Narrative Non-Fictions in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Home , Francesco Munzi, Giorgio Diritti, Italian neorealism

SDF 5 (2+3) pp. 121–131 Intellect Limited 2011

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

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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

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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

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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). emphasize this marginality by employing non-professional actors, a scenario at times looser than in a traditional fiction, anthropological investigation of 6. Among many interesting examples, their locale and, in more recent years, thanks to the development of digital see the two volumes portable camera, use long takes and time-based scene development. edited by Rhodes and Springer (2006) and Hal Foster has noted that in the Sixties, a rigid epistemological model was Juhasz and Lerner imposed on the reading of art works, which established an absolute separation (2006). between a referential object – inextricably linked to the reality of the world – and the independent or arbitrary simulacrum, which encoded a self-referential dimension into all forms of representation – including realism (Foster 1996: 134). In recent years this epistemological divide has unravelled, as actual film practice – for instance, the rise of a new worldwide wave of guerrilla-doc film-makers and the popularity of ‘reality shows’ on the global system of screens – has clearly rendered it obsolete. This trend has caught the attention of those media theo- rists interested in realism, with its attendant discourses of truth and veracity, as it has been classically framed in the arts and in cinema.6 The issue of realism becomes paramount in docu-dramas, docu-fictions and all sorts of fictionalized documentary, including the new group-elimination reality shows à la Big Brother or Survivor, and their fictionalized counterparts such as the American ABC TV series Lost, a Club Med-gone-wild fantasy (Hill 2005). The films I will be analysing here take their cues from the same cultural milieu, even if they position themselves in opposition to the mainstream dissemination of the values of the ‘society of the spectacle’, with its typical mystification of labour, commodification of leisure and presentation of a homogeneous and unalterable community life ruled by the new capitalist regime of global corporations. These oppositional films (low-budget, small- scale productions) nevertheless are comfortable moving from fiction to non- fiction as a destabilizing spectatorial act. The proto-form of this cinema was established in the Sixties at the same time that the more rigid epistemological divide became critically hegemonic. We can name here as major influences Chelsea Girls (Warhol, 1966), the twelve-part 1973 PBS show An American Family and, more poignantly, the cine-fictions developed by French film-maker and anthropologist Jean Rouch (Chronicle of a Summer, 1960; Jaguar, 1967; etc.). The films mentioned in my title construct hybrid representational strat- egies that intentionally leave indeterminate the ontology of their referential

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fields. Saimir (Munzi, 2004) narrates a ‘story’ – a fiction – within the frame- 7. I am borrowing the term “non-places” from work of a documentary style that has reminded critics of the Dardenne broth- Marc Augé (Augé 1995). ers’ investigation of exploitation of labour such as in La promesse/The Promise, While Augé is using 1996 or Rosetta, 1999. While Saimir is indeed a scripted piece, the low-budget this term to define the “supermodern” 16 mm hand-held style indicates a documentary feel that is systematically spaces of diffuse challenged by – often opposing – stylistic choices. Also, the hand-held camera westernization style references a world in which the complex division of labour characteris- (airports, hotels, supermarkets, etc.), I tic of mainstream film has ceded to a world in which such specialization is bend it to the harsh becoming obsolete, due to the proliferation of film technologies. The film lives reality that followed the ideological in a state of tension between documentary and auteur cinema. Il vento fa il bacchanal that suo giro/The Wind Blows Round (Diritti, 2005) is another scripted fiction film. was Baudrillardian The film was shot with non-professional actors in a small Occitan-speaking postmodernity. community at the border between Italy and France (near Monviso). Because of this ‘neorealist’ choice (non-professionals and actual local language) and the nine months spent by the director on location, the fictional quality of the film gives way to a Rouchian ethno-fiction of remote mountain communities in Northern Italy under the constant threat of disappearance. La bocca del lupo/ The Mouth of the Wolf (Marcello, 2009) starts off from a completely different perspective and with a different objective: the lives of two marginal figures, a Sicilian ex-convict and a transsexual prostitute, are investigated through a ‘participatory ethnography’ (as, again, Jean Rouch defines these kinds of films) in which the actors share with the director their most dark and intimate moments. And yet it is precisely the way the two characters can, from the clues picked up in their media saturated world, organize their images according to the canon of the media star system, along with Marcello’s highly sophisticated and stylized direction and editing, which ultimately make for the undecidable quality of this film as either documentary or documentary’s uncanny double, fiction. Shot in Genoa in 2008, the film manages the difficult task of maneu- vering from TV-esque exposé to Brechtian theatre. In Munzi’s cinema we experience a dialectics of fiction and non-fiction, or more specifically a collision of cinema d’autore, documentary-like realism and docu-drama. Fulfilling the traditional social and political function of documentary, Munzi focuses on exposing the ‘invisible Italy’. In a recent interview Munzi defines the subjects of his films as ‘only geographically Italian’ (Munzi, Saimir DVD interview), that is, as referring to the territory of those who inhabit a ‘non-place’ of legal and social limbo within the formal national confines of Italy.7 The absolute failure of recent immigration policies, culminating in the Bossi–Fini law that significantly increased the police and security surveillance of immigrants, has created a large group of ‘non-people’ (Dal Lago 1989). Munzi’s earlier filmic experiments as a documentarian already dealt with the excluded and marginalized, for instance in his short Nastassia (Munzi, 1996). His documentary training plays a key role in his film-making practice to the point of declaring that we need to ‘suspend the notion of fiction to immerse ourselves in reality’ (Munzi, Saimir DVD interview). Saimir is a demonstration of that manifesto-like demand. The establishing shot of the film: a head-on back tracking shot of Saimir (the Albanian kid protagonist of the film) on his moped, immediately throws us into the Roman outskirts celebrated by Pasolini. This region sprawls between Ostia and Torvajanica on the Roman coast – and it was here that Pasolini was murdered on 2 November 1975, by a ragazzo di vita, a hustler not so different from those Pasolini so vividly represented in his works. Munzi takes his characters from the same milieu, three decades later. But Saimir

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reveals immediately its complex cinematic layering with another citation. The film picks up where Nanni Moretti’s Caro diario’s first episode ‘In vespa’ leaves off. In Caro diario (Moretti, 1993) we see Nanni on his Vespa slowly reaching the exact spot of Pasolini’s murder. This long forward tracking shot follows Nanni while Keith Jarret’s The Köln Concert plays smoothly on the soundtrack (the choice of this recording maintains a feeling of actuality with the event of the murder, because it was released in 1975). No such sooth- ing soundtrack accompanies the main character Saimir (whose name means ‘right’ in Albanian) as he speeds forward: the live sound brings us the loud, buzzing noise of his obsolete moped. Saimir is on his way to meet up with his father, Edoard, for one of their ‘business’ trips across Italy. They have to reach the Tirrenian cost to pick up illegal immigrants landing in Italy from Albania. This first trip across Italy presents the landscape of Saimir, removing it as far as possible from any picturesque representation of the country. The film is shot in a gloomy and dark palette of earthly yellows and metallic blues with a super-16 mm camera: even glorious Apennine passes and seashores look perpetually dim and sombre, filtered through the grainy semi-professional lens of a small hand-held camera. Italy loses its mythic coordinates as the Mediterranean ‘orient’ so dear to the Nordic travellers of the late nineteenth century, and so often replicated since by cinematic images and the tourism industry – a place of beauty and joie de vivre. It becomes, instead, a non-place, its loss of geographical identity emphasized by two major stylistic choices: the use of non-Italian languages, mainly Albanian and Romany, and the soundtrack constituted mostly of Albanian pop songs. The juxtaposition of language and music with the de-mythologized geographic coordinates creates a sense of displacement for both the audience and the film’s characters. Displacement is enacted both spatially and in the collective psychology of the immigrant communities, torn between dealing with the official Italian superstructure and nostalgia for home. In the Pasolini poem quoted at the beginning of this essay, we can see how the production of non-space was central to the project of modernizing Italy. Pasolini’s description of the consequences of the arrival of the ‘excavator’ in the Roman borgate in his 1956 poem ‘The Cry of the Excavator’ pivots upon central rooting terms: ‘soil’, ‘neighbourhood’, ‘city’, ‘world’ that are ruthlessly dug up, bringing together the excavator, the victim and executioner as actors in the seemingly unstoppable change. This is the orizzonte novecentesco, the twentieth-century horizon of the late 1950s Rome, beautifully explored by two recent studies by Noa Steimatsky (2008) and John David Rhodes (2007). These new wastelands or non-spaces were the territories in which Riccetto of the novel Ragazzi di vita (Pasolini 1956) and Ettore of the film Mamma Roma (Pasolini, 1962) lived. Pasolini’s patchwork landscape is infused with memories, ruins and history, still retaining the sacral aura of a wound on the body of a culturally rich – though quickly changing – reality. Munzi’s Rome, by contrast, is already a city of Empire, where any sign of the past has been expunged, and that ‘numismatic quality’ that Benjamin assigns to ruins – that power of ruins to mark the territory with history – has disappeared (Benjamin 1928: 77). The film’s locations are roads seemingly devoid of identifying characteristics, mass-produced houses that do not carry any specificity and shacks made out of the detritus of twentieth-century industries. Aesthetically, the mise-en- scène is closer to a Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’, where non-traditional materials (garbage, machine parts, industrial wrappings, etc.) find innovative combinations, rather than the rich history of Italian art. The ingenuity of the

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new inhabitants of the borgate in creating shelters is the result of the devastating 8. Interview with Pietro Marcello (Caminati hopelessness of their economic circumstances. They have neither the bourgeois 2010: 139). aspiration of Mamma Roma’s eponymous character, with her ideal of a new life outside of the projects, nor any trace of the revolutionary hope that infused earlier generations of manual labourers. These new anonymous spaces are inhabited by immigrants from the war-torn Balkans, economic refugees from Albania, nomadic families of Rom and Sinti, who all share a need for anonymity in order to function illegally or semi-legally in the interstices of the Italian economy. The form of temp labour by which they managed to secure subsistence encourages a massive disrespect for the bourgeois laws concerning commerce and property – thus, a large part of their economy is tied up with the black market, petty crimes and the smuggling of drugs and people. Munzi’s harsh investigation into the underbelly of Empire approaches the most troubling question that faces young directors interested in repre- senting the ‘referent’ (to use Marcus’ evocative term) or, in other words, the social reality that surrounds them. Munzi’s stylistic choice of telling his story mixing modes and genre (documentary, fiction, Pasolini’s auteur cinema) is, on the one hand, symptomatic of the unsettled state of the Italian nation at the beginning of the new millennium; on the other, it proves to be a forceful tool of investigation. Saimir features in fact mostly non-professional actors represented in their own environment. Munzi picked his actors in the Rom and Sinti camps in and around Rome and asked them to re-enact themselves in the film before his camera. While this puts into question the distance between actor and persona, it also marks the intrusiveness of the film, which is never neutral. The documentary-style images act as a powerful signifier of the film’s ambition to challenge its own fictional status. Pietro Marcello’s La bocca del lupo is, as we have mentioned, also constructed to represent a peripheral space. The back-story of the production itself deserves a mention. Pietro Marcello’s earlier documentary about night-train commuters Il passaggio della linea/Crossing the Line (Marcello, 2007) came to the attention of journalist and film critic Goffredo Fofi, who proposed Marcello for a residency with the Jesuit community of San Marcellino in Genoa.8 Marcello spent almost a year on location in search of characters and stories to tell. One caught his attention: an odd couple formed by a former convict, Enzo, and Mary, an ex-heroin addict transvestite. The ‘plot’ of the film is very simple: a chronological reconstruction of their love story since their meeting in prison to the present. While Munzi operated in a fictional environment tainted by reality-signifiers (the low-fi camera, the non-professional actors, the real locales of the story, etc.), Marcello riffs ironically on the traditional observational documentary. The film assembles four types of images: footage shot specifically for the film showing the audience what the characters are talking about; reconstructed docu-drama moments in which the characters re-enact themselves; found-footage collected from various Genoese film archives and amateur film-makers; and finally short improvised vignettes, often in the hilarious vein of Brechtian demystifications. Marcello’s ambitious project aims at creating a micro/macro link, where the humble story of exclusion of the two main characters is intertwined with the modernization of Genoa: from the early Sixties heavy industry (steel facto- ries) to the current docklands development as planned out by Renzo Piano. But rather than using a ‘voice of God’ narration (signifying the ‘truth’ in the standard TV exposé), or a personal account of how the city used to be (as, e.g. in Of Time and the City, Terence Davies, 2009, a lyrical voice-over piece

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9. While on the on Manchester), Marcello gives voice to the two protagonists. He blends two international scene this Brechtian mode narrative voices, mostly made of cut-ups from original tapes his two protag- is embodied by onists exchanged while Enzo was serving his long prison sentence. In this Godard, Staub/Hulliet, period, Mary was on the outside, having served a shorter sentence, and she Makavejev and so on, in Italy I would had hit upon the idea of communicating with her beau via recorded tapes. argue that this style The archive of these tapes becomes a testimony to their relationship in the was developed by film, which is in turn a mirror of the ruthlessly implemented modernization Rossellini in his post- Neorealist phase (from of the city – so common to many Italian towns in the post-war period. The Stromboli, 1950 and archival voice tapes resonate with the amateur footage used by Marcello to Voyage in Italy, 1954, to the didactic films give weight to his chronicle of the city. The two main characters are at the made for television in same time types (as in neorealist films) of the exclusion from moderniza- the last phase of his tion, and ‘anthropological subjects’ as in auto-ethnographic experiments à career) and by Pasolini in his ethnographic la Jean Rouch. What saves this experiment in mixed genres and spheres of engagement with the history from imploding under the weight of its stylistic contradictions is the new spaces of the Third cinematographic quality of the characters. Rather than being gripping just for World. being real, they easily carry the dramatic weight of the story precisely for their citational quality: Enzo could be a Jean Gabin from Le mura di Malapaga/The Walls of Malapaga, (René Clair, 1947) or, more appropriately, an extra in some Seventies Italian gangster flick, say, Genova a mano armata/Merciless Man (Mario Lanfranchi, 1977). This citational quality operates as a very powerful Brechtian tool that decomposes and recomposes the aura of the actor; as, for example, in the film’s bar scene: Enzo is lounging in a dubious bar, the ‘New Frisco’, with a group of fellow drop-outs, when their everyday conversation is interrupted by the sound of the juke-box playing a samba. Suddenly, the characters in the bar become dancers in an improvised low-budget musical. Just imagine a Pedro Costa film being infiltrated by an amateur rendition of Singing in the Rain! My use of the term ‘Brechtian’ here is indebted to Martin Walsh’s insightful analysis in his seminal book The Brechtian Aspects of Radical Cinema (1981). Walsh singles out Brecht’s main creative ambition as his delin- eation of a revolutionary art where ‘it is not enough to discuss radical or revolutionary ideas – they must be discussed in a new format’ (1981: 6). Or to use Walter Benjamin’s wording:

transmitting an apparatus of production without – as much as possible – transforming it, is a highly debatable procedure even when the content of the apparatus which is transmitted seems to be revolutionary […] The bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate an astonishing number of revolutionary themes, and can even propa- gate them without seriously placing its own existence or the existence of the class that possesses them into question. (1928: 90)

The basic orientation of this Brechtian mode is a clear ‘hostility to mere illu- sionism’, that is, the creation of an easily accessible diegetic world based on post-Renaissance perspectival rules in which all lines of sight are considered ‘neutral’, as though they were not determined by class positions or history. Most famously, the Brechtian critique aimed at the ideology that favoured an empathic relationship between characters and audience (Walsh 1981: 11). According to these precepts, the narrative, in short, exists not to attract attention to itself as language, but as a self-effacing neutral medium whose sole purpose is to convey a story of some agon that ultimately validates the political and ideological status quo.9 Marcello’s use of Brechtian ruptures is both

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formal (the mixing of different film sources-archive, documentary, fiction) and 10. The turning point […] was the advent substantial (in a love story that deliberately defies bourgeois conventions). of cinema verité. Thus, La bocca del lupo created an unusual interruption in the current Italian Lightweight sixteen- cinematic scene, dominated as it is by the ideology of ‘no alternative’ and the millimetre equipment, and the humanist idyll of consumer passivity, in taking a political stand against any ‘univocal idea of Jean Rouch mode of explicating the world’ (Rancière 2007: 256). in the 1950s. His Giorgio Diritti is probably the least flamboyant of the trio of directors conception of ‘shared anthropology’ analysed in this essay. The non-spectacular opening scene of Il vento fa il suo and ‘participatory giro presents us with a Point-of-View shot from a car in which the two occu- ethnography,’ […] opened up the field pants are conversing in Occitan as they climb the winding road towards the to new methods Monviso. The two are discussing the rueido, a custom of mutual aid among the and new audiences. mountain communities: a whole village gets together to perform chores to help Rouch’s innovations were closely linked to out villagers in trouble. The film then cuts to a staged scene of a child collect- developments in fiction ing hay in order to feed the cows. By the end of the film, we discover that this filmmaking, specifically child grew up to become one of the two men involved in the conversation. At Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. the end of World War II, when many families were short of labour power, the (Russell 1999: 13) children of the village shared their effort to help families whose men were lost at war. The identification of the child/man occurs mediatically – the image of the boy freezes, and cross-fades to a black-and-white picture the man in the car is holding in his hands. That it is a black-and-white photo already puts the temporal dimension in technological terms, as a sort of warning against the ruralist nostalgia such a scene could encode. This introduces the ‘then-and- now’ theme that ideologically structures the filmic diegesis. With a flashback signalled by a superimposed lettering ‘nine months before’, it takes us back to the same mountain road covered in snow. It is the POV of Philippe, a French shepherd looking for a new home for his family and his sheep. His village in the Pyrenees has been condemned to make way for a new nuclear power plant. In as much as Philippe’s lifestyle is nomadic, it is obsolete from the perspective of the capitalist notion of property – that is, it is only incompletely commodi- fied. Thus, the sheepherder’s family has no alternative but to try to escape from the regime of imposed modernity. Nine months is significant not just in as much as it gives us a marker of organic time, the time of pregnancy: it is the time spent in the village by Giorgio Diritti and his small film crew in order to understand the Occitan community, its language (Diritti comes from Bologna), and to adapt the loose script to the daily life of the valley. Produced with the support of the local communities (many villagers actually invested in the film), and with the financial support of a consortium of local governments, Diritti’s film is a very interested case of ‘participatory ethnography’ or ‘shared anthropology’ as Jean Rouch defined his films. In Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch, 1960) or Jaguar (Rouch, 1967) the director develops the film with his ‘informants’, challenging once and for all the hierarchy of representation implied in any account of otherness and alterity.10 The cross-breeding of fiction and non-fiction stands at the core of post- war ethnographic cinema, with different – and not always politically positive – results. But while with the rise of a grassroots film-making came the attempt to capture it and organize it with ‘reality TV’, which functions as a massive attempt to narcotize the revolutionary potential of the genetic splicing of fiction and documentary, Munzi, Marcello and Diritti have created films that exploit the new potential offered by deconstructing all the givens of media work: the need for an auteur, the hierarchical relation of the makers to the ‘subjects’ of the film, the professional distance of the actor to the role being enacted, the need for sophisticated equipment and high value sets and so on. The result is a

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formally innovative political cinema that performs an oppositional function in the face of the new realities of Empire. Established fictional practices and the monopoly of the production function by media corporations are undermined by both the political and aesthetic commitments of the three Italian film- makers upon whom I have concentrated. More specifically, this hybridity of styles, the dialectics of forms, can be read symptomatically as the expression of the attack on community identity mounted by the forces of globalization, and of a difficult reconceptualization of national identity through oppositional cinematic practices.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank for their contribution to this essay Masha Salazkina, Roger Gathman, Andrew Covert and the American Academy in Rome for its support.

REFERENCES Augé, M. (1995), Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. J. Howe), London: Verso. Benjamin, W. ([1928] 1998), The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. J. Osborne), London: Verso. Caminati, L. (2006), ‘The return of history: Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica, memory and national identity’, Italica, 83: 3–4, pp. 596–608. ——— (March 2010), ‘Genova per loro: Intervista a Pietro Marcello’, Rolling Stone Italia, 77, p. 139. Cavalcanti, A. (October 1938), ‘Documentari di propaganda’, Bianco e nero, 10: 2, pp. 3–7. Dal Lago, A. (1989), Non persone: L’esclusione dei migranti nella società globale, Milan: Feltrinelli. Diritti, Giorgio (2005), Il vento fa il suo giro, Bologna: Aranciafilm. Foster, H. (1996), The Return of the Real, Boston: MIT Press. Gabara, R. (2010), ‘Abderrahmane Sissako: Second and third cinema in the first person’, in Rosalind Galt and K. Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 320–33. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2001), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hill, A. (2005), Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television, London: Routledge. Juhasz, A. and Lerner, J. (eds) (2006), F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marcello, Pietro (2009), La bocca del lupo, Rome: Indigo Film. Marcus, M. (2002), After Fellini, Baltimore, : Johns Hopkins University Press. Menarini, R. (2008), Italiana Off. Pratiche e poetiche del cinema italiano periferico, Milano: Transmedia. Munzi, Francesco (2004), Saimir, Roma: Orisa Produzioni. O’Healy, Á. (2007), ‘Border traffick: Reimagining the voyage to Italy’, in K. Marciniak, A. Imre and Á. O’Healy (eds), Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, New York: Palgrave, pp. 59–72. Pasolini, P.-P. (1955), Ragazzi di vita. Milan: Garzanti. —— (1982), Poems (trans. N. MacAfee), New York: Vintage Pratt, Mary Louise (1992), Imperial Eyes, New York: Routledge.

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Quandt, J. (2008), ‘Still lives: An article on Pedro Costa’, Artforum, 45: 1, pp. 354–56. —— (2009), Apichatpong Weerasethakul, London: Wallflower. Rancière, J. (March 2007), ‘The emancipated spectator’, Artforum, 45: 7, pp. 271–80. Rhodes, G. D. and Springer, J. P. (eds) (2006), Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, London: McFarland & Company. Rhodes, J. D. (2007), Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Russell, C. (1999), Experimental Ethnography, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Steimatsky, N. (2008), Italian Locations, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Swann, P. (1989), The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Walsh, M. (1981), The Brechtian Aspects of Radical Cinema, London: British Film Institute.

SUGGESTED CITATION Caminati, L. (2011), ‘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)’, Studies in Documentary Film, 5: 2+3, pp. 121–131, doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.2-3.121_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Luca Caminati is associate professor of Film Studies in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal. He is currently completing a new volume on Rossellini’s non-fiction films provision- ally titled Una cultura della realtà: Rossellini e il cinema documentario (Rome: Edizioni del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, forthcoming 2011). In 2009–2010 he was the recipient of the Paul Mellon/NEH ‘Rome Prize’, a residential fellowship awarded by the American Academy in Rome. Contact: Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

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SDF_5.2&3_Caminati_121-131.indd 131 10/1/11 9:03:13 AM Studies in Eastern European Cinema

ISSN 2040-350X (2 issues | Volume 1, 2010)

Editors Aims and Scope

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