Italian Political Cinema
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Italian Political Cinema Public Life, Imaginary, and Identity in Contemporary Italian Film Bearbeitet von Giancarlo Lombardi, Christian Uva 1. Auflage 2016. Buch. VIII, 439 S. Softcover ISBN 978 3 0343 2217 1 Weitere Fachgebiete > Musik, Darstellende Künste, Film > Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Zu Inhaltsverzeichnis schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, eBooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte. Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva Italian Political Cinema: Definitions and Goals In early 2012, shortly before Mario Monti’s government began to inflame public opinion with its unpopular reform of the labour system, the political magazine Panorama asked two prominent leaders of the Democratic Party, Walter Veltroni and Matteo Renzi, to review Roberto Andò’s Il trono vuoto (2012), a political novel which was brought to the big screen a year later as Viva la libertà (2013), and with great critical acclaim. In his novel, Andò nar- rates the switched identities of his two protagonists, identical twin brothers with strikingly different character traits: Enrico, the depressed, introverted political Democratic leader whose lack of charisma is perceived as sympto- matic of the current crisis of the left, and his brother Giovanni, a brilliant philosopher who spent much of his life in a mental institution. Upon his release, Giovanni is summoned to impersonate Enrico, who mysteriously vanishes during the last, critical weeks of his political campaign. Giovanni’s joie de vivre, optimism and directness contrast with the defeatist attitude of a political caste that has long failed to communicate with its constituency. Performing as (and in lieu of ) his brother, Giovanni achieves the impos- sible, reconnecting with a disenchanted electorate and inspiring new faith in the purpose of Italian politics. Veltroni, who comes to embody the voice of a generation of politicians asked by their younger peers to step aside and make room for the future, captures, in his reading of Andò’s novel, the indictment of a political class ‘that is often too removed from the real life of its voters’. Renzi, the politician most vocal in calling for such rottamazione, the ‘scrapping’ associated with the adoption of new technologies over the technically obsolete, believes that Andò is indeed telling his readers that the Shakespearean fool’s sudden ascent to power constitutes an unforeseen and salvific event, a dream that spells ‘the path we should follow’.1 1 W. Veltroni, ‘Il nostro nemico è il cliché’, Panorama (21 March 2012), 65. M. Renzi, ‘L’imprevisto ci può salvare’, Panorama (21 March 2012), 65. All translations ours. 4 Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva Two years later, when Renzi has obtained his rottamazione, forming a government whose cabinets are entrusted to young, barely known fig- ures chosen largely from the ‘civil society’ whose presence in politics had been deemed necessary since the demise of Berlusconi’s last government, the political talk show Ballarò hosts for a time a dark political sitcom. In its indictment of current politics, the sitcom responds rather directly to Renzi’s earlier statements by turning the dream into a veritable nightmare. Il candidato (Ludovico Bessegato 2014) tells the story of yet another fool, a postman and dummy candidate for a primary election, chosen as a rep- resentative everyman in hopes that his obvious ineptitude will facilitate his corrupt opponent’s ascent to power. Once the unpredictable electorate favours the postman, the staff that intentionally grooms him for certain failure is suddenly saddled with betting on his candidacy. Portrayed as mere artifice, packaging, and as the product of the media spin cycle, the creators of this series boil politics in the age of Renzi down to a ruthless marketing operation that, in semiotic terms, successfully voids the sign of its original signified, thus leaving an empty signifier. If during his tenure Berlusconi highlighted the importance of physical appearance, Renzi brought to the fore, as political satirists such as Maurizio Crozza have amply demonstrated, that of catch-phrase wordplay. Both experts in mass communication, Berlusconi and Renzi are representatives of a time when politics suffers a semiotic slippage, a disappearance of conceptual substance that results instead in a greater concentration on the surface of things.2 New Forms of Political Cinema? In spite of such antipolitica – the adversarial relation with politics which increasingly spread through society during the Second Republic – Italian cinema has recently returned an engagement, in varied forms, with political 2 All episodes of Il candidato were shown at the end of Ballarò and are now available online at <http://www.rai.it/dl/portaleRadio/Programmi/Page-e92daca4-c0b9- 4571-a407-ac99931e5265.html?section=Main> accessed 1 November 2015. Italian Political Cinema 5 issues. Its persistent attention to the complex manifestations of a social, cul- tural, ideological Italian identity has led several critics to question whether we are indeed witnessing the birth of what could be termed a ‘New Italian Political Cinema’. This is the question raised, in the Anglophone world, by William Hope in a collective research project which culminated in two significant volumes dedicated to recent cinematic discussions of labour, migration, gender relations, and the representation of the recent socio- political past.3 While Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug had already reframed the political question within the larger landscape of postmod- ern impegno in the Anglophone context,4 in the Italophone context, in his ‘“Il cinema è l’arma più forte”: È tornato il cinema politico?’, Paolo Bertetto wonders whether we can indeed speak of a true rebirth of Italian political cinema.5 A few years ago, Roy Menarini and Giovanni Spagnoletti engaged in a complex discussion over what they define as Forme della politica nel cinema contemporaneo.6 The international success ofGomorra and Il divo in 2008 confirmed the suspicion held since Tangentopoli that Italian cinema had begun to take measure of the socio-political realities of a country about to face one of its most delicate and unpredictable seasons. It is indeed since the release of Il portaborse (Daniele Luchetti 1991) that the Italian film industry appears interested in the necessity of facing the political establishment head on, bringing to the screen, shortly before the explosion of the Mani Pulite scandal, ‘the departure from legality of an entire ruling class’, signalling the twilight of the Italian First Republic.7 3 W. Hope, L. d’Arcangeli, and S. Serra, eds, Un nuovo cinema politico italiano?, i: Lavoro, migrazione, relazioni di genere (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2013); Un nuovo cinema politico italiano?, ii: Il passato sociopolitico, il potere istituzionale, la marginalizzazione (2014). 4 See P. Antonello and F. Mussgnug, eds, Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 5 P. Bertetto, ‘“Il cinema è l’arma più forte”: È tornato il cinema politico?’, Alfabeta 2 19 (May 2012), 60–7. 6 R. Menarini and G. Spagnoletti, eds, Forme della politica nel cinema italiano con- temporaneo: Da Tangentopoli al Partito Democratico e alle elezioni 2008, Close Up 23 (2007–8). 7 E. Galli Della Loggia, ‘Dov’è lo scandalo?’, Mondoperaio (March 1980). 6 Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva In recent times, Italian cinema has continued incessantly to engage with politics, both in its most strict definition, and in a wider context that includes reflection upon public life, memory, and national identity. On one hand, a certain type of auteur cinema, from that of Marco Bellocchio and Nanni Moretti to that of Mario Martone and Paolo Sorrentino, con- tinues to posit personal interpretations of the most crucial aspects of the life of the nation. On the other – while we are witnessing a noteworthy revival of the poliziesco and noir film – comedy, in its many instantiations has become the genre most inclined to offer a real-time portrayal of the tumultuous events of the Second Republic. As Menarini suggests, ‘if we consider realism to be today’s form of excess, if the voracious politician is now part of our daily chronicles, comedy inevitably becomes cinema of political denunciation, even when treading upon tragicomic blueprints or capitalising on a gallery of famous actors, or stock characterisation’.8 The series of questions and assessments pertaining to the presence, or rather, to the reappearance of ‘political cinema’ in recent Italian film produc- tion calls for a preliminary reflection on the very terminology adopted to address it. As many scholars have signalled over the years, its semantic horizon is slippery and ambiguous to the extent that, as Maurizio Grande remarked, it often comes across as ‘a mirage, as the “ghost” of an “ideal” object’.9 Theorising Cinema Politico: Early Debates The question of ‘political cinema’ has long been an object of debate among illustrious Italian film critics and scholars. An ample, intensive discussion first took place in France, and later in Italy at the end of the 1960s, in step 8 R. Menarini, ‘Foto di famiglia in un interno: La rappresentazione politica dell’italia