Narrative Non-Fictions in Contemporary Italian Cinema

SDF 5 (2+3) pp. 121–131 Intellect Limited 2011 Studies in Documentary Film Volume 5 Numbers 2 and 3 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.2-3.121_1 LUCA CAMINATI Concordia University Narrative non-fictions in contemporary Italian cinema: Roberto Munzi’s Saimir (2002), Giorgio Diritti’s Il vento fa il suo giro (2005) and Pietro Marcello’s La bocca del lupo (2009) ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In recent years a growing number of Italian film-makers have made a conscious effort globalization to create a cinema that testifies to the great trends of the current epoch: globalization, hybrid narratives emigration and displacement. A moral seriousness reminiscent of neorealism has Cinema of Empire re-emerged, accompanied by a return to the ethics and techniques of documentary documentary which defined that earlier movement. The ambition to expose the country’s vices, a Italy goal shared among fiction and non-fiction film-makers alike, is implied in a strug- neorealism gle to express this new global environment. Beginning with the notion of ‘Empire’ as defined by Michael Hardt and Anotnio Negri, Luca Caminati investigates the changing social and cinematic terrain of Italy through the artistic production of 121 SDF_5.2&3_Caminati_121-131.indd 121 10/1/11 9:00:52 AM Luca Caminati 1. In Pasolini (1982: 148). current directors Francesco Munzi, Giorgio Diritti and Pietro Marcello. Their work All translations from recuperates motifs of the neorealist and cinema impegnato movements, while incor- Italian, unless otherwise noted, are mine. porating gestures from the new documentarians of their generation. These hybrid narratives represent a formally innovative political cinema that performs an opposi- 2. I borrow and adapt the notion of contact from tional function in the face of the new realities of Empire. Pratt’s definition of ‘contact zones’ (1992). While I am not claiming a direct relationship The scream is the old excavator’s between the current Italian socio-economic tortured by months and years situation and the of morning sweat–accompanied seventeenth- and eighteenth-century by silent swarms of stone- colonial and postcolonial phases cutters; but it’s also the freshly in Africa and South convulsed earth’s, or, within the narrower America addressed by Pratt in her work, I limits of the modern horizon, believe it is hard not to the whole neighborhood’s […] It is the city’s, bring to comparison the current political plunges into a festive brilliance issues developing in the periphery of the –it is the world’s. The crying is for Western world, and what ends and begins again–what was the ‘asymmetrical relations’ Pratt grass and open space and has become highlights in her study. waxy white courtyards enclosed within a resentful decorum; what was almost an old fairground of bright plaster slanting in the sun and has become a new block, swarming in an order made of stifled grief. The crying is for what changes, even if To become something better. The light Of the future doesn’t cease for even an instant To wound us: it is here to Brand us in all our daily deeds With anxiety even in the confidence That gives us life, in the Gobettian impulse Toward these workers, who silently raise, in this Neighborhood of the other human vanguard, Their red rag of hope. (Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Il pianto della scavatrice’, 1956)1 INTRODUCTION In recent years a growing number of Italian film-makers – Gianni Amelio, Carlo Mazzacurati, Matteo Garrone, Ferzan Ozpetk and a few others – have made a conscious effort to create a cinema that testifies to the great trends of the current epoch: globalization, emigration and displacement (O’Healy 2007: 62–65). This group of like-minded directors has investigated ‘spaces of contact’2 in their films, by which I mean the encounter of peoples in the new geographies of ‘Empire’, as Hardt and Negri define the later phase of multi- national market expansion, a phase dominated by the end of ‘the idea of a 122 SDF_5.2&3_Caminati_121-131.indd 122 9/19/11 1:28:25 PM Narrative non-ﬁ ctions in contemporary Italian cinema single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way 3. For a discussion of the notion of Empire in and treats them under one common notion of right’ (2001: 9). Empire began relationship to Gianni to operate a foundational shift, beginning in the 1980s, to a different system, Amelio’s cinema, see both internally (in the decomposition of the welfare state) and externally (in Caminati (2006). the proliferation of structures that transverse national boundaries). As a result, Empire has moved towards a new ‘horizontal’ distribution of power among states, corporations and other financial and political entities (Hardt and Negri 2001: 13), and as a direct consequence, it has created new subjects and new subjectivities. What Hardt and Negri brought to the fore in their study is that ‘the end of the dialectic of modernity has not resulted in the end of the dialectic of exploitation’ (Hardt and Negri 2001: 43). Instead, the velocity of the flow of capital and commodities in the world market – which requires a higher degree of labour mobilization as well – has produced new territories (for instance, rogue or failed states on the borders of the most highly developed economies) and peoples. It is against this background that we can justify labelling the socially aware film-makers listed above as creators of a ‘Cinema of Empire’.3 In dealing with the current Italian social scenario, the Cinema of Empire makes a turn towards reality that is, as Millicent Marcus points out, a ‘return to the social referent and to the moral accountability of neorealism’ (Marcus 2002: 11). Thus, this cinema makes a point of choosing its subjects from among the structuring features of contemporary Italian society: mass immigration from the South and the East, the disintegration of old forms of popular aggregation such as trade unions and political parties, the disappearance of social safety nets in the workplace triggered by the flexibility required by the new economy and the emergence of minority groups – such as gays, migrants, illegal workers – to the surface of Italian political debate (Menarini 2008). Just as the return to the moral seriousness of neorealism marks the moral orientation of the Cinema of Empire, the return to documentary (the formal aesthetic marker of neorealist theory) has also re-emerged. What fictional and documentary film directors share is a desire to expose Italy’s current vices, and to do so they make cunning use of all possible available technical and stylistic means. Among the most successful examples, Biùtiful cauntri/The Beautiful Country (Esmerelda Calabria and Andrea D’Ambrosio, 2008) showed how the mafia had organized the illegal recycling of dangerous and toxic waste; Il corpo delle donne/Women’s Bodies (Lorella Zanardo and Marco Malfi Chindemi, 2008) incorporated the feminist analysis of images of women; and the interesting ‘participatory’ experiment, L’Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio/The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio (Agostino Ferrente, 2006), in which the director documented himself forming a multi-ethnic music band around Piazza Vittorio in Rome. In between the more commercially viable fictions and the low-budget guerrilla-style documentary exposés shot digitally, a number of film-makers have sought a hybrid narrative that uses both fiction and non-fiction. This, I will argue, is the case of a trio of odd directors working at the edge of the fiction/non-fiction divide: Francesco Munzi, Giorgio Diritti and Pietro Marcello. Their work recuperates motifs from within the Italian tradition of neorealism and cinema impegnato (Petri, Germi, Bellocchio, etc.), while incorporating gestures from the new documentarians of their generation. While each of these directors is certainly deserving of separate analysis, in spite of their young age and short careers, I will treat them collectively to pull out the fundamental features of new narrative non-fiction: work in which we find a typical stylistic blending of reality and fiction, and the use of such dimensions of documentary as 123 SDF_5.2&3_Caminati_121-131.indd 123 9/19/11 1:28:25 PM Luca Caminati 4. There is no single scripted and non-scripted dialogue, as well as observational and self-reflexive study of this new international wave approaches to film-making. of ‘hybrid directors’. Narrative non-fiction is certainly not new in itself. Many of the classic early A first attempt at documentary film experiments, such as Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922), mapping this issue was Catherine Moana (Flaherty, 1933) and Alberto Cavalcanti’s late thirties productions for Russell’s Experimental the British Film Institute (The Saving of Bill Blewitt, 1937; North Sea, 1938; etc.), Ethnography (1999). fall under this category. Such film-making has been recently brought back More recently a series of articles have dealt to the international film festival circuit by, among others, the works of Pedro with individual authors. Costa, Abderrahmane Sissako and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.4 This genre See, for example, Quandt (2008, 2009) and was rightly labelled by Alberto Cavalcanti as long ago as 1938 in an article Gabara (2010). published in Bianco e nero, as documentario narrativo (narrative documentary 5. For an accurate or story-documentary), reflecting the two stylistic and ideological aspects of reconstruction of the these works (Cavalcanti 1938: 3). Cavalcanti distinguishes documentary with Empire Marketing a slight narrative – and thus, in his view, a fictional structure – from the ‘pure Board and General 5 Post Office film units, documentary’ à la Grierson. At the level of content, these hybrid films charac- and the relationship teristically deal with peripheral groups who exist at the margins of the main- between Grierson and stream discourse manufactured in the great centres of imperial power and Cavalcanti, see Swann (1989).

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