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
© 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 to exist only in a clearly hierarchical relation to the colonizers, the plots of these fi lms often involved working through anxieties about the solidity of racial
8 Ruth Ben-Ghiat gives a productively expansive defi nition of colonial cinema and its intimate relation to modernity and national cultural production: ‘The relationship of cinema and colonialism thus encompasses not only the making of fi lms on colonial themes but larger issues such as the importance of the category of the visual within colonial culture, the complex ways that colonial images infl uenced and legitimized metropolitan discourses about class, nation and gender, and the extent to which cinematic representations were constitutive of popular and ethnographic conceptions of the primitive’: ‘The Italian Colonial Cinema: Agendas and Audiences’, Modern Italy, 8:1 (2003), 49–63 (p. 49). For a wealth of documentation relating to Italian fi lm production and Africa in the colonial period and beyond see Film d’Africa: fi lm italiani prima, durante e dopo l’avventura coloniale, ed. by Liliana Ellena (Turin: Archivio nazionale cinematografi co della Resistenza Regione Piemonte, 1999). Also Fabio Melelli, La nostra Africa: sguardi del cinema italiano sull’Africa (Assisi: Graphos, 1998). Directed by Carmine Gallone with a script by Emilio Cecchi, Harlem (1941) is perhaps the fi lm that most fully embodies fascist ideals of racial segregation and fears of contamina- tion. As the title suggests, the fi lm is set in New York, but is a complex meditation on Italian identity in a multiracial context. 9 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Modernity is Just Over There: Colonialism and Italian National Identity’, Interventions, 8:3 (2006), 380–93. 10 Ben-Ghiat, ‘Modernity is Just Over There’, p. 381. 11 For an effective introduction to the disparate range of interlocking issues that racialize the nation see the essays in Nel nome della razza: il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870–1945, ed. by Alberto Burgio (Bologna: il Mulino, 1999). 198 derek duncan defi nition. Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s study of Guido Brignone’s Sotto la croce del sud (1938) examines the fi gure of the bi-racial Mailù (Doris Duranti) whose sultry appear- ance is both alluring and dangerous.12 Pickering-Iazzi wonders how a female spectator of the time might have responded to Mailù’s relative freedom by positioning her read- ing of the fi lm in relation to a range of contemporary discourses that sought to involve Italian women in the colonial project. She tentatively suggests that an active gender- based identifi cation with the bi-racial character allowed women to cross otherwise hardening lines of racial differentiation.13 Pickering-Iazzi is rightly conscious that her investigation opens onto a broader project as she argues: The need for a more critical frame of mind that looks at the roles played by both race and gender among other forms of social identity, in the construction and negotiations of racialized images instantiating power relations. Such a project would ideally alter our perspective on the Italian colonial gaze that was designed during Fascism and on how it may or may not exceed the historical parameters of its invention in postwar cinema.14 As an instance of this latter point, she cites Monica Vitti’s deranged parody of African dance in Antonioni’s L’eclisse; Pasolini’s work would also lend itself to similar inquiry.15 The possibility that the colonial gaze of fascist cinema may have exceeded the regime in longevity is potentially resonant for the study of how issues of race and ethnicity are negotiated in post-war Italian cinema. It proposes both a continuation up to the present day of Fascism’s racializing project, and the contrary possibility that inter-racial identifi cation may invite the Italian spectator into explorations of trans- national or transcultural identities. The fi rst suggestion intimates the persistence of an exclusionary nationalist project, whereas the second expresses the hope that calcifi ed limits of national belonging might be transgressed. Both these options are present in Maggie Günsberg’s innovative Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre, the only full-length study of Italian cinema that takes the issue of race seriously as a structural element in fi lm’s narrative and representational economies, and hypothesizes the function of its
12 Robin Pickering-Iazzi, ‘Ways of Looking in Black and White: Female Spectatorship and the Miscege- national Body in Sotto la croce del sud’, in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. by Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garfolo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002). 13 In optimistic vein, the editors of a recent collection of essays on transnational cinema write: ‘Because narrative fi lm as a dramatic medium relies largely on emotional identifi cation to do its work, the sense of familiarity with other cultures and with the natives of those cultures as people worthy of the two or three hours of intense emotional investment that a given cinematic text demands weakens the ability of cultural authorities to deploy the binarized us/them narratives upon which nationalisms depend’: Transnational Cin- ema: The Film Reader, ed. by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 4. While this belief clearly has appeal, I would suggest that the technical means through which the narrative is conveyed, and the broader socio-and geo-political network through which fi lm is distributed and received disturb the inevitability of such spectatorial identifi cation. 14 Robin Pickering-Iazzi, ‘Ways of Looking in Black and White’, p. 214. 15 For some indication of the complex temporalities of colonial cultural representation see Giorgio Bertel- lini, ‘Colonial Autism: Whitened Heroes, Auditory Rhetoric, and National Identity in Interwar Italian Cin- ema’, in Palumbo, A Place in the Sun, pp. 255–78; Karen Pinkus, ‘Decolonization in Italy’, in Palumbo, A Place in the Sun, pp. 299–320. The inventiveness of Fascism’s ideological reworking of pre-existing colonial- ist discourses with reference to the fi gure of Saartjie Baartman is dealt with in Barbara Sorgoni, ‘“Defending the Race”: the Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism’, Journal of Modern Italian Stud- ies, 8:3 (2003), 411–24. postcolonial cinema 199 presence on the spectator.16 Günsberg draws attention to the question of how racial difference operates beyond the moment of fascist colonialism in two popular Italian genres of the late 1950s and 1960s: the peplum and the spaghetti western. In both, the hero’s whiteness is a defi ning element of his moral or physical superiority. Yet, there is a complex confl ation of bodily signs in this confi guration. Race is a critical element of an idealized masculinity that needs to be purifi ed of, and protected from, any element encoded as menacingly feminine, homosexual, and non-white. Günsberg speculates on the effect of such constructions on the Southern, lower-class audiences with whom such fi lms were most popular. Following Richard Dyer, she contends that the candid hero of the peplum provided an imaginary, nostalgic compensation for the failure of Fascism and its imperial ambition that had promised so much to Italy’s poor.17 Yet, conversely, she wonders if the same audience might have been tempted to identify with the dark-skinned Mexicans of the Westerns as mirror images of their own racially subordinate position in a peculiarly Italian hierarchy of racial difference that splits the North and South. These ideologically retrograde texts therefore have the capacity to cause the spectator to refl ect on and re-work his own position in the national order. There is an inevitable slipperiness in the ways in which Günsberg designates racial difference as epidermal gradations become markers of national, and even regional, diversity. Skin and its associated values index distinctions of class, gender, and sexuality with whiteness functioning as the over-arching term.18 This slipperiness resonates with Ania Loomba’s comments on the functional malleability of race as a distinguishing category: While colour is taken to be the prime signifi er of racial identity, the latter is actually shaped by perceptions of religious, ethnic, linguistic, national, sexual and class differences. “Race” as a concept receives its meanings contextually, and in relation to other sexual groupings and hierarchies such as gender and class.19 What appears to be a signifying system grounded in the material body is more accurately understood as a system of social signifi cation that uses the body as a metaphorical resource to justify the distribution of power in a given context. While discussions of race have centred conventionally on those believed to be racially marked in the sense that they are ‘non-white’, recent scholarship has demanded that attention be paid to how ‘whiteness’ is constructed and how it functions as a vehicle of social 16 Maggie Günsberg, Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). It is not coincidental that Günsberg, Ben-Ghiat and Pickering-Iazzi are all concerned with gender as well as race. As Richard Dyer notes: ‘All concepts of race are always concepts of the body and also of heterosexuality. Race is a means of categorizing different types of human body which reproduce themselves’ (White (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 20). The inseparability gives rise to the fear of miscegenation that drove fascist policy and whose expression is apparent in a number of recent fi lms about migration. Claudio Fragasso’s Teste rasate (1993) explores the violent outcome of interracial enmity and desire. 17 Günsberg, Italian Cinema, pp. 101–02. Her chapter on the peplum references Dyer, White, pp. 145–83. 18 Günsberg’s primary methodological resource is feminist-infl ected psychoanalysis that foregrounds the constitutive work of gender difference in the construction of subjectivity. As such, other differences are sub- stitutive of gender difference in her schema. For example, with reference to the Spaghetti Western, she writes: ‘given the paucity of central female characters the positions of femininity can be seen [to be] taken up by the racial, rather than gendered, other of dominant white masculinity, and on occasion by the feminized adoles- cent or homosexual masculinity’ (p. 214). Sarah Ahmed notes that in general psychoanalysis ‘tends to posi- tion race as secondary and derivative of the processes of sexualization itself’. Sarah Ahmed, ‘Racialized Bodies,’ in Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction, ed. by Mary Evans and Ellie Lee (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 46–63 (p. 55). 19 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 121–22. 200 derek duncan determination.20 By ‘white’, again I am not referring to skin colour, but to a racialized position of the sort identifi ed by Ien Ang in her discussion of ‘white’ and ‘Western’ as identity categories. She contends that they both: describe a position in a structural, hierarchical inter-relationship rather than a precise set of cultural identities . . . whiteness does not acquire meanings outside of a distinctive and overde- termined network of concrete social relations . . . Whiteness, then, is not a biological category, but a political one.21 Tellingly, she cites Italians in post-war Australia as an example of a racial group who did not count as ‘white’. This is perhaps broadly illustrative however of the uncertain place that Italians occupied in a racial hierarchy that placed Black and White at opposite ends of the scale of civilization. While in the colonial era, fascist ideologues asserted the ‘Aryan’ nature of the Italian race, US immigration offi cials were less confi dent.22 Legislation implemented in Italy’s colonies to ensure racial separation was symptomatic of the fear that colonizers and colonized were simply not different enough.23 But what does race actually mean in the visual economy of cinema?24 As a pri marily visual technology, cinema would seem an ideal tool for constructing and maintaining a system that depends on the acknowledgement and perpetuation of visible difference.25 Yet as the brief examples given above demonstrate, cinema is abidingly
20 There is now a substantial literature on whiteness. For a recent survey of the fi eld see France Winndance Twine and Charles Gallagher, ‘The Future of Whiteness: a Map of the “Third Wave”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31:1 (2008), 4–24. See also Alfred J. López, ‘Whiteness after Empire’, in Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, ed. by Alfred J. López (Albany: State University of New York Press 2005), pp. 1–30. For the investigation of the racialization of Italians in the United States see the essays in Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America, ed. by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 21 Ien Ang, ‘I’m a Feminist but . . .: “Other” Women and Postnational Feminism’, in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2003), pp. 190– 206 (p. 200; emphasis in original). 22 The ‘blackening’ of Italians is another element of the forgotten history of colonialism and emigration that is currently being revived. See Gian Antonio Stella, L’orda: quando gli albanesi eravamo noi (Milan: BUR, 2003) and also the associated website
26 Girotti starred in two Salgari adaptations as Tremal Naik: I pirati della Malesia and Le due tigri (both 1941). The romantic pairing of Girotti and Calamai in a fi lm pre-dating Ossessione might usefully be examined in relation to Visconti’s better-known work of the following year. 27 In 1939, the fascist publication La difesa della razza published a number of articles that purported to investigate Albania’s racial history in order to support Italy’s annexation. Initially, Albania was claimed as Illyria, intimating a classical link with Italy. This was then disavowed as Illyria was deemed too racially mixed to justify any close association. Compare Renato Semizzi, ‘Storia della razza albanese’, La difesa della razza, 9 (1939), 118–20, and C. Cencarelli, ‘L’Albania e il suo popolo’, La difesa della razza, 20 (1939), 33–35. For an informative discussion of the history of the links between Albania and Italy, and of the representation of each country in the cultural imaginary of the other see Nicola Mai, ‘The Cultural Construction of Italy in Albania and Vice Versa: Migration Dynamics, Strategies of Resistance and Politics of Mutual Self-Defi nition across Colonialism and Postcolonialism’, Modern Italy, 8:1 (2003), 77–93. With particular reference to the invasion of Albania see Bernd J. Fischer, Albania at War 1939–1945 (Hurst: London, 1999). 28 Wood, Italian Cinema, p. 137. 202 derek duncan formal techniques of fi lm-making and the variegated histories of cultural production combine to produce a ‘visibility’, or ‘way of seeing’ that brings the object of vision into being. My project then is to look at ‘the plots, images and spectacles’ through which the Albanian is made visible on the understanding that this fi gure will have a synecdochal function, not in the sense that a single fi gure will stand in for all Albanians, but that the tensions that accrue round this fi gure will allow the anxieties of postcolonial Italy to come more sharply into focus. It is important to stress that the ‘identity’ in question is a cinematic one, hence the product of a particular system of representation and narrative economy. It is an exploration of what Albanians are imagined to be like; it is therefore concerned with the production of a socially intelligible fantasy by means of which the contours of what might be called the Albanian-subject-in-Italy are hypothesized. As Vehbiu and Devole have noted in their study of the representation of Albanians in the Italian press, this group has been more heavily stigmatized than any other migrant community.29 Initially, there had been a strong perception in Italy that the physiological similarity of Albanians to Italians would facilitate integration.30 Yet very quickly, a characteristic seen as advantageous came to be viewed as a particularly virulent menace. Albanians were perceived as a threat to public order, health, and European integration; soon the association with criminality and violence became their defi ning trait. Vehbiu and Devole conclude: ‘Il delinearsi nell’immaginario collettivo dello stereotipo dell’albanese altezzoso, scontroso e malavitoso, cioè dell’albanese che fa paura, pare che sia da considerare come defi nitivo’.31 Whether the basis for this distinction is thought to be biological or cultural, its calcifi cation has the effect of producing a sense of diversity that is racial in effect. In fact, Vehbiu and Devole note that Albanians photographed in the Italian press were made to appear visibly different from Italians through an exaggerated emphasis on the trappings of poverty and their desolate demeanour. An insistence on religious as well as physical alterity intensifi ed this racializing project.32 References to ‘i nostri antichi sudditi’ invoking the memory of Italy’s colonial relationship with Albania and likening the ‘comportamenti collettivi’ of the Albanian lower classes to those of the ‘continente nero’ clearly showed that the recollection of Italy’s colonial past was not deeply buried.33 In contrast to this insistence on the perceptible difference of Albanians and their separation from Italian society, recent sociological work reveals a high degree of integration/assimilation of Albanian residents in the peninsula. The crucial discovery of this work, however, is that integration is achieved through strategies that aim to make the Albanian migrant invisible to the Italian eye. Albanians have consciously adopted techniques of ‘mimetismo’ in order to make themselves socially
29 Ardian Vehbiu and Rando Devole, La scoperta dell’Albania: gli albanesi secondo i mass media (Milan: Paoline, 1996). 30 Vehbiu and Devole, La scoperta dell’Albania, p. 12. 31 Vehbiu and Devole, La scoperta dell’Albania, p. 175. 32 Vehbiu and Devole, La scoperta dell’Albania, pp. 78–81. 33 Vehbiu and Devole, La scoperta dell’Albania, pp. 107, 102. postcolonial cinema 203 unremarkable.34 As a result of the confl icting pressures to make visible/render invisible his body, the postcolonial Albanian subject enters into a vortex of suspicion and doubt that in effect articulates the nature of his presence in Italy.35 Visible or invisible, the Albanian-subject-in-Italy is always to be found embedded in the masquerade of the racial fi ction. Drawing on the work of social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, Romania argues that identities only come into being and are provisionally maintained as effects of their social articulation: Le identità perciò non dipendono né derivano da un’essenza precedente alla rappresentazione, ma sono esse stesse frutto delle performance, in quanto procedure di espressione: ognuno di noi è ciò che appare tramite la sua facciata e il suo comportamento manifesto. Non esiste perciò alcun italiano, alcun uomo e alcun eterosessuale, agli occhi della cerchia sociale, ma soltanto individui che si comportano in pubblico come italiani, come uomini, e come eterosessuali.36 What is at stake here are not specious issues of authenticity, but rather an avowal of the deeply social and relational nature of identity and the conditions of its production. These performances are also histories in that they carry the burdens and memories of their formation and practice. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has analysed how cinema produces a form of ‘whiteness’ that necessitates the eradication of any marker of class or ethnicity, and ponders the consequences of this process: ‘What of the white human wreckage that skirts the edge of the falsely constructed visual fantasies of whiteness?’37 The idea that Albanians remain on the ‘edge of whiteness’ succinctly conveys what I will argue here: that cin- ema deploys geographies of the abject body as a prime metaphorical resource in the articulation of difference. The determination to mark out migrants as defi nitively not Italian is met by a counterpressure in many of these fi lms to represent the efforts of migrants to belong to the national body. Indeed, imitation, impersonation, and masquerade recur consistently in fi lms dealing with migration from Albania.38 As the grandson of an Italian soldier in Mussolini’s Albanian campaign, Giorgio in De Domenicis’ L’italiano (2002) persists in his claim to be Italian even though he is never recognized as such in Italy. The men that the Italian protagonist meets as he travels through Albania in Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) dream of shedding their
34 Vincenzo Romania lists the types of social practice through which the process of ‘auto-assimilazione’ occurs: ‘il cambio del nome; la spoliazione volontaria dell’accento albanese; la gestione del tempo libero entro le routine locali e una presentazione del sè basato su questa dimensione; l’ovvio rigetto di interazioni con i propri connazionali; e, infi ne, soprattutto, la discriminazione dei propri simili meno integrati e, spesso, anche, degli altri immigrati’: Farsi passare per italiani: strategie di mimetismo sociale (Rome: Carocci, 2004), p. 138. For responses of Albanians in Italy to this media-led stigmatization see also Nicola Mai, ‘The Albanian Diaspora-in-the-Making: Media, Migration and Social Exclusion’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31:3 (2005), 543–61. 35 The use of the masculine pronoun is deliberate. The threat posed by Albanians is seen as a masculine one; Albanian women tend to be fi gured as traffi cked prostitutes and in need of liberation from their men. 36 Romania, Farsi passare per italiani, p. 140. 37 Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 137. 38 Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘colonial mimicry’ is useful here. He identifi es the attempt of the colonized subject to appear like the colonizer as a sign of instability in the colonial regime. In the fi lms discussed here representations of the failure of mimicry to approximate its object function as an aspiration of control rather than ambivalence: ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–92. 204 derek duncan national identity and becoming Italian. The point, of course, is that they won’t.39 The effort to individuate physiologically and insist on the visibility of the Albanian migrant results in the articulation of a racially marked subject who is clearly not ‘black’, but can no longer be classifi ed as ‘white’. Lamerica, set entirely in Albania, yet famously about Italy, is certainly the most highly regarded of these fi lms about migration. The story of two brash Italian embez- zlers hoping to make a quick profi t by setting up a factory in Albania as a front for claiming government subsidies indicts the values of Italy in the early 1990s. Yet, the fi lm also offers something of a history lesson.40 The opening credits appear along- side LUCE footage of the 1930s that heralds fascist Italy’s invasion of Albania.41 An Italian-speaking Albanian doctor has the task of informing the historically and culturally ignorant Gino (Enrico lo Verso) about his nation’s colonial past, a past that has been all but eradicated from Italy’s national consciousness. Gino’s realization that the elderly and seemingly senile man chosen to front the fake company is actually a Sicilian soldier from the 1940s instates an uncanny sense of how the past may linger unattended to in the present. Amelio’s own comments on the fi lm stress its pastness on both a personal and national level. He had initially wanted to make a fi lm about his own father’s migration from Calabria to Argentina. What he found in Albania while shooting the fi lm were reminders of his childhood in Italy’s impoverished South in the aftermath of World War Two. He remembers particularly how the women of his village would remove their shoes and walk barefoot in order to stop them from getting worn.42 The concluding sequence set on a crowded, ramshackle boat heading for Italy invites contemplation of a common humanity beyond national or historical difference.43 Lamerica explicitly links the phenomena of migration to Italy in the 1990s with Italian emigration and colonialism.44 The fi lm’s title brings together the longings of
39 For a lengthier discussion of this point see Duncan, ‘The Sight and Sound of Albanian Migration’, pp. 8–9. 40 David Martin-Jones adopts a Deleuzian perspective to investigate how cinema reworks or ‘deter ritorializes’ accepted versions of national history and identity through formal structures that invite a reconsideration of how the past is known. One further point is especially relevant to Lamerica: ‘The possibility of ungrounding the nation’s dominance, then, is most evident when the re-emergent histories of postcolonial or diasporic populations “threaten” the maintenance of the pedagogic view of national identity’. The lack of knowledge about Italy’s colonial past makes this sort of interruption particularly destablizing. David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 34–35. 41 L’italiano (Ennio De Dominicis, 2002) closes with similar archive footage while its opening scenes include television news footage of the events in the Bari stadium in August 1991. 42 On the background to the fi lm see Gianni Amelio, ed. by Gianni Volpi (Turin: Scriptorium, 1995), pp. 147–56. 43 While Lamerica has been widely praised in Italy and beyond, it remains an object of controversy in Albania. In December 2007, the TIFF (Tirana International Film Festival) hosted a retrospective of Amelio’s work that included a debate, with the director, on the varied reactions the fi lm had provoked in Albania. The representation of the country as chaotic and in a state of physical and political dereliction with Albanians depicted as corrupt or child-like in their mindless absorption of commercial Italian television had not been met with great enthusiasm. The abiding point, of course, relates to the politics and conditions of reception. See also the debate in Bota Shqiptare, 25 April – 2 May 2000, p. 3 where Artur Zheji and Roland Sejko, two Albanian commentators, discuss the representational strategies of Amelio’s fi lm. In view of the supposed parallel made between Italy and Albania, Sejko wonders how an Italian audience identifi es, for example, with the lawless children robbing the old man of his shoes. 44 On this point in relation to Lamerica see Armando Gnisci, Creolizzare l’Europa: letteratura e migrazione (Rome: Meltemi, 2003), p. 144. postcolonial cinema 205 today’s Albanian migrants for an ill-defi ned new world of material plenty with the aspirations of Italian migrants earlier in the twentieth century. More striking and less familiar is the original LUCE footage that Amelio uses to preface his fi lm. The voice- over makes explicit Italy’s imperialist designs on its Balkan neighbour. As an extradi- egetic sound and image sequence, the re-cast newsreel footage serves a pedagogical function for the spectator as the narrative that emerges disrupts consoling fi ctions of the national past. Throughout the fi lm, there are suggestions of a more recent mode of colonization by Italy that does not require a military presence. The omnipresence of Italian commercial television is seen as the conduit for the delivery of, what can only seem, parodically excessive dreams of Western opulence.45 Albania’s status as the symbolic repository of Italy’s own confl icted past and present suggests that its prime purpose is to function rhetorically as Italy’s other. It is not represented on its own account. Amelio’s fi lm is important in that it largely set the terms for subsequent, albeit unresolved, discussions of migration in Italian cinema. Additionally, the perception of Amelio as a politically committed fi lm-maker intimated a connection with post-war neorealist work that Italian fi lm history sees as the touchstone of civically responsible cinematic practice and nation building.46 Yet, as Áine O’Healy in her acute and de- tailed analysis of the fi lm shows, Lamerica quite ostentatiously avoids the types of fi lm-making technique associated with Neorealism.47 She also points out that rather than asserting with any confi dence a unifi ed and coherent version of national identity, the fi lm is more accurately understood as a text in which identity is labile and porous with respect to spatial, temporal, and racial boundaries. The dissolving of boundaries is represented through the central fi gure of Gino on whose body the chaos of Albania is fi gured. Initially, his relative prosperity makes him stand out physically. Yet as he gradually loses his place as a privileged foreigner, he is effectively racialized by the circumstances in which he fi nds himself. As the fi lm goes on, he looks less and less Italian as he loses the trappings of affl uence, and in his beleaguered condition becomes physically indistinguishable from the Albanians. This kind of blurring of somatic
45 Vehbiu and Devole cast doubt on the veracity of Amelio’s representation of Albanian viewing habits. Not least, they claim that the commercial fare mindlessly consumed by spectators in the fi lm was simply not available at the time Lamerica is set: La scoperta dell’Albania, p. 138. In some areas, viewers watched pro- grammes broadcast from Greece and Yugoslavia, complicating the alleged unidirectional traffi c from Italy eastwards: Onofrio Romano, L’Albania nell’era televisiva: le vie della demodernizzazione (Turin: L’Harmattan Italia, 1999). For a nuanced refl ection on the infl uence that Italian television exerted in Albania see Nicola Mai, ‘“Italy is Beautiful”: The Role of Italian Television on Albanian Migration to Italy’, in Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference, ed. by Russell King and Nancy Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 95–109. 46 Amelio’s dialogue with neorealism is more directly expressed in his earlier Il ladro di bambini (1992). On this see Pauline Small, ‘Gianni Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini: Recalling the Image’, Italian Studies, 53 (1998), 150–66; also Millicent Marcus, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore and Lon- don: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 154–77. 47 Áine O’Healy, ‘Lamerica’, in The Cinema of Italy, ed. by Giorgio Bertellini (London: Wallfl ower Press, 2004), pp. 245–53 (p. 246). For an alternative view see Luca Caminati, ‘The Return of History: Gianni Ame- lio’s Lamerica, Memory, and National Identity’, Italica, 83: 3–4 (2006), pp. 596–606. In relation to Roma città aperta, David Forgacs comments: ‘The fi lm’s early reception as quasi-documentary was probably due at least as much to its closeness to the events it reconstructed as to the way it was directed or photographed’ (Rome Open City (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), p. 9). I would suggest that a similar proximity has moti- vated responses to Lamerica. 206 derek duncan characteristics and psychological or moral hierarchies carries echoes of the ambigui- ties of fascist colonial cinema and the ambivalences it evinced in terms of the repre- sentation of racial difference. It does not alleviate the potential threat expressed in Lamerica where the ambition of one of the young migrants is effectively to disappear through reproductive marriage to an Italian woman once he reaches Italy.48 saimir (2004): a postcolonial fi lm Amelio’s fi lm represents the Italian presence in Albania, but stops short of document- ing the arrival and settlement of Albanian migrants in the peninsula. This next stage is the central focus of Francesco Munzi’s award-winning Saimir (2004) which accepts Lamerica’s wager by giving material form to the fantasies and ambitions expressed by the aspiring migrants. According to Brunetta, Munzi’s fi lm ‘con intensità e senza facili moralismi, esplora il mondo della malavita degli emigrati albanesi e l’aspirazio- ne a una vita normale del giovane fi glio di un corriere di clandestini.’49 The tension alluded to by Brunetta between Albanian criminality and Italian ‘normality’ appears to embed the fi lm in familiar racializing stereotypes. But what is compelling about Saimir are the terms in which it negotiates the presence of a migrant community in Italy through representations of place and embodiment, as well as through the shape of the narrative and, particularly, through its resolution.50 Saimir, initially at least, is not primarily concerned with issues of assimilation or integration, nor does it make the migrant’s interaction with Italians the primary motor of the plot. While these ele- ments do emerge later as the narrative unfolds, its most challenging aspect is that for large sections it virtually eliminates Italians from the Italian landscape. Cinema’s task of fusing landscape and nation is therefore cast into doubt. Additionally, unlike fi lms such as Lamerica and L’italiano, Saimir contains no specifi c reference to the past as a mechanism through which to explain away the present. For instance, no mention is made of Albania’s colonial link with Italy. Nor does the spectator sees shots of the overcrowded boats bringing Albanians to Italy such as appear in Moretti’s state-of- the-nation essay, Aprile. The pedagogical intent of many Italian fi lms about migration does not depend here on the relaying of information. What I will argue, however, is that the fi lm is structured by both the racial hierarchies that characterize colonial
48 On this element see O’Healy, Lamerica, p. 253, and Duncan, ‘The Sight and Sound of Albanian Migra- tion’, p. 9. Certain elements of the fi lm’s plot that depend on revelation and dramatic closure might usefully be considered in light of Marcia Landy’s point about the melodrama of historical narrative: ‘The melodramas take the form of threats to national continuity, inevitably involving scenarios of physical and spiritual strug- gle; of personal, familial, and group sacrifi ce; of patriotism; and of intense and excessive concentration on belonging and exclusion. Such scenarios are justifi ed in terms of biological determinism, especially in relation to questions of individual and group survival’. Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 17. 49 Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema italiano contemporaneo: da La dolce vita a Centochiodi (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2007), p. 676. 50 The fi lm’s casting is signifi cant. Edmond, the father, is played by established Albanian actor, Xhevdet Feri. Mishel Manoku (Saimir) had no acting experience and was discovered by the director in the street just by chance on a trip to Tirana. This use of a non-professional actor in a major role invoked memories of Neorealism, while the character’s physical appearance, life of petty crime, and habitation of an anonymous ‘periferia’ recalled inevitably Pasolini. The review that appeared in La Repubblica was entitled ‘I ragazzi di vita di Pasolini vivono ancora in periferia’:
51 For an analysis of the romance narrative in fi lms dealing with migration see Derek Duncan, ‘“Loving Geographies”: Queering Straight Migration to Italy’, New Cinemas (forthcoming 2008). 52 A similar dynamic is apparent in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (2005). The age of the Romanian migrants is crucial to whether they are allowed to remain in Italy, yet their involvement with criminality is indicative of their enduring alterity, all appearances to the contrary. 53 Interview with the director on DVD (01 Distribution, 2006). The desolation of the landscape deemed proper to Albanians underlines Alessandro Dal Lago’s point that from an Italian perspective they share the status of ‘qualsiasi altra periferia degradata o zona sottosviluppata del nostro paese’: Non-persone: l’esclu- sione dei migranti in una società globale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004), p. 200. 54 Rosalind Galt’s work on the symbolic spectacle of landscape in Italian cinema is useful here for the elu- cidation of a topic that merits more detailed analysis with reference to the representation of Italy’s migrant presence. She contends that ‘landscape images’ open up questions of ‘politics, representation, and history because landscape as a mode of spectacle provokes questions of national identity, the material space of the profi lmic, and the historicity of the image’, Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 27. An interesting counter-example to Saimir is Vittorio de Seta’s Lettere dal Sahara (2006) where the African migrant is shot against the backdrop of Italy’s most famous historical and tourist monuments in order to suggest the incongruity of an African man in such a densely Westernized space. 208 derek duncan
One of the Saimir’s most striking features however is the way in which it denatural- izes the Italian landscape and forces a separation between identity and place. The fi lm’s opening sequence sees Saimir on his moped moving directly towards the camera through an urban periphery.55 The place has no distinguishing features to identify it. He returns home and speaks to his father in Albanian sub-titled for the Italian audience. The two set off in their van driving through a mountainous, forested land- scape. Their lengthy journey into the night in order to collect a cargo of new migrants is accompanied by an Albanian vocal soundtrack (intra/extradiegetic) that creates, for the spectator, the impression of not being in Italy. It is only when Saimir explains to a small child in the group where they actually are that the spectator understands the ruse. Italian is only spoken for the fi rst time when they reach the farm where the new arrivals will work. Albanian is the fi lm’s primary language and Italian is used only on the occasions when Saimir and his father come into contact with Italians or other national groups.56 Italian is more a lingua franca rather than the medium in which national space and identity fuse. Albanian dialogue is subtitled for the Italian audience, however, unlike that of the Roma characters as a result of which they remain more opaque, less avail- able to assimilation. In fact, the fi lm does suggest quite clearly that identity and place are intimately related, and characters are assigned spaces to which to belong although these can no longer be considered national spaces.57 When characters move out of their assigned place, however, they generate disorder. I want to illustrate these points by analyzing key sequences in Saimir that illustrate the racialization of the non-Italian through particular confi gurations of body and place. The relationship between Saimir and Michela has three highly symbolic locations: the beach, the abandoned house used by Saimir and his friends as a hideout, and Michela’s school. The beach is where the two fi rst meet, but its out-of-season desola- tion is often visible from Saimir’s house, particularly from his bedroom window. In the scene immediately before their encounter, Saimir is seen staring out of the window towards an unidentifi able fi gure on the empty beach. The fi lm cuts to Saimir walking alone along a sandy path where he sees Michela approaching with a group of school friends. In the following scene, Michela’s group are watched by Saimir as they play on the beach. The group is shot in the middle distance and the perspective emphasizes Saimir’s real distance from them as he sits alone in a crumpled tracksuit clutching a plastic carrier bag.58 In conventional fashion, a short sequence of medium
55 This sequence bears comparison with the opening chapter, ‘In vespa’, of Nanni Moretti’s Caro diario, and what Marcus refers to as his ‘itinerant gaze’: Marcus, After Fellini, p. 291. 56 The question of language is a crucial element of the politics of representation in theses fi lms. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam comment: ‘Questions of address are as crucial as questions of representation. Who is speaking through a fi lm? Who is actually listening? Who is looking? And what social desires are mobilized by the fi lm?’, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 205. For further discussion of this point see Duncan, ‘The Sight and Sound of Albanian Migra- tion’. 57 The fi lm can be read in terms of the national drama identifi ed by David Martin-Jones as the ‘attempt to reassert a linear narrative of national identity (a reterritorialization of narrative time), or alternatively, to question the options that are open to national identity (a deterritorialization of narrative time)’, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity, p. 5. Space becomes a key element to the working out of national history. 58 Just as Gino in Lamerica loses a secure grip on his Italianness as he is dispossessed of his fashionable accessories, Saimir’s Albanian identity is reiterated through his shabbiness, a shabbiness, however, that also sets him apart from the sharp-suited gangsters he occasionally frequents. Saimir’s clothes are key elements in the aesthetics of marginality he embodies. postcolonial cinema 209 close-ups of Saimir and Michela indicates a burgeoning romantic connection. As Michela wanders off from the group an over-the-shoulder shot frames her from Saimir’s perspective, but the camera pulls back, and what the spectator in fact sees is a shot of Saimir tracking Michela as she walks towards a bar. In this instance, the over-the-shoulder shot, normally employed to allow the spectator to ‘see with’ a character, is turned against Saimir. The pulling back highlights his distance from the spectator, his exteriority to the scene, and positions him as a potential threat to Michela. Saimir follows Michela to the bar, buys a beer, and engages her in an awkward adolescent conversation in which she asks ‘Ma tu non sei italiano?’ Again Saimir’s long-established alterity is insisted on. Michela leaves the bar, and after a minute’s hesitation Saimir follows in pursuit. The couple agree to meet again. In the scene that immediately follows, Saimir picks up a friend on his moped and they return to the beach to break into a car, adding another layer of signifi cance to the beach as common social space, in a manner that explains, with a certain inevitability, Saimir’s initial presence there. The criminal stereotype of the Albanian is confi rmed. The empty beach is the place where they have their date in a brief sequence that represents Sai- mir’s only interlude of happiness in a bleak existence. The normally dishevelled and down-at-heel Saimir has spruced himself up, yet it is entirely within the representa- tional logic of the fi lm that he needs to divest himself of the sartorial signifi ers of Albanianness in order to experience this happiness.59 Despite the cold, they undress and run joyfully into the water. The conventions of romance dictate that Saimir will then offer Michela his teeshirt to keep her from the chill wind as again he is shown watching her as she dries herself. The scene ends with a close-up of Saimir hazarding a smile, having opened with him watching Michela walk down to the water’s edge. The expanse of sand separating them a reminder of the social gulf between them.60 Saimir is undone by his adherence to the conventions of heterosexual romance as he plunges deeper into a life of crime to buy Michela an expensive gift. His visit to the jewellers’ shop underlines his marginality in relation to these conventions and his lack of money signals his distance from Italy’s consumer economy. In the scenes that follow, the common space of the beach is replaced by locations encoded as belonging to only one of the characters. The framing insists on the inhospitable nature of the location to the presence of the other. When Saimir picks Michela up from school, he watches and waits for her behind an iron fence. Although the fence is permeable to
59 The performance of his identity can be read in the terms proposed by Judith Butler in her discussion of the fi lm Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990), a documentary about drag balls in New York in which Black and Latino men attempt, amongst other things, to pass as white. She discusses the norms of race and social class through which gender comes to be embodied in terms of a ‘morphological ideal that remains the standard which regulates the performance, but which no performance fully approximates’. The pathos of the performance results from the account of social deprivation that it enacts to produce ‘the phantasmatic con- stitution of a subject, a subject who repeats and mimes the legitimating norms by which it itself has been degraded’. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 129, 131. 60 David Sibley argues that ‘the human landscape can be read as a landscape of exclusion’. His study of the geography of marginality effectively demonstrates the ways in which fantasies of social difference are mapped in material. The social geography of Saimir is a case study of such mapping. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995), p. ix. 210 derek duncan his gaze, what lies beyond it is inaccessible. They walk the length of the fence to- gether until she exits at the gate. This scene is shot entirely from Saimir’s perspective. Conversely, when he takes her to the abandoned house described by him as ‘il mio posto’, the scene is structured round a series of close-ups of Michela that show her physical unease, and tracking shots that follow her through the gloomy interior. The darkness conceals Saimir’s ‘secreti’. After accusing Saimir and his friends of being ‘ladri’, Michela moves to leave having refused to accept the gift of the expensive necklace. Saimir grabs her, but she makes her escape and the scene concludes with Saimir watching her hitch a lift from a passing motorist. The consequences of spatial transgression are fully dramatized when Saimir bursts into Michela’s classroom interrupting, appropriately enough, a lesson on Verga’s I Malavoglia. Demanding an explanation for her abrupt departure, he shouts: ‘Che sono io? Merda? Merda?’ That Saimir is indeed little more than ‘human wreckage’ is confi rmed by his hasty expulsion from the school. His intrusion signals the wholly impossible and improper nature of his relationship with Michela. In the episode that follows, Saimir joins a group of Roma boys in ransacking a wealthy villa in a carnev- alesque sequence in which the putative thieves all too briefl y inhabit the luxurious space of Western opulence that they will never rightly own. The immediate return to the squalid Roma camp rudely juxtaposes the incompatibility of the two worlds. conclusion: the non-national body Like Nanni Moretti in Caro diario, Saimir maps the Italian landscape on a moped. Yet their respective places in the nation are different. Like Caro diario too, Saimir is about the symbolic function of the body as well as about the spaces it occupies in the fi lm’s economy. In the concluding chapter of After Fellini, Millicent Marcus interprets Moretti’s fi lmic strategies in Caro diario as the index of a commitment to the real. By including authentic footage of his ailing self in the fi lm’s third ‘capitolo’, Moretti cuts through the metaphorical valences of the body as merely sign or symbol to insist on its mortal reality. This is, Marcus contends, a ‘return to the body in all its specifi c materiality’ (p. 298).61 Saimir too represents a corporeal reality, albeit one that is entirely grounded in the context of the violence acted upon it, externally and delib- erately. Saimir’s reality is of a different order. In the scene that follows the burglary, the fi lm cuts to Saimir sitting on an empty railroad track. The camera homes in on the razor incision he makes to his leg and the blood that fl ows down his calf. Saimir’s act of self-mutilation initiates the conscious rejection of his father, and in effect, of the Albanian identity to which he had acceded. Further violence follows as he is beaten by the traffi ckers in his attempt to rescue the girl. Saimir’s body does not have the transcendental status of a body in pain which is the prerogative of those on the other ‘edge of whiteness’. Unlike Moretti, he is not the victim of misdiagnosis or misrecognition. His body is the site of violence as he is beaten and scarred precisely because of who, or what, he is.62 The function of the visible damage done to Saimir
61 Marcus, After Fellini, p. 298. 62 The migrant body fi gured as the site of violence is a topic that warrants extended analysis. In addition to the murders of the Albanian protagonists of both L’italiano and La cura del Gorilla (Carlo Sigon, 2006) whose deaths are caused by their involvement in organized crime, it would be necessary to look at the assaults on African migrants in fi lms such as Pummarò (Michele Placido, 1990) and Lettere dal Sahara who have no criminal connections other than their clandestine status. postcolonial cinema 211 is to keep the potentially invisible Albanian in view. While the fi rst half of Saimir encourages the idea that the apparently overwhelming Albanian presence in Italy be read as almost a reverse colonization, the rest of the fi lm stages the drama of a territorial presence that lacks power. While Moretti may no longer wish to be seen as representative of the Italian national body, Saimir clearly functions as the ‘somograph’ or ‘corporeal sign’ of the non-national, to pick up on Marcus’s term. As such the physiological boundaries that the Albanian might threaten to breach are held in place. Saimir is a narrative in which the migrant body stakes out the confi nes of the nation. While Lamerica articulated the aspiration of the Albanian migrant to assimilate to the point of vanishing into the Italian landscape, Saimir insists on the untenablity of that proposition. The damage infl icted on his body is a statement, in Bhabha’s terms, that he is ‘almost the same but not white.’63 Moretti, on the other hand, did get better. The category of the ‘national’ has been the dominant mode through which cinema produced in Italy has been considered. While calling into question the category of national cinema as an overarching determinant, the transnational turn in Film Studies does not alter that fact that, historically, cinema in Italy has been seen as the cultural form in which national identity is most securely located. This claim stands whether applied to the heroic and affi rmative moment of fi lm-making in the post-war period, or to the production of the 1980s when audiences plummeted and the failure of cinema to address or refl ect the nation was considered symptomatic of a broader national crisis. Histories of Italian cinema tell a national story. This is a narrative of both rupture and continuity. The point and project of such histories, it must be remembered, is not to furnish a descriptive account of what happened. Rather, their purpose is to stake a claim that would align time and space in a gesture that is recu- perative and utopian. It is a claim that, in the most positive sense, makes the nation up. While it might be possible to read Saimir as a narrative of national redemption, to do so refuses the multiple histories of demographic displacement and territorializa- tion that comprise its representational economy. This essay has only touched on a few aspects of the racial and colonial logic that subtend the national imaginary of Italian cinema. The point is not to designate it as racist in any reductive sense, but to begin the work of unpicking just one of the many ideological knots through which the historical narratives of national identity formation unravel.
University of Bristol DEREK DUNCAN
63 Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man,’ p. 89 (italics in original).