Edinburgh University Press Masculinity & Italian Cinema

1. INTRODUCTION Press Cinema This book is about a particular moment in the history of Italian cinema when the understanding of what it is to be a man undergoes a radical redefinition. Much has been written about experiences of male disempowerment and vulnerability in film, the emphasis of this scholarshipItalian invariably being either on representations of scarred, damagedUniversity male bodies or on accounts of male suffering and loss. Less has been written& about the opportunities that cinema provides for considering masculinity in relation to an experience of transformation. It is not just that change, with its complexities and contradictions, is difficult to locate and observe.1 The problem is how the idea of change itself seems to raise immediate suspicion, if not blatant pessimism. Paul Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington, for example, have argued that the image of a new, transformed cinematic man, beyond the oppressive constraints of patriarchy,Edinburgh may merely represent ‘a repositioning or realignment with patri- archal power structures’.2 Accepting the meaning of change as ‘the process of becoming somethingMasculinity different’, one could argue that in studies of masculinity in film too much attention has been paid to considerations about the expected end result (a fully formed new masculinity), rather than to the intricacies of the very process of becoming something different. To consider change does not necessarily mean looking at where this change has already run its course. It also makes sense to pay attention to the points where the change appears less than smooth and where walls hampering the possibility for further transformation spring up. Equally, it may be worth considering the spaces of desire where change has not yet occurred. This is where unfulfilled possibilities for 1 MASCULINITY AND ITALIAN CINEMA transformation appear most visible and where the potential for becoming something different may be most promising. Masculinity and Italian Cinema examines one of the most complex and, oddly, under-examined periods in the history of Italian cinema. The 1970s were a decade of innovation and challenging work for Italian filmmakers, one that was marked by radicalism and heated debates about the function of cinema as a political medium and as a mass cultural phenomenon.3 During these years, Italian cinema experienced a proliferation of sexualised images as never before. Sex emerged as a matter of public concern, as something that needed to be shown and discussed. Masculinity and Italian Cinema will show that, in this context, a wide-ranging interrogation of masculinity also took place, with a number of films beginning to question the definitional boundaries demarcating a socially acceptable male identity and the exclusions inevitably produced by such boundaries. * * * Press A man sits with his back to the camera. He slowly turns his head towards us. His gaze is sustained, tense, inquisitive. He seems frightened.Cinema The man stares into the darkness. His gaze seems to convey a desire for knowledge, for self- knowledge. The man seems transfixed. His gaze appears to be both reaching out and blocked, the bars that separate his body from the camera partly hampering his search of the darkness. In staring at the camera, the man involves us in his search. It is a gaze for which there Italianseems to be no distinct object other than the subject looking, the Universitycamera operating like a mirror, turning the gaze back on to itself. & This closing shot from The Conformist (Il conformista: 1970), featured on the cover of this book and which I have just described, exemplifies the predicament of masculinity in the Italian cinema of the 1970s. It is the predicament of a man who is forced to look at himself, to confront his insecurities and face a set of circumstances that demand a move towards introspection on his part. As he looks back towards us, the man faces the desires that he has tried to disavowEdinburgh throughout the film. In confronting these desires, the man is also confronting himself, his limits. It is a kind of confrontation that occurs repeatedly in the ItalianMasculinity cinema of the 1970s. Such a confrontation implies the questioning of a set of blockages. Like the bars obstructing the man’s inquisitive look, this questioning may not be able to transcend a set of pre-existing limits, but points towards the possibility of pushing them outwards and renegotiating their constraining power. This man appears to be both daunted and forced towards self-analysis. Scriptwriter Bernardo Zapponi, who collaborated with Federico Fellini on one of the films that best explored this predicament, City of Women (La città delle donne: 1980), describes the situation of this man in the following terms: ‘it 2 INTRODUCTION was the period of feminism, women appeared with a new threatening face; as a result, men felt somehow bewildered.’4 Zapponi’s comments point to the image of an unsettled man, one who now faces a set of new challenges. His words reflect the predicament of a number of men involved in consciousness-raising practices during these years. In a collective memoir entitled L’antimaschio, one of these men describes the impact of feminism for his generation as one of traumatic confrontation with one’s insecurities and previously unquestioned privileges.5 As I will be arguing in this book, far from being simply fraught with anxieties, this predicament also points to the possibility of re-imagining one’s masculinity in new ways. Writing on the pages of a leftist magazine in 1969, one of these men declares: ‘we will have to rethink the whole way of being men, [. .] so that we might feel free from all the obligations coming from our privilege [. .] and from that particular kind of slavery that stems from being masters.’6 Predicated on an implicit critique of what masculinity has historically been, this rethinking points to the possibility of change and of envisaging alternative ways of being a man.7 Press The Conformist explores the dilemmas of its male protagonist by making use of the classical Oedipal narrative, thus dramatising the internalCinema conflict experienced by the protagonist in the form of a symbolic struggle between father and son. The father stands in the film for repression and the presence of one inevitable path leading to the acquisition of a stable male heterosexual identity. The son stands for the potential to imagine other possibilities, a potential charged with the desire to break free from a singular,Italian univocal path. In its most conventional articulation, the OedipalUniversity plot describes a deterministic journey, one in which the only possible outcome is& the intervention of repression. In the conventional psychoanalytic account, the conflict between father and son ends with the latter bowing to the authority of the former, endorsing his repressive regime and following in his steps. The Conformist initially adopts this fairly linear narrative and its deterministic logic. But the film also twists the linear succession of narrative components and creates an elliptical structure with the superimposition of flashbacks that appear to disturb the linear progression of the story.Edinburgh These disturbances reflect the psychosexual conflict experienced by the protagonist, and the impossible resolution of the conflict. Throughout the film, the protagonistMasculinity strives to repress his homosexual instincts and the memories of an earlier erotic experience with an older man in order to achieve a sense of normality. Exemplified by the unexpected re-emergence of these unwanted memories, the ‘repressed’, however, returns to haunt the protagonist at the end of the film. As the conflict of the protagonist remains unresolved, an alternative space of libidinal possibilities becomes visible. It is this conflict between the singular and the plural – between the narrowing down of knowledge and the proliferation of a multitude of knowledges – that interests me about the predicament of masculinity in the Italian cinema of the 3 MASCULINITY AND ITALIAN CINEMA 1970s. It is a tension between, on the one hand, conventions that constrain the way in which masculinity may be envisaged and, on the other, an underlying thrust to disrupt the operating mechanism of these conventions and to widen the meaning of this gender experience. This is a dynamic, productive tension, I would argue, one that is constraining as much as it is enabling. It points to the power of these conventions to validate a set of norms, whilst simultaneously allowing the possibility of resistance to these norms and of acknowledging the exclusions that such norms produce. In The Conformist, these conventions follow the archetypal Oedipal story. Functioning like blockages, such conventions are regulative: they constrain and impose a set of necessary steps in the development of the story. Yet, they are also constitutive: that is, they determine what is possible within the story, what is to be shown and how it is to be shown. This book examines the predicament of masculinity in the Italian cinema of the 1970s by considering both the constraining and the constitutive power of the conventions regulating its representation. Blocked, apparently unable to take action, the manPress who appears in the last shot of The Conformist is a far cry from the model of masculinity revolving around notions of control, mastery and power that someCinema of the early scholarship on men in films theorised in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike the insecure look of the man that turns to stare at the camera in The Conformist, the male look defined by this earlier scholarship was one that projected its controlling fantasies on carefully styled objects of desire. This was a man that enjoyed a considerable degree of control and masteryItalian also at the level of the narrative through his active role in makingUniversity things happen and his ability to push the story forwards.8 In the last twenty &years, the paradigm for thinking about masculinity in films has shifted somewhat.

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