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
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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
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 nel cinema di Luchetti’, in L. Ceretto and A. Morsiani, eds, Declinazioni del vero: Il cinema di Davide Ferrario, Daniele Luchetti e Daniele Vicari (Bergamo: Edizioni di Cineforum, 2007), 34–6; 35. 9 M. Grande, Eros e politica (Siena: Protagon, 1995), 5. Italian Political Cinema 7 with the wave of socio-cultural insurgence that began with the events of May 1968. Back then, the copious production of films labeled as ‘politi- cal’ due to their subject matter, their programmatic intent, or the vantage point from which their narratives originated, drew the attention of several critics and scholars. The increasing visibility and growing debate about political cinema outside of institutional circuits allowed for a militant and interventionist cinema which gained from the employment of lighter modes of filming (8 or 16 millimeters) and the gradual introduction of new technology. Using as a springboard the organic and systematic debate occurring on the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinéthique and Positif, Italian critics and scholars paid particular attention to a definition of the ‘politicity’ of cinema, attempting to recover the ‘critical and terminological tools of lin- guistics and semiology, and linking the question of political cinema to that of a cinema engaged in the invention of new “forms” and “structures”’.10 In doing so, they either gravitated toward foreign film-makers such as Godard and Straub, as attested by studies appeared in Filmcritica and Cinema & Film, or pursued the new direction of the militant cinema long praised in Cinema Nuovo, which based its Marxist critical reflections upon strict political terms, and by Ombre Rosse, which rooted its work on the counter- informationist and interventionist cinema directly inspired or produced by the working class and by the student movement.11 The ideological tenets which greatly informed and limited the posi- tions of many critics of the time led them to attack what they termed as ‘Italian political cinema’ as a degraded genre which had found its inspira- tion in the unparalleled success of films such as Costa Gavras’s Z (1969) or Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970). Critics such as Goffredo Fofi and Guido Aristarco based their indictment of this genre on an excessive spectacularity that poorly hid its analytic superficiality as
10 A. Bernardini, ‘Il “cinema politico” nel dibattito delle riviste’, Vita e pensiero 3–4 (1973), 231–47; 241. 11 See, for instance, the films originating from the collective efforts of directors close to Silvano Agosti in Rome and Paolo Gobetti in Turin, or from the Milanese Collettivo Cinema Militante. 8 Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva it called for emotional rather than intellectual spectatorial investment. As a consequence, these films were perceived as strongly compromised with what these critics deemed to be capitalist values.12 We should not forget, in this context, the heated debate over the theme of ‘technique and ideology’, a loaded phrase which actually served as title of a collection of essays, originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1971 and 1972, later reprinted in an Italian translation edited by Jean- Louis Comolli in 1982,13 and used also as the title of a 1980 collection of essays edited by Antonio Bertini.14 Even earlier, this debate found suste- nance in the words of Pio Baldelli, whose remarks at a roundtable during the 1966 Mostra del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro asserted the importance of ‘ideology as hermeneutic structure of style’ and consequently, as the title of his intervention stated, of a ‘linguaggio cinematografico come strumento di mistificazione ideologica’.15 As per Antonio Bertini, cinematic technique was associated with ‘a calculated and somewhat compressed choice which obeyed goals of indus- trial rationalisation’16 inevitably leading to a ‘cinema of prose’, as Pasolini would have called it, to be perceived as ‘fruit of violence exerted by the market, by a system of production and distribution’.17 As Claudio Bisoni notes, this is how ‘civil cinema’ comes to be ‘not merely considered as kitsch
12 For a discussion of the theory and practice of (political and) militant cinema, see F. Rosati, ed., 1968–1972: Esperienze di cinema militante (Rome: Studi monografici di Bianco e Nero/Società Gestioni Editoriali, 1973). See also P. Ortoleva, ‘Cinema politico e uso politico del cinema’, in F. De Bernardinis, ed., Storia del cinema italiano, xii: 1970–1976 (Venice/Rome: Marsilio/Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 2008), 151–66; 162; C. Bisoni, Gli anni affollati: La cultura cinematografica italiana (1970–79) (Rome: Carocci, 2009), 90; C. Uva, L’immagine politica: Forme del contropotere tra cinema, video e fotografia nell’Italia degli anni Settanta (Milan: Mimesis, 2015), 17–19. 13 J.-L. Comolli, Tecnica e ideologia (Parma: Pratiche, 1982). 14 A. Bertini, ed., Tecnica e ideologia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980). 15 P. Baldelli, ‘Il linguaggio cinematografico come strumento di mistificazione ideo- logica’, in Per una nuova critica: I convegni pesaresi 1965–1967 (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), 375–87; 383, 375. 16 Bertini, Tecnica e ideologia, 8. 17 Bertini, Tecnica e ideologia, 10. Italian Political Cinema 9 and in bad taste, but also authoritarian in structure and figural language’. Thus, the pervasive use of selected formal parameters common to many films within this genre, ‘such as the acceleration in film speed, the use of the zoom and of wide angle shots’, come to be described as ‘authoritarian techniques’ that render this style ‘synonymous with constriction’.18 The hypothesis of a political and militant action in cinema, based on the concept of a direct intervention on reality, is meant to oppose the Balaszian ‘bourgeoisification’ of film.19 The echo of Zavattini’s positions is evident: it all starts, in fact, from the guiding neorealist principle of ‘the direct encounter, the physical encounter with things’20 that substitutes the old, ‘bourgeois’ idea of subject and screenplay, thus replaced by a script strictly taken as a ‘moral, or better, political canvas’.21 This is the terrain from which, in the early 1970s, said theoretical debate follows a new direction. Still in opposition to the idea of cinema as institutional and bourgeois spectacle, Ciriaco Tiso identifies a new category, that of ‘poetic-political’ cinema. Its political nature derives from the aware- ness that ‘revolutionary ideology does not always generate revolutionary cinema, yet revolutionary cinema always generates revolutionary ideology’.22 Through this lens we should distinguish between political cinema, defined by its language and form rather than by its content, and cinema on politics. Gianfranco Bettetini concurred with Tiso when, in a round- table discussion on political cinema, he sketched the current coordinates of the cinematographic horizon in Italy and Western Europe. Bettetini evidenced the traits of a cinematography where ‘the mere mimetic act did not bear the same political relevance […] as the transformative work of a film that interrogates, more than its society and its original referent, the
18 Bisoni, Gli anni affollati, 91. 19 Cf. B. Bálazs, Estetica del film (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1954), 207. 20 S. Parigi, Fisiologia dell’immagine: Il pensiero di Cesare Zavattini (Turin: Lindau, 2006), 280. 21 Parigi, Fisiologia dell’immagine, 279. 22 C. Tiso, Cinema poetico-politico (Rome: Partisan, 1972), 27. 10 Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva actual medium of communication concretely offered by that very society in which the film acts’.23 What can we thus retain and recover from the debate we have briefly attempted to revisit in order to evaluate the level of politicity of contempo- rary Italian cinema and the forms that such dimension assumes? Bettetini’s position could indeed serve as our starting point, if only as a reminder that we should never lose sight of the formal aspect of language and style as such, as we extend our consideration to the role granted to technique in the writings of critics such as Comolli, Bertini and Tiso. As Lino Miccichè once said, ‘the “political” core of filmic communication continues to rest not only in the content to be communicated, but also and mostly in the very modes of communication’.24 Such a statement inevitably leads us to consider the question of the politics of cinema, namely the way in which the system of production and distribution is organised, structured, and directed within a specific politi- cal and economic context. The politicity of cinema, therefore, is a question equally pertaining to form, content, and to the productive system in which the works to be analysed are embedded. We can thus begin to present the hypothesis that the politicity of film presents itself in different degrees, varying in accordance to the extent to which form and content are joined harmonically within their specific network of production. The nature and level of politicity of a film can depend on the extent to which form and content organically coexist in a project which should be aimed at investigating, reflecting, photographing, representing, and interpreting salient and problematic aspects which iden- tify the polis, a concept by which we intend the communal life a group of men and women organised and governed according to norms that reflect shared values. If upon such considerations we conclude that, on the one hand, there is no stable definition of political cinema, then on the other, for this very
23 ‘Tavola rotonda. Cinema politico, film politologico?’, Vita e pensiero 3–4 (1973), 7–29; 10. 24 ‘Tavola rotonda. Cinema politico, film politologico?’, 14. Italian Political Cinema 11 same reason, we can affirm that, as Maurizio Grande maintains, we are not in presence of an actual genre, but of a ‘filone which cuts diagonally across diverse genres and subgenres […] labelling their definitethematic or practical attitude towards politics’. 25 If we follow Grande’s suggestion, one of the main questions to be addressed when investigating political cinema rests on the type of image put forth by the cinematic corpus to be analysed in relation to Italian public life, as conceived in its societal and its political context.26
Italian Political Cinema
Conceived and edited by two Italian film scholars working in radically different academic settings,Italian Political Cinema inscribes its inves- tigation in this theoretical debate on Italian political film by bringing together a wide array of critical positions. Film scholars from Italy, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, and the US have contributed to this venture, which posits itself as a unique and multifaceted reflection on contemporary Italian political cinema. The volume opens on a group of thematic essays that discuss contem- porary political film from a variety of angles. Gaetana Marrone revisits the work of a selected group of early masters of political cinema, in order to set up the tone for the production of the coming years. Christian Uva continues this argument with a wider discussion of contemporary cinema, restricting the field of politics to what was once termed as civil engage- ment. Nicoletta Marini-Maio offers instead a unique perspective in this field by focusing on the cinematic presence of the most invasive and iconic political figure of the Second Republic, Silvio Berlusconi. The cinema of migration is the object of Áine O’Healy’s analysis, while non-fiction film is the focus of the two essays that follow: Anita Angelone’s investigation of the documentaries on migration and Elena Past’s examination of those
25 Grande, Eros e politica, 16. 26 Cf. Grande, Eros e politica, 21. 12 Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva dedicated to denouncing Ecomafia. Mary P. Wood and Alan O’Leary read political cinema through the lens of genre: Wood analyses its para- digmatic manifestations within film noir, while O’Leary draws connec- tions, raising significant questions, between political and popular cinema. Although our choice was not to focus specifically on the political comedy, to which several essays make multiple references, O’Leary’s reading of the cinepanettone stands in stark and significant contrast with the following essay by Vito Zagarrio, where questions of form in political cinema target comedies as well as recent auteuristic efforts. Paolo Russo closes this first section dedicated to themes and genres by shifting gears and taking the reader through a detailed quantitative and statistical analysis of the eco- nomic aspects of political cinema, paying specific attention to its state and regional subsidisation. In the second section of this volume, a group of scholars reprise the themes discussed earlier in the book by providing individual critical assess- ments of the recent cinematography of the most prominent directors cur- rently engaged in this genre: Ruth Glynn on Marco Bellocchio, Cosetta Gaudenzi on Guido Chiesa, Laura Di Bianco on Francesca Comencini, Anna Paparcone on Marco Tullio Giordana, Marguerite Waller on Sabina Guzzanti, Simona Bondavalli on Daniele Luchetti, Marcia Landy on Nanni Moretti, Claudio Bisoni on Paolo Sorrentino, Monica Jansen on Daniele Vicari, and lastly Clarissa Clò on the documentarists Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi. Questions of gender and sexuality, which were not the sole subject of any thematic essay in the first section, inflect many of the essays contained in the remaining two, as witnessed also by the choice of films selected to rep- resent specific case studies of new political cinema. In this light, we should read Danielle Hipkins’s analysis of Nessuno mi può giudicare, Nicoletta Marini-Maio’s discussion of Cosmonauta, Catherine O’Rawe’s reading of La prima linea and Dana Renga’s study of Romanzo criminale. The selec- tion of films analysed in this section is informed by their representative nature as well as by their wide distribution outside national borders. This is the case for Lamerica, Il divo, Gomorra, and Viva la libertà, analysed respectively by Luca Caminati, Pierpaolo Antonello, Millicent Marcus, and Giancarlo Lombardi. Other films were selected for their specific treatment Italian Political Cinema 13 of key aspects of new political cinema: Gius Gargiulo explores the con- tinuity between Risorgimento and the anni di piombo in Noi credevamo; Giovanna De Luca investigates the cinematic representation of two hotly contested events in the history of mafia as portrayed in Placido Rizzotto and Segreti di Stato; Ellen Nerenberg studies the depiction of captivity in an emblematic, yet relatively unknown film,Tutta colpa di Giuda. We are of the opinion that all these films should be considered as constitutive of the filoneof New Political Cinema. It is our hope that this tripartite struc- ture will facilitate the utility and application of this volume for scholars and students of film alike, offering diverse points of entry into a subject that continues to deserve increased critical attention, inside and outside of academia.