History Is Made in the Dark 2: Salvatore Giuliano & L'africa a Casa

History Is Made in the Dark 2: Salvatore Giuliano & L’Africa a casa As a masterpiece of political cinema, Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano may represent in our time what The Battleship Potemkin did in the silent era. But unlike Eisenstein’s film, this is not a work of propaganda but an investigation more intent on raising questions than supplying answers. Rosi had been part of a new wave of Italian cinema that appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s (which included the directors Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi and the Taviani brothers), and his approach is a critical realism which extends the earlier practice of neo-realism. Like many of Rosi’s films, it deals with the South – in this case, Sicily – a part of Italy usually despised by the wealthier north which refers to it derogatively as “l’Africa a casa” (“Africa at home”). Rosi, born and raised in Naples, is himself a man of the Mezzogiorno (the southern part of the Italian peninsula and Sicily), and has often probed the culture and mores of that province where the Mafia rule of omerta (to keep silent) reigns. Salvatore Giuliano was originally entitled Sicilia 1943-1960, an apt enough title for a film which is in no way a biopic but is, as its director described it, “a discourse on the corpse of Julius Caesar”. Giuliano’s is the corpse in question: the film’s first shot shows his dead body in a Sicilian courtyard in 1950, and the last shot shows another body, that of a Mafia informer, in a market square 10 years later in 1960. In between, Giuliano exists as little more than a white blouse glimpsed in a landscape. There is no chronological order to the narrative which constantly shifts in time: the audience is located, as it were, in different presents with forays into the past. Rosi’s method is to refer to historical moments about which he has no sure knowledge, revealing that appearances are as shifting and elusive as the truth in Sicily. It’s a method that is close to that of an historian who refuses to invent characters or events, and he relies on books, newspapers, clippings, photographs, newsreels and oral testimonies. But the 1 film is in no way a documentary, but rather an interpretation of reality in a mixed style. Rosi’s voice-over introduces the account: “The film was shot in Sicily, in Montelepre, where Salvatore Giuliano was born, in the houses, the streets, or the mountains where he reigned for seven years”. Giuliano’s name first came to light in the troubled history of Sicily when he was apprehended in September 1943 for participating in the black market in wheat. He killed one of the four carabinieri who tried to arrest him, was wounded himself, but managed to escape. As a bandit, Giuliano profited freely from a career of kidnapping and extortion, but drew a great deal of support from the local peasant populace – as most of his activities were directed against wealthy landowners – and the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm gave him a place in his famous category of “social banditry”. In June 1945, Giuliano became involved with MIS, the separatist movement for the independence of Sicily, and in return was offered the post of head of the police and Minister of Justice. Involvement with politics also entailed alliances with various factions of the Mafia. The most notorious incident of Giuliano’s career was a massacre that took place during a May Day parade in Portella della Ginestra in 1947, after the left-wing Popular Bloc, a Socialist- Communist alliance, had triumphed in Sicilian elections over the MIS. Despite his close ties with the peasantry, and his support for land reforms which were close to the left-wing position, Giuliano was staunchly anti-Communist, which brought him close to the right-wing power brokers who launched the May Day attack. Giuliano and his men certainly took part, although the bandit subsequently declared himself appalled at the killing of 11 peasant demonstrators and the wounding of dozens. In 1952, in Viterbo, Giuliano’s close lieutenant, Gaspare Pisciotta, and other members of his band were put on trial for the massacre, and Pisciotta declared in his defence that “the Mafia, the police and the carabinieri are like the holy trinity”. (Pisciotta, who turns out to be the Judas of the story, is played by one of only two professional actors used in the film.) Rosi’s approach is to reveal, amidst the confusion of the facts, how power is handled in contemporary Italy, how the landowners and the right-wing parties used Giuliano for their own ends, during the struggle for the independence of Sicily, and then got rid of him with the complicity of the state and the security forces. The film examines the causes and consequences of Giuliano’s death, and through the measured distance of its mise-en-scène allows the audience to draw its own conclusions. But Salvatore Giuliano is far from a dry document. Enhanced by the crisp black-and-white photography of Gianni Di Venanzo, and the modernist score by Piero Piccioni, it bursts with energy and lyricism, with unforgettable sequences like the revolt of the women of Montelepre, who struggle against the soldiers trying to take away their husbands and sons. The scene of Giuliano’s mother weeping over the corpse of the bandit recalls Mantegna’s painting, “The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ”. For its portrait of the empty 2 streets and bleak landscape of the island, Leonardo Sciascia, the great Italian novelist, referred to this as “the best film ever made about Sicily”. Michel Ciment Editor, Positif 3.

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