario, does not have an arc. He is a linear character, and as such he stays true to himself and his values throughout the film. In fact as far as emigrants are concerned, Totonno is the evolution of the species. He uses the narrative of the poor Italian emigrant who is underpaid and exploited to his own advantage. He turns the rules of migration upside down and succeeds in getting ahead by scamming the local population and by outsmarting the host culture. Throughout the film and in particular during the sales pitches, Totonno practices a style of instrumental self-stereotyping; he taps into the narrative of the Italian emigrant and reappropriates its markers, using them at his convenience. The idea of movement from the margin to the centre is a driving force in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli as well. Unquestionably the most celebrated film about internal migration of all time, Rocco is also one of the greatest films of Italian cinema at large. Loosely based on Giovanni Testori’s collection of short stories Il ponte della Ghisolfa, Rocco e i suoi fratelli “appartiene, in realtà, a quella categoria di film viscontiani che enunciano e denunciano ispirazioni (letterarie) plurime, alcune evidenti e conclamate, altre più segrete e occulte” 5 (Micciché 2002, 39). In five acts divided by intertitles, Rocco tells the story of five brothers from Lucania who migrate to Milan at the peak of the economic boom. Although the title seems to indicate Rocco (Alain Delon) as the film’s protagonist, it is the segment focusing on the first born, Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), which recei- ves the most screen time.6 In fact, Rocco is not a film with a single, defined protagonist; it is about the arc of the whole Parondi family, from the eldest to the youngest brother and the hurdles they encounter on their way to assimilation. Housing, work, education, sexuality, and love are the themes explored by the film in its five segments. As Visconti monographer Geoffrey Nowell-Smith explains:

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright each brother in a crude sense represents a certain kind of solution to the problems facing a Southern immigrant in a Northern urban environment. These solutions are not abstractly conceived, but evolve dialectically, each in response to the contradictions and inadequacies discovered in the last. (Nowell-Smith 2003, 128-129)

Alberto Zambenedetti 111

Just like its contemporary La ragazza in vetrina, Rocco begins with a train pulling into a station at night. The Parondis exit the direttissimo Bari- Milano and unload their belongings on the platform before beginning their journey across Milan. With its monumental proportions, the central station dwarfs the crowd of migrants, who move slowly through the massive structure weighed down by their luggage. The mother, Rosaria (Katina Paxinou), and four of her sons—Vincenzo is already in Milan—continue their journey across the metropolitan landscape on a tram, gazing at the city’s modernity through the vehicle’s windows. Rosaria shows pictures of her eldest child to the conductor, who observes them with interest. How- ever, the magic of this overture, in which human contact and integration seem like concrete possibilities for the migrants, is quickly reigned in. Rosaria clashes with the family of Vincenzo’s fiancée and forces her son to leave his own engagement party. Albeit being the first son to migrate and leave the family, Vincenzo is still quite tied to the ways of the South. He chooses a girl from the community of Southern immigrants, Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), and a blue-collar job. His loyalty to the family is almost unblemished, and he follows the dictates of his mother almost to the point of renouncing his own personal life, even though a healthy, individualistic drive initially motivates his choices. His attach- ment to old fashioned ideas of masculinity and gender roles are fleshed out in his relationship with his fiancée. Conversely, Simone (Renato Salvatori) breaks the first taboo. He not only fails to seek a Southerner, he romances a prostitute, Nadia (Anne Girardot). A metonymical embodiment of decadent city life, the girl endangers the solidity of the kinship between the siblings and will drag Simone and Rocco to an irreparable dispute. Unable to find steady employment, Simone follows in Vincenzo’s footsteps and “becomes a boxer, which is a classic mode of advancement for ambitious members of exploited but emergent ethnic groups” (Nowell- Smith 2003, 129). In fact, three out of five Parondi brothers wear the boxing gloves to attain social mobility: Vincenzo without success, Simone without discipline, and Rocco without heart. Just like Vincenzo, Simone relies on his physical rather than intellectual ability to succeed. However like Totonno, the magliaro, Simone, who is depicted with animalistic similes throughout the film, also places himself at the margin of legality. The eponymous third born, Rocco, plays a pivotal role in the younger brothers’ process of integration. In fact, Simone’s shortcomings dege-

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright nerate into criminal actions that Rocco attempts to redress. Despite their opposite natures—Simone is an arrogant “cock-of-the-walk” whereas Rocco is a goodhearted country boy—the brothers still share the core values of the rural society in which they received their upbringing.

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Concepts such as honor, loyalty, affiliation, and tradition simply have a different connotation in the host culture. Their inability to overcome their Southern imprint is what sentences their ultimate demise. When Rocco must leave the family to serve his draft term in the military, Rosaria keeps him updated through letters. This simple storytelling device allows Visconti to inform the audience on the family’s slow rise to middle-class status, on their slow crawl from the margin toward the centre. The driving forces are Vincenzo, who married Ginetta, and Ciro (Max Cartier), who obtained his high school diploma and became a skilled worker in an Alfa Romeo factory. Simone, however, cannot secure a steady job because of his boxing career, which initially goes well. After Vincenzo moves out, Ciro becomes the main provider with a steady in- come. However in order to conquer a position for himself in Milanese society, he must turn his back, at least partially, on the Parondi clan. In his segment, he rewrites the norms of familial loyalty by adjusting to the mores of the host culture: he dates a native (blonde) girl and relies on education rather than physical strength in order to earn his salary. Most importantly, Ciro is instrumental in finding a rational solution to the problems raised by Simone’s downfall. In his classic volume on the Italian character, Luigi Barzini writes that “most Italians still obey a double standard. There is one code valid within the family circle, with relatives and honorary relatives, intimate friends and close associates, and there is another code regulating life outside” (Barzini 1985, 194). After Simone turns his anger against Rocco and Na- dia, Rocco chooses to desert his lover in the hopes of saving his brother; he pushes Nadia onto Simone, sacrificing his love for her in favor of his sibling’s well-being. Also when Simone steals from his first manager Morini (Roger Hanin), Rocco offers to repay his debt and agrees to fight, despite the fact that he does not enjoy boxing. While Rocco succumbs to the code of the clan and shoulders Simone’s wrongdoings, Ciro shows that he is able to operate outside it. Firstly, he tries to reason with Simone, who is hostile to his younger brother’s remarks and tells him off. Secondly, he approaches Rocco and foreshadows his intentions of breaking from the code. Thirdly, he tries to bribe Simone and send him away. The film’s most climactic sequence is a masterclass in cross-cutting between two locations: While Rocco fights to earn the money to save Simone from prison, his crooked brother murders Nadia.7 When Simone shows up at

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright Rocco’s after-party covered in blood, Ciro runs to the police and turns him in. No longer identifying the clan as the core of society, the fourth sibling turns to its superstructure: having left rural Lucania and embraced the

Alberto Zambenedetti 113

industrial world, Ciro aligns with the Northerners’ reliance on law-and- order as the system governing life in the metropolis. Luca, the youngest brother, represents the project of total assimilation: remnants of peasant knowledge are bestowed upon him by Simone and Rocco, who still envision Lucania as a lost paradise. However, the final lesson, in the end sequence, comes from Ciro, who has struggled throughout the film to absorb the Northern values and embrace the new way of life. Nowell-Smith argues that “Luca is still a child, and his horizons are bounded by the family. Unlike the others he remembers the South only vaguely, but he has the idea that he would like some day to go back, to renew contact with the world of origins” (Nowell-Smith 2003, 132). Luca’s project can be accomplished because he, thanks to his young age, is the sole sibling who can manage where the others failed or only partially succeeded: he can become a respectable citizen in the host environment and afford the luxury, somewhere along the line, to rediscover his origins in a trip to the motherland, as Rocco wishes. The film ends on Luca as he returns home after visiting Ciro at the Alfa Romeo factory. In a long shot, the boy walks off into the distance, moving across an urban landscape that is still very much in the making. He leaves the desolate, naked periphery of the plant behind, symbolically heading towards the city on the horizon. Luciano Emmer’s La ragazza in vetrina elaborates on the scandalous themes Rocco introduced in the conversation about emigrants’ sexuality. Vincenzo (Bernard Frasson), the film’s protagonist, is a young miner from the Veneto who migrates to Holland and gets involved with Else (Marina Vlady), a beautiful Amsterdam prostitute. The innovative director was deeply involved with every stage of this film’s production. He wrote the script with Rodolfo Sonego and Emanuele Cassuto and was part of the team of writers that collaborated on the screenplay, which included Cassu- to and Vinicio Marinucci, Luciano Martino, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.8 La ragazza was deemed unsavoury by the censorship, which at the time was controlled by the Christian Democrats,9 and was restricted to audiences of sixteen or older. Not only did the film have a troubled release, it also had a very difficult production. Magali Noël (who plays Corry, Federico’s girlfriend) recalls that Emmer

sul set ogni tanto si arrabbiava: non con gli attori, ma piuttosto con le

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright situazioni che capitavano. Giravamo nella città proibita di Amsterdam, proprio nel quartiere delle prostitute, e spesso Luciano aveva problemi con con qualche gestore di bar, di locali. La situazione era difficile. Marina ed io eravamo molto truccate, e quando non giravamo venivamo spesso importunate.10 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 49)

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In addition to these problems on the set, Emmer did not get along with the producer, Emanuele Cassuto, and accused him of embezzling funds from the film’s budget. Reportedly, the actors had to contribute funding to finish the film. Because of its issues with the Italian censorship board, the film now exists in at least two different versions: the French version and the Italian version, which is a few minutes shorter. Emmer was always bitter about his film’s ill fate. In 1998 at a screening of La ragazza at the Centro di Cultura Italiano in Brussels, he addressed an audience of expatriates and remarked that “la stessa democrazia che vi ha spinto lontano dalle vostre case è quella che perseguitò con la censura il mio film”11 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 88). As Guglielmo Moneti notes in La ragazza in vetrina,

riemergono, in una forma sostanzialmente tragica, i consueti temi emmeriani dello scontro fra pulsioni soggettive e resistenze materiali, e del rapporto fra desideri, progetti, tensioni individuali e dinamiche collettive.12 (Monetti 1992, 66f)

Emmer had already explored these themes in his 1951 Parigi è sempre Parigi (Paris is Always Paris), in which a group of Italians travel to the French capital to watch an Italy versus France soccer game and spend the weekend in the ville lumière. His second feature film and one of the first Italian travel comedies ever made, Parigi, is “uno dei più geniali film sullo spettacolo degli spettacoli nello spazio urbano europeo esploso del dopo- guerra,”13 as Enrico Ghezzi dubs it (2004, 11). Francesco Rosi was Emmer’s assistant director, and many stars and rising new faces were cast in the film,14 including Aldo Fabrizi and his on-screen wife Ave Ninchi, Lucia Bosé, a young Marcello Mastroianni, Paolo Panelli, and Franco Interlenghi. The last named plays Franco, a handsome young man who romances a French girl, Christine (Hélène Rémy) who works in a news- stand. The short-lived romance, whose touching sweetness is made possible by its intrinsic brevity, contains the possibility of deracination and migration for either lover, which is ultimately curtailed by the group’s narrative. Franco must return to Italy and leave Christine behind for their fling to have memorable status; it is the very fact that their union remains only potential that makes it so compelling. Once the threshold between travel and migration is crossed, things lose their glamorous patina. This much bleaker scenario is embodied by the Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright “Barone” character (Giuseppe Porelli), a poor Italian emigrant living in Paris who pretends to be rich and chaperons Fabrizi to the seediest nightclubs in Paris. It is through this character that “Emmer può inserire, accanto alla Parigi mitica dei monumenti e degli spettacoli notturni, quella,

Alberto Zambenedetti 115

demitizzata, dei lavori umilianti, dei bassifondi, dei quartieri malfamati dove si vive di espedienti”15 (Moneti 1992, 44). However, Parigi è sempre Parigi is not a film about migration; it is a comedy about Italy’s fast growing economy, which for the first time allows its citizens to visit exotic locations for leisure and not only while searching for employment and social mobility. Migration must remain an unexplored avenue for the young international lovers in order for the film to project the image of a changed Italy: no longer that of post-war reconstruction and neorealism, but the optimistic one of an economic boom that was beginning to appear on the horizon. Emmer recalls that this storyline was added to the film after the others were completed:

Volevo finire il film, ma i produttori l’hanno abbandonato, perché non volevano una storia come questa. Sono andato dal distributore, che era un greco, proprietario della Minerva Films. Gli ho detto che era criminale, che senza questa storia il film non esisteva. Mi ha dato un assegno, sono andato a Parigi, solo con un operatore, una macchina da presa e i due attori, e ho girato l’episodio. Era un momento molto bello.16 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 215)

While La ragazza revisits all these themes, Vincenzo’s choice is much more daring and controversial than Franco’s. Firstly, like Simone and Rocco, he romances a prostitute. The film makes no mystery of her profession, while also abstaining from casting any sort of moral judgement upon her. Secondly, by choosing to stay in Holland, he loses his innocence and becomes another Federico (Lino Ventura). This character arc both pleases and frustrates audience expectations in that Vincenzo’s motion is not thrust forward but follows a circular pattern. As Tonino de Bernardi writes, the film’s staging and cinematography reflects this trajectory: La ragazza

inizia nel buio di una notte in terra straniera per finire quasi fatalmente in quello ancor più nero nelle viscere della terra la quale si richiude al si sopra di tutti nella miniera, come se alle tenebre non ci fosse scampo.17 (Francia di Celle and Grezzi 2004, 169)

Just like the Parondis in Milan, Vincenzo arrives at the station at night. He travels on foot to the villaggio degli italiani.18 After settling in, his descent

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright into the mine plunges him into obscurity, gradually even tinting his skin. When the workers board the elevator that will travel 1,350 meters into the ground, their faces are fresh, but when they end their shift, they are covered in coal dust. Additionally when the gallery collapses and traps him underground with Federico and an African miner named Mustafà, the

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men decide to ration their electricity and use only one headlight at a time. It is in this womb-like, jet-black claustrophobic environment that the men plan their weekend in the capital. However, what follows is not a sequence that counterbalances the mine’s darkness: Amsterdam’s night, despite the lights of bars, windows, and signage, is not bright. It is yet another stage in Vincenzo’s circuitous motion towards the loss of his innocence. When Vincenzo and Federico spot Else in the window, she is bathed in light, her radiant complexion and blonde hair luring Vincenzo in.19 However, this fleeting promise of light is broken by Federico’s coarse manners and his inability to secure the woman’s company for the weekend. Before he is able to return to Else, Vincenzo has to suffer Federico’s drunken behaviour and Corry’s jealous tantrums. It is only after Federico is kicked out of the gay bar that Vincenzo can have what he wants. After she sleeps with him, immediately infringing her “no kus” (no kiss) rule, Else drives Vincenzo to the railway station, where he is supposed to board the eleven o’clock train to Italy. Tonino de Bernardi comments on the film’s many locations, including the station

e la forza delle ambientazioni diverse in La ragazza in vetrina, quella sta- zione di Amsterdam che con la sua monumentalità notturna […] diventa un’immagine di Kafka, del luogo sempre eluso, dello smarrimento.20 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 169)

Dark and inhospitable, this location is emptied of its primary function in Emmer’s film. Vincenzo does not arrive in Holland through this particular port of entry, nor does he ever leave from it. Like Kafka’s bureaucracy, the modern Amsterdam station becomes a holding place, a strange locale where the main character is marooned. Vincenzo must return to Else for the story to continue: the station must bounce him back over and over again. Else takes him to her summer house, a small two-storey hut (another closed location), where she tells Vincenzo that “mai uomo stato in casa mia.”21 The lovers spend the night in the hut, and the next morning Vincenzo wakes up and walks to the beach, where Else is waiting for him. The open seaside space, which is whipped by a strong wind and filled with an abundance of light (in the sky, in the sand, and in the protagonists’ clothing) contrasts starkly with both the mine and Amsterdam’s night scene. Daylight paints a different Else, who has shed the prostitute clothes, Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright for the moment. The transition from the city capital to the cabin, a much more welcoming environment, contains the possibility of home, the ultimate prize for a migrant worker whose status is predicated upon the loss of it. In daylight, Else is a potential mate with whom Vincenzo can create

Alberto Zambenedetti 117

such a home abroad. It is while sitting on the beach that Else inquires about Vincenzo’s marital status. Framed frontally, their hair brushed back by the sea breeze, the couple looks very handsome and well-matched. Else takes Vincenzo’s left hand, brings it to her face, and strokes it with her cheek, and then points to his ring finger. Vincenzo, somewhat amused by the question, replies “Sposato? Chi, io? Son mica matto!” Else, put off by his coarse response, comments simply “Perché matto?”22 Vincenzo’s avoi- ding the question indicates his inability to envision Else as a potential life partner. This blindness affects his vision in daylight, reflecting the social conventions according to which Else, because of her nighttime occupation, is a tainted woman and, therefore, is unworthy of being considered a spouse. By conforming to the societal norm, Vincenzo condemns their relationship to being consumed only in the shadows of the night: darkness births it, and in darkness it shall exist. La ragazza does not end with an unproblematic lovers’ reunion but on a note that is accompanied by Federico’s booming laughter. Vincenzo stays in Holland, and the friends are again at work in the mine on the same shift. They descend again into the darkness, where they quickly make up and then go off for another day of work. The potential happy ending, one that would have the lovers reunite and Else lifted out of prostitution, does not happen. Audience expectations are fulfilled only in part: the lovers’ newly found agreement will not generate a home, like in Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza, thus allowing for the assimilation of the migrant worker. Else’s affection, albeit genuine, remains paid affection for Vincenzo. Corry and Federico are the model for this sort of union. Hence, the film ends with the men walking into the recesses of the mine, modernity’s darkest pit, and embracing the precarious stability of concepts like love, home, and even life. As Tonino de Bernardi observes:

“C’è un’infiltrazione d’acqua,” dirà qualcuno nel finale riguardo alla miniera a chi sta per discenderci come se appunto dovessimo aspettarci ancora sempre un’altra irruzione di quella morte imminente, è la cronaca di una morte annunciata.23 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 170)

Much like Luciano Emmer, Ermanno Olmi began his career as a documentarian. The director was employed by Edisonvolta, a massive conglomerate in the energy industry that had its own Sezione Cinema, (Film Division). They commissioned documentaries about the company Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright and its activities from Olmi. Between 1953 and 1961, Olmi directed nine- teen 35mm documentaries and oversaw the production of many more.24 In 1959, he made his first feature film, Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still), which is the first instalment of a trilogy loosely based on the theme

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of work in contemporary Italy, of which I fidanzati is the final instalment. Thematically speaking, Olmi’s early films are highly personal meditations on the director’s own experiences in the workforce, but also on religion, family, and romance. In particular, I fidanzati elaborates on the relationship between work and personal life, capturing with superb humanistic sensibility the strange melange of bereavement and excitement that is felt by the migrant worker at the prospect of leaving his loved ones, as well as his difficulties in adjusting to a new culture and creating a social network in the host environment. A film about an unskilled factory worker from Milan who is relocated to Sicily and must leave his loving fiancée behind, I fidanzati stands apart from the many texts of Italian migration cinema for two main reasons. Firstly, it is one of the rare examples in which the main character’s displacement does not follow the canonical routes that Italian migrations have taken over the years. Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini) is offered the opportunity of career advancement if he agrees to move south and work in a new plant. Not only does his migration grant him an immediate promotion that contains the potential for social upward mobility, it also sends him out of the industrialized North and into the rural South, travelling literally in the opposite direction to all the characters in Il cammino della speranza, I magliari, Rocco e i suoi fratelli, and La ragazza in vetrina. Secondly, Olmi’s film is also unique from a stylistic point of view: it capitalizes on the experience of the French Nouvelle Vague and, specifically, on the non- chronological, fractured narratives of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) as much as it does on the purest neorealist precepts of casting non-professional actors. Thus, it gives a voice to the meek and the humble, focusing on labour and everyday life. For the film’s masterful opening sequence, Olmi cross-cuts between four different time planes: the present, two distinct moments in the near past, and one in the near future. In the present, Giovanni and his fiancée, Liliana (Anna Canzi), are at the ballroom La Speranza. From their faces and their lack of communication, it is clear that they just had a fight, and that their night is ruined. The second sequence is the first one from the past. The protagonist is at his workplace, and he is offered a post—and a promotion from unskilled to skilled labourer—at a new plant in Sicily. The third sequence reveals Liliana’s distress at the news of Giovanni’s forth-

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright coming departure, possibly depicting the argument they had just before arriving at La Speranza. The fourth sequence is concerned with the figure of the protagonist’s elderly father and his son’s arrangements with a retirement home for him after he decides to leave. The twelve-minute long

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opening ends with the shot of a four-engine aeroplane taking off in the night: the transportation technology Giovanni uses to migrate sets him apart from Rocco, Vincenzo, and all the other characters. In fact, I fidanzati is a story about Italy’s newly found status of modernized industrial power—as the scenes in the plant clearly display—as much as it is about self-discovery. As film scholar Jérôme Picant argues, “le voyage de Giovanni est vécu comme une rédemption”25 (Estève 1992, 47). Having been unfaithful to Liliana, Giovanni must be apart from her in order to rediscover himself, their relationship, and to atone for his misdeeds. Picant continues arguing that “l’arrivée de Giovanni en Sicile est placée sous le double signe de la recherche de l’identité et du retour à l’enfance”26 (Estève 1992, 49). The forced separation between the lovers creates longing—for home, for each other—and opens a space for them to renegotiate their union. As the film progresses, the words they exchange in their correspondence regain the meaning they had lost. While the soundtrack to the opening scene is almost entirely occupied by music, the more the film progresses and the lovers rediscover their feelings for each other, the more their voices and their words become important. The clearest example of this process is the extended letter sequence. In it, Giovanni and Liliana’s voices bare their feelings about the forced separation. Carla Colombo’s exquisite editing brings them together in a magical whirlwind of memories that climax in a passionate kiss. In framing and composition, the kiss is reminiscent of James Stewart and Kim Novak’s famous scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). Unlike Vertigo, I fidanzati does not use special visual effects but relies on editing (as it did in the opening sequence) as a way to conjure up the couple’s happy memories and, perhaps, even a space in which they imagine their possible future. Giovanni’s internal redemption is mirrored by his daily life in Sicily, which is split between the time at the plant and the time spent exploring the surrounding areas. The man’s quiet gaze provides Olmi with an unobtrusive lens through which he explores the cultural, sexual, and even climactic differences between Northern and Southern Italy. In his 1963 review of I fidanzati, Olmi’s friend and collaborator Tullio Kezich wrote:

qualcuno potrà osservare che Olmi non ha visto la Sicilia che per rapide illuminazioni, senza connessioni di causa ed effetto, senza inserirsi in un

discorso di fondo sui rapporti fra Nord e Sud. Ma questo è appunto il Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright dramma di Giovanni, che spesso non vede al di là del proprio naso: ed è il motivo dialettico segreto del film, la spinta riformatrice ed educativa che s’intravede dietro la mobilitazione dei sentimenti individuali.27 (Kezich 2004, 26)

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In conclusion, I fidanzati breaks away from its predecessors in many ways: it offers an original take on internal migration in which it is the Northerner who travels south, it looks into the possible positive effects of displacement, exploring its potential for self-discovery and redemption, and finally, it suggests new avenues from a stylistic point of view. The film’s release coincided with the end of the economic boom and the golden season of migration cinema ended with it. After I fidanzati pointed the way to an aesthetic and thematic renewal, it was impossible for filmmakers to return to the well-established formulas. They had to move to forms that used reflexivity as a means to break apart the conventions and establish new ones.

Notes

1 “In 1959, Italian cinema revisited the ‘great themes’: the resistance and World War II. [...] Rosi, on the other hand, does not look back. He wants to shed some light on a difficult situation: emigration.” 2 “Totonno is [...] suspended between the margins of legality, which he does not conform to, and the margins of illegality, which he walks without risking too much.” 3 Cattini uses this word in a narratological sense. He refers to a particular set of clichés employed in the Mario storyline, such as Paula’s backstory—the poor woman who is set on the road to sin by the older, wealthy man—but also Mario’s own trajectory of a righteous man who strays from the path but ultimately returns to it. Raffaello Matarazzo’s many post-war melodramas are the model for this brand of perdition-to-redemption character arc. 4 “Italy is well represented here! The Roman, the Tuscan, and the Neapolitan!” All quoted dialogue is taken from the DVDs currently in distribution. 5 “Belongs to the category of Visconti films that spell out and expose many (literary) sources, some of which are evident and declared, others more secret and hidden.” 6 Lino Micciché offers a breakdown of the film’s structure, including a segment- by-segment shot count: The opening scene consists of shots 1 through 15; Vin- cenzo’s is the largest portion of the film, from 16 through 227. Simone’s story runs from shot 228 to 321, and Rocco’s is from 322 to 503. Ciro’s segment is from shot 504 to 623, and Luca, the youngest brother, has only a few minutes of film time from shot 624 to 693 (Micciché 2002, 40). 7 For a detailed discussion of the scene, see Rohdie 1992, 33-43. 8 Pasolini had a penchant for stories involving prostitution; his 1961 directorial

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright debut, Accattone (Accattone!), tells the story of Vittorio “Accattone” Cataldi (Franco Citti), a low-life pimp in Rome. Pasolini also wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s first feature film, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper 1962), which depicts the police investigation following the murder of a prostitute in the same city.

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9 As David Forgacs notes, the “state censorship was complemented by that of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (CCC), a body inaugurated in 1935 which was directly dependent on Italian Catholic Action” (1990, 121). 10 “Sometimes would get mad on the set: not with the actors, but rather with things that happened. We shot in the forbidden city of Amsterdam, in the red light district, and Luciano often had issues with bar or club owners. It was a difficult situation. Marina and I wore a lot of make-up, and when we were not shooting, people bothered us.” In the same interview, Noël goes on to describe the most memorable of these tense situations, a notorious anecdote that made the papers in 1961: Four local men cut the electricity on the set, bringing the shoot to a halt. They approached Emmer with the idea of blackmailing him, but he refused to pay them and told them off, so they threw him in a canal. After this forced bath, he caved and paid the men so that production could resume (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 50). 11 “The democracy that pushed you far away from your homes is the same one that persecuted my film.” 12 “Emmer’s usual theme resurfaces in this film in a fundamentally tragic guise: there is the clash between subjective impulse and material resistance, and there is the relationship between desires, projects, individual tensions, and collective dynamics.” 13 “One of the most genius post-war films on the spectacle of shows in the exploded European urban environment.” 14 In a remarkable cameo appearance, Yves Montand sings one of his classics, Les feuilles mortes, during an extended cabaret scene. 15 “Emmer can work into the film, together with the celebrated Paris of its monuments and night life, the humble reality of humiliating jobs, of bad areas, and of ill-famed neighbourhoods where people scramble to survive.” 16 “I wanted to finish the film, but the producers deserted it because they did not want a story like this one. I went to the distributor, a Greek who owned Minerva Films. I told him that this was criminal, that without this story the film did not exist. He gave me a cheque, I went to Paris with one operator, a camera and the two actors, and I shot the episode. It was a beautiful moment.” 17 “Begins in the darkness of night in a foreign land and ends, almost fatally, in the even darker obscurity of the earth’s bowels, which is closed over people’s heads in the mine. It’s as if darkness were inescapable.” 18 The villaggio degli italiani was a camp that housed migrant workers. Many films about Italian emigrants have scenes set in these environments, including I magliari and Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate Franco Brusati, 1974). 19 In discussing his troubles with censorship, Emmer recalls “Avevano tagliato la scena della vetrina, che era molto casta, era una censura moralistica. Il responsa- bile del cinema del Ministero dello Spettacolo aveva concordato con Cassuto una

Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright bella somma per rigirare la scena in vetrina con l’autorizzazione a far vedere qualcosa di più di una spalla, magari nuda, a condizione che io aggiungessi una scena—figuriamoci se facevo una cosa del genere—in cui mentre lui dormiva lei vedeva sul giornale la foto di lui in un articolo che parlava dell’incidente in miniera. Allora si sarebbe dovuta avvicinare e dire:‘Tu sei un eroe e io sono una

122 Modernizing Italian Migration Cinema

miserabile prostituta’” (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 179). “They cut the scene in the window, which was very chaste; it was a moralistic type of censorship. The head of the Ministry of Entertainment had negotiated a big sum and an agreement with Cassuto that we would reshoot the scene showing more skin. A shoulder, maybe, or even a nude, but on one condition: I had to add a scene—God forbid I’d do anything like that—showing him sleeping and her seeing a picture of him on the newspaper in an article about the mine accident. She should have approached him saying: ‘You are a hero and I am a miserable prostitute.’” 20 “And what force do the different locations have in La ragazza in vetrina; Amsterdam station, which with its nocturnal monumentality [...] becomes an image by Kafka, of the always eluded place, of forlornness.” 21 “Never was a man in my house.” 22 “Married? Who, me? I am not crazy!” “Why crazy?” 23 “‘There’s a water leak,’ someone says in the closing scene to those who are about to descend into it. It is as if we need to prepare for another incursion of imminent death; it is the chronicle of a death foretold.” 24 For a detailed discussion of Olmi’s career as a documentarian, see Tabanelli 1987. 25 “Giovanni’s voyage is lived as a redemption.” 26 “Giovanni’s arrival in Sicily is placed under the double sign of his search for identity and his return to childhood.” 27 “Some may criticize Olmi for his take on Sicily, which is shown by rapid flashes without connections of cause and effect, without tapping into the discourse of North–South relations. But this is Giovanni’s problem: he cannot see beyond the tip of his nose. And this is the film’s secret dialectic motif, its push towards reform

and education, which shines through the mobilization of individual feelings.” Copyright © 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. rights All Publishing. Scholars Cambridge 2013. © Copyright