Italy's Postcolonial Cinema and Its Histories of Representation
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ITALIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 2, AUTUMN 2008 ITALY’S POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA AND ITS HISTORIES OF REPRESENTATION abstract A number of recent fi lms have explored migration to Italy. Responses tend to focus on the nov- elty of this phenomenon in relation to Italian history, and to the history of Italian cinema as a nation building project. I argue, however, that these fi lms need to be seen in terms of how they racialize the non-Italian subject, and that they are embedded in complex histories of Italian colo- nialism, and emigration. After surveying work on Italian cinema that engages with questions of race, I consider the representation of Albanian migrants in Munzi’s Saimir (2004). Despite the fi lm’s sympathetic take on the efforts of clandestine, Albanian migrants to integrate into Italian society, it is mired in a tradition of representation that systematically constructs the non-Italian as extraneous to the nation. Saimir can be seen as a postcolonial fi lm as its representational economy depends on, and extends, a colonial logic of racial difference. KEYWORDS migration, colonialism, race, Albania, Saimir, postcolonial What difference might a consideration of race and colonial history make to an under- standing of Italian cinema, and in particular to its often-reiterated function as the crucible in which national identity is formed? The contemporary relevance of the question owes much to responses to recent migration to Italy, and to the rekindling of memories of Italy’s own history of emigration and colonialism.1 The presence of what is perceived to be a large number of non-Italians now resident in Italy has dramatized the non-homogeneity of the national space, and overtly politicized questions around citizenship and its entitlements. As the modern art form most closely associated with the creation of national identity in Italy, cinema has done much to index this process of diversifi cation and self-refl ection. Mary P. Wood, for example, notes that the ‘preoccupation with the integration, or not, of non-Italians into Italian society’ has become a signifi cant theme in contemporary Italian cinema.2 The question of what it means to be Italian has been thrown wide open, even if some of the defi nitions produced in response indicate a very conservative notion of national identity. This tension has been noted by Graziella Parati who, on the one hand, argues that ‘migration defi es any attempt to reclaim national identities and create rhetorical discourses as protection against external contamination’, but also points out that this phenomenon has inspired any number of attempts to ‘reclaim’ Italy as a 1 For general overviews of Italian histories of colonialism and of emigration see Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002); Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Dias- poras (London: UCL Press, 2000). 2 Mary P. Wood, Italian Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2005), p. 145. For a reading of the representation of Alba- nian migrants in relation to the discourse of Italian national cinema, see Derek Duncan, ‘The Sight and Sound of Albanian Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema’, New Readings, 8 (2007). Available at <http://www. cardiff.ac.uk/euros/subsites/newreadings/volume8/abstracts/duncanabstract.html> [accessed 16 July 2008]. 195 © The Society for Italian Studies 2008 DOI: 10.1179/007516308X344351 196 derek duncan monocultural space that is both white and Catholic.3 It is in the light of post-war cinema’s history of moral and political engagement that Parati affords fi lm a prime cultural role in tackling discriminatory representations of migrants in the Italian media: ‘[f]ilm that places the story of individual migrants at the centre of a visual narrative talks back to convenient representations, currently at the centre of political discourses, to migrants as an invading mass’.4 Wood acknowledges, however, the complicated history embedded in representations of Italy’s migrants, recognizing that they imitate the kind of stereotypes used to represent Southern migration some decades before. Traditions of representation can occlude as well as enlighten, and it is essential that superfi cial similarities in terms of shared representational economies are not confused with material differences involving questions of citizenship, mobility, and rights of settlement. That the Parondi family in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) can be dismissed by their neighbours as ‘Africani’ does not mean that today’s black migrants occupy a directly comparable social position. While fi lm and fi lm histories offer very imperfect sociologies, they do furnish an understanding of the terms according to which the migrant presence in Italy is under- stood, and of the inadvertent historical legacy that migrants are called on to bear. If cinema is to be conceptualized as the cultural crucible of Italian national identity, it is legitimate to ask if its representations of the migrant subject rework and expand narratives of national belonging? Or do they instead pursue the exclusionary logic of the post-Romantic idea of the nation that, as Angelo Restivo contends, demands ‘the suppression of all particularity’.5 In this sense, is the representation of the non- Italian only a pretext for the affi rmation of an exclusive Italian identity rather than an opening out to more inclusive articulations of belonging and citizenship?6 The stark partition suggested by the formulation of these questions is probably unhelpful for these issues require subtler terms to unravel the modalities of representation in particular narrative, visual, and historical economies. 7 This is the aim of what follows. colonial cinema and the racial legacy Concerns about race were closely allied to the aesthetic project of an Italian colonial cinema much discussed in the 1930s and 1940s, but largely ignored by fi lm historians. Like most fi lms produced under Fascism, the fi lms that might be grouped together under this rubric were not propagandistic in a direct sense. Often shot on location in 3 Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 6. In this path-breaking work, Parati argues persuasively for the power of migrant cultural production to offer counter-narratives to the negative representations of migrants that have been hegemonic in the Italian press and in political discourse in Italy. 4 Parati, Migration Italy, p. 19. 5 Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 15. 6 Clear examples of the stigmatization of the foreigner used to reaffi rm a positive sense of Italian identity are commonplace in the cinema of the post-war period. Most notable perhaps is Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) where political culpability is displaced onto the morally dissolute German invader. 7 In this sense, Millicent Marcus’s recent work on the reluctance of Italian fi lm-makers to deal with issues relating to Fascism’s race laws and the Shoah needs to be seen as part of a broader set of historical dis- courses on questions of identity and difference in Italy that work towards the defi nition of the nation: Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). postcolonial cinema 197 the Empire, they thematized Italy’s colonial experience through conventional roman- tic or adventure plots.8 Cultural historians working outside Italy have begun to analyze this work in closer detail. They employ methodologies that place these texts in dense relation to the period of their production, distribution, and reception as well as examining their strategies of representation in relation to other modes of cultural activity. The advantage of this approach is to combine an awareness of the specifi ci- ties of fi lm as a medium endowed with particular formal or aesthetic properties with an understanding of its symptomatic nature in relation to its cultural contexualiza- tion. It also intimates the ongoing relevance of a ‘way of seeing’ not limited to the fascist period, but as an element that both pre- and post-dates the ventennio. In a recent piece, Ruth Ben Ghiat draws attention to the interrelatedness of cinema and colonialism as modern technologies or epistemologies.9 Fascism’s imperial ambi- tion and the cinema that accompanied it need to be situated in relation to the nation’s fraught passage towards a modernity that had thrown into crisis accepted values and identities: ‘colonial expansion and the cinema had brought a greater awareness of non-European peoples but also increased anxieties about degeneration and the pres- ervation of national identities’.10 Cinema and colonialism brought people and cultures closer together, but as a consequence generated a proximity that threatened the racial hierarchies that were articulated with increasing vehemence as the 1930s progressed.11 She illustrates her argument through a rigorously contextualized analysis of Mario Camerini’s Il grande appello (1936) set in the French colony of Djibouti. The plot revolves round the main character’s enmeshment in an ‘unhealthy cosmopolitanism’ and the way in which he fi nally is able to escape its lure and recover a sounder sense of his Italian identity. Life in the colony is risky, but the exoticism that pervades the absence of fi xed boundaries makes it appealing in equal measure. This elision of boundaries is a feature of the colonial fi lm. While black characters were shown